One of the most fascinating aspects about the launch of Google+ is the way it reframes how we, as individuals, interact with our communities. As Brian Solis so rightly points out, the initial Facebook model of creating a single social graph of up to 5000 friends must now be compared to a series of what Google+ calls ‘circles’ that expand and contract as we pass through various life stages, jobs, relationships and experiences in our lives.

This contrast is very instructive as to the future, and is particularly important for brands trying to engage with their customer communities. By now, most brands have overcome their reticence to participate in social media, and exhausted their knee-jerk reaction to buy their way to a sizable social footprint that is at least comparable to their competitors. But the challenges continue to arise.

This new reframing, just as Twitter emerged after Facebook, and Google+ after Twitter, we will see more social platforms emerge that will become increasingly sophisticated and nuanjced in their expression of how individiuals prefer to relate to each other.  Ultimately, it’s possible that these platforms themselves will be designed as templates that the users themselves can customize in terms of the best way to express their community and experience of life.

What this means for brands is significant. It is already challenging to engage and maintain the interest of your customers in real time across multiple platforms, especially as many brands are still fighting the inertia that inevitably comes with hierarchical structures designed with control in mind. But now, as the social business marketplace becomes increasingly fragmented and more and more micro-communities, specific to a variety of media (Path, Instagram) start to emerge, brands face the prospect of reaching an increasing number of specific audiences, conversations and communities all in real time.

Perhaps the most effective way to describe the approach a brand must take is to not just think of themselves as architects of community, but engineers of echo-chambers. By that I mean that brands must simultaneously inspire, engage and maintain a series of conversations taking place within specific communities using specific media and migrating constantly. In a sense, a brand must create a series of targeted conversations going on simultaneously that achieve sufficient resonance that these conversations intersect and amplify each other, creating an echo chamber. If one was to create a metaphor for what an effective campaign might look like, you can imagine what rain looks like on a pond of water. Each drop creates its own circle of impact and ripple effect, and each of those circles impact each other, creating movement on the surface of the water. In a sense, it’s like taking the circles that Google+ so artfully constructed and creating a campaign through the combined resonance of a series of specific circles of conversation in and around a brand.

How long such a transition takes is hard to know, but as the half-life of technology shrinks, the distance between the way brands think about traditional advertising and how their customers like to relate to each other is growing ever larger. As such, brands need to engage with social media comprehensively, both internally and externally. To demonstrate not just the desire to be part of the conversation wherever they take place, but to play an active role in shaping the way conversations are framed if they hope to maintain their share of voice and a measure of control in a dynamic and ever-changing social business marketplace.

What’s your image of the future of social networking? Do you prefer the approach taken by Facebook or Google+?

Business 2 Community » Social Media