The other two issues we presented in August – “it’s complicated” and “it’s still in beta” – persist. This post will address the complications of Google+ and a post next week will examine what it means for Google+ to be in beta.

It’s still complicated

On the surface, Google+ Pages look a lot like Facebook Pages, but underneath they behave differently.

First of all, you – as an individual – must add a Page to your circles to receive updates from it. Whatever credit Google+ earned for creating the “circle” paradigm is marred by this fact. In case you can’t think of the equivalent of a “friends” circle for brands or organizations, Google+ comes with a default “Following” circle that you can use for the Pages you like, or follow, or whatever. It’s complicated.

Furthermore, a Page can add people who have added the Page to its circles. I cannot, however, add people to my Page’s circles unless they’ve added my Page. This is quite different from Facebook, where the relationship between people and Pages is asymmetrical (a Facebook Page can’t request friendship from anyone). Google+ Pages get to behave more like a friend. As a Google+ administrator, I can comment on the posts of any person who has added my Page to his circles.

Some organizations will be able to pull off this kind of engagement better than others – it will require a careful balance of thoughtfulness and not-creepiness on the part of whoever manages the Page.

In a similar vein, Google+ Pages can “hang out,” or video chat, with its followers (or are they its encirclers?). This has the potential to be huge, and fun, and useful. Google+’s Google+ Page has been hanging out with people throughout the week, but I haven’t had a chance to join in. I’m looking forward to hang out-enabled Q&A sessions or pop-up performances in the future.

Poke around

Despite all this, the nice thing about Google+ right now is that no one knows how to use it. The value of Google+ is going to emerge as people use it. Now it’s time for organizations to give it a try.

Go create a page. If you’re already on Facebook or Twitter, model your Google+ Page after your existing accounts. Be consistent with your name and your profile picture. Tell your friends and family about your page. Start sharing things that would make sense coming from your organization. Consider sharing things from other people on Google+. If people add you to their circles, add them back – consider commenting on their posts.

Just be mindful of how much time you’re spending on it and be sensitive to what value you’re getting from it. If you have a good operation going on Facebook, Tumblr, or Twitter, be cautious about diverting resources to Google+ just yet. Now’s the time to get your bearings so you’re ready to take advantage of Google+ when its value is clearer.

Circumscribe Measured Voice on Google+!

Before they started using Measured Voice, they had developed a strong and consistent brand across not only Facebook and Twitter, but also YouTube and Flickr. When they learned of Measured Voice’s app in April 2011, they immediately saw its value and began to experiment with it as a collaboration, scheduling and measurement tool.

MO.gov’s initial social media strategy was to rebroadcast messages from other state, city and federal organizations that were relevant to Missouri residents. When the a tornado hit Joplin and the southwestern part of the state, their messaging strategy changed, but their reliance upon the Measured Voice app did not.

We’ve written a case study to tell this story in a bit more depth. It is about the messaging strategy they implemented during the first vital hours and days following the disaster, and why Measured Voice was the tool that they chose to execute this strategy. You can read the full MOgov Measured Voice Case Study (.pdf).

If you don’t read the full case study (you should, it’s only three pages), here’s a very simplified list of the features and benefits that made Measured Voice the right social media messaging tool. Though this list of benefits was provided with the backdrop of a natural disaster, we suspect they’d be the same for your context:

• Low (very very very low) start up cost;
• U.S. government approved;
• Two kinds of users with two kinds of permissions;
• Collaborative;
• Reliable and intuitive scheduling features;
• Reports on all sent messages and posted links.

I love showing the above video to people. I usually use it to show how to stay on message when building a brand. It always gets a few laughs at first, but it doesn’t take long to put people into a trance. Despite the repetition, everyone always wants to watch the whole two minutes.

I’d been thinking about this video a lot this week. I was even instant messaging with my brother about this video when we learned that Steve Jobs had died yesterday. The words Apple chooses to describe its products – great, wonderful, incredible, really easy, better, faster, beautiful – are remarkable to me for two reasons:

1. They’re clear.

   As the name of our company indicates, we think about words a lot. We’re driven to help people make an impact by choosing their words carefully. Apple is masterful at this. Their message is crystal clear: “our products are great.”

   Apple famously avoids talking about technical specifications. Instead of talking about what makes their products work, they tell you what you can do with them. They insist on talking about things that most people will understand.

   Steve Jobs admired people who “push the human race forward.” His ambition was to “put a dent in the universe.” He needed to touch as many people as possible to make this happen, so he spoke clearly. He made sure people knew that Apple’s computers were made for them. No jargon required.

2. They’re the truth.

   This, of course, is the hard part. Anyone can say their products are great, but making a great product is extremely difficult.

   Watch the iPhone 4S video. There’s no hyperbole, just facts about the product. “All new camera.” “Up to twice as fast.” “New voice assistant.” “Works worldwide.” It’s “the most amazing iPhone yet.” (again, “amazing”)

   Some people claim Apple’s success is all smoke and mirrors, that their products are all style and no substance. The magnitude of Apple’s success disproves this idea, both in sales and in the sheer value of the company. As another American hero, Abraham Lincoln, said: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.” The millions of people who choose Apple’s products aren’t fools.

   Apple wins because its products are defensibly great, wonderful, incredible, really easy, better, and faster with every release. Very few companies get to say that about what they do.

   It’s not marketing. It’s doing what matters, it’s doing what works, it’s doing it as well as possible, and it’s explaining it to people in terms they understand. It’s being great and telling the truth about it. We aspire to do the same thing.

Steve Jobs described the iPad as “magical” when he introduced it to the world. Some people laughed at the word, but it turned out to be true.

A few months before my sixth birthday, my parents brought home a Macintosh. It was 1984. One of my clearest early memories is sitting alone in the guest bedroom where we’d set up the computer, playing with MacPaint. It was magical. Computers have been a central part of my life ever since. I love them, and I feel very lucky that I get paid to help other people benefit from them. I’m grateful to Steve Jobs for making computers for people, even a five-year-old boy.

Steve Jobs was great. He was wonderful. He was incredible. He made beautiful things. He showed us what humans can do. He was magical.

Goodbye Steve.

Larger images will make Facebook’s news feed even more addictive to users and presents a new opportunity for organizations to use imagery to get their message out. It’s important to note that these larger images haven’t rolled out to Facebook’s brand pages yet. They’re only available to personal profiles now, but it’s safe to assume that that brand pages will get them before long. (Update, 6 October 2011: Photos Posted by Facebook Pages Now Appear Larger in the News Feed)

The shift from showing thumbnails in the news feed to showing 300px wide images may appear to be a simple change, but it’s not. It’s a big deal. Connie Malamed explains why images are such an important communication tool in the introduction to her excellent Visual Communication for Designers:

We have no choice but to be drawn to images. Our brains are beautifully wired for the visual experience. For those with intact visual systems, vision is the dominant sense for acquiring perceptual information. We have over one million nerve fibers sending signals from the eye to the brain, and an estimated 20 billion neurons analyzing and integrating visual information at rapid speed. We have a surprisingly large capacity for picture memory, and can remember thousands of images with few errors.

In short: a picture is worth a thousand words, as proven by science.

Facebook’s larger images will let organizations make a quick and emotional impression on their likers right in the news feed, without requiring a click through. As such, organizations should start thinking about image selection as carefully as they think about copy. Images are no longer decorative flourishes within a copy-centric communication strategy. They’re content. The kinds of images you share, their production value, and their ability to communicate will shape your brand, for better or for worse.

As a consultant and amateur academic, I was thrilled to learn that there’s a word to describe the skills needed to communicate with imagery: graphicacy. As Wikipedia defines it, graphicacy is “concerned with the capacities people require in order to interpret and generate information in the form of graphics.” My family, friends, and colleagues will soon get sick of hearing me overuse the term. Note that “graphics” can describe essentially any two dimensional visual presentation: photos, charts, comics, memes, etc.

Communicating via imagery – graphicacy, that is – is nothing new, but Facebook’s recent interface changes, Twitter’s native support for photos, and the rise of Tumblr are making imagery an essential part of any social media content strategy. Magazines and some newspapers are already adept at using graphics as content, but many government organizations and companies do not have the operations or skills to do so.

Just as social media has required more organizations to develop stronger copy writing operations, it is now requiring them to develop graphic editing skills. If you aren’t already, it’s time to start brushing up on your graphicacy.

Fewer Excuses

Amazon has waded through the ocean of alphabet soup that have kept cautious government agencies from adopting cloud technology. I thought I was cool (probably not the right word) for knowing what FIMSA and SAS-70 were, but Amazon says they’re FIMSA and SAS-70 compliant as well as covering “ISO 27001, FIPS 140-2 compliant end points, and PCI DSS Level 1. AWS also provides an environment that enables agencies to comply with HIPAA regulations.”

IT providers have been able to use this list of certifications and requirements to scare agencies and programs into using absurd amounts tax dollars to pay for unnecessary servers, storage, and bandwidth. Meanwhile, the rest of the market has moved effortlessly to the cloud, and while it hasn’t been perfect, countless services and apps have been built that would have been financially prohibitive before. Twitter wouldn’t exist without Amazon Web Services.

Recovery.gov is already moving to Amazon’s GovCloud, and Vivek Kundra estimates that the move will save $750,000 each year. Imagine that kind of savings across thousands of government websites.

It’s worth noting that GovCloud’s pricing is on par with Amazon’s normal AWS pricing. Kudos to Amazon for not extracting rents from its government clients.

More Experimentation

The .gov Reform Effort is currently reassesing how the government approaches the web. Part of the effort includes “a comprehensive review of federal websites to eliminate those that are duplicative and outdated and identify opportunities to strengthen and coordinate content across agencies.” That is, there’s a push to create efficiencies by getting rid of duplicative websites and consolidating government resources.

Having worked with USA.gov for the past three years, I’m convinced that this effort is the right thing to do. Citizens shouldn’t have to know if they should look to the FDA, USDA, or CDC for information on food recalls. They should have a single easy-to-remember source for the information they need most. USA.gov should be that source.

That said, the government is vastly complex, and it will be impossible to develop a single site that can be all things to all people. This is why Amazon’s GovCloud (and hopefully more government-friendly cloud services) is so important. While government sites are consolidated, it’s important that agencies and programs to continue to experiment with ways to use the Internet to achieve their goals and reach their audiences. Cloud computing will allow agencies and programs to set up quick projects, make them work, or shut them down—quickly, without dealing with a ton of red tape.

This is what’s most exciting. We’re getting to a point where government agencies will be able to innovate a bit more quickly, perhaps on par with the private sector. There are countless talented and ambitious public servants out there who are held back from building new technologies because of crippling procurement issues. Amazon’s announcement is great news for them.

We ♥ Amazon Web Services

We developed GovClicks.us last month as a proof of concept to show off what can be done with 1.USA.gov data. On the back end, it ingests data from all the clicks on 1.USA.gov links each day, sorts them, ranks them by number of clicks, and then makes that data available in JSON and CSV files. On the front end, it looks awesome, and it’s turned out to be a really useful tool for research.

GovClicks took us about 2 weeks to build from scratch, amid other projects. It’s exciting to know that if USA.gov ever wanted to port GovClicks into USA.gov, it could do so seamlessly without breaking any laws.

Let me know if you want to talk about getting set up on Amazon’s GovCloud. I’m at jed@measuredvoice.com.

Now that Google+ has been around for a little over a month, our advice remains the same.

In order for an organization to be successful on a social media platform, it needs to develop a strategy based on a deep understanding of the dynamics and culture of that platform. Even if Google+ were destined to become the next Facebook, there’s little benefit to diving into it before understanding how it works. We’re protective of our clients’ time and resources and can’t make recommendations to use a tool if we can’t clearly explain how to use it and, more importantly, why they should.

What we knew about Google+ when it launched

It’s in beta.

Google made it clear at the beginning that Google Plus wasn’t ready for prime time when it announced on it’s official blog “We’re beginning in Field Trial.” We don’t have any clients who can afford to commit real resources in beta. It’s our job to get into the weeds for them.

It’s complicated.

Google+ is made up of circles, huddles, hangouts, and sparks. All of these words take on completely new meaning within Google Plus that aren’t intuitive to new users. Circles is a great way to organize contacts and manage distribution of content, but creating them requires work for most people. Services that require learning new jargon are bound to see slower adoption based on the steeper learning curve.

It’s not for brands yet.

A number of brands set up shop in Google Plus very early on. It was immediately clear that Google didn’t want brands on Google Plus as its profiles are built around first and last names. When an interface forces you to enter “Ford” as your first name and “Motor Company” as your last name, think twice.

What we know about Google Plus now.

It’s in beta.

Google+ has grown quickly, but it’s no feat for Google to get millions of people to sign up for something (remember when people sold invitations to Google Wave on eBay?). The trick will be for Google to get the right mix of people to sign up and stick around. Comscore reports that Google+ users are largely 25-34 year old males and Experian Hitwise reports that visits to and time spent on Google+ are declining.

Undoubtably, Google’s working on this. Give it time.

It’s complicated.

Thomas Moradpour laid out 5 Fatal Flaws of Google+ about a week after the service launched and included this great flowchart that reveals the complexity of sharing content on the service:

It’s painfully unclear what you’re doing when you share content on Google+. None of our clients are ready for the hour-long webinar required to train them on the service. Google+ needs to show larger sustained growth to make it worth learning.

It’s not for brands yet.

You won’t find any brand profiles in Google+ now because Google has removed them, nullifying the efforts of the brands who couldn’t wait—I guess we should have written this post earlier. Google is smart enough (following Facebook’s lead) to know that people don’t interact with brands in the same way they interact with other people. Google has announced that pages for businesses are coming.

What you can do right now

Here’s what you can do: provide a valuable service that people care about, talk about it on your website or some other web property that you own, and make it easy to share with a simple link. If you do that, people will talk about you on Google+ without you having to set up shop there. While you do that, you can also just go ahead and create a Google+ account, kick the tires, and start talking about what you do!

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and now that so many people are comfortable creating profiles online, it needs to learn how to enlist people to help it accomplish that mission rather than search algorithms. Google+ is one way it’s going about it. Its +1 button is another tactic.

Social media is becoming impossible to ignore because people are learning that “if something is important, it will find me.” People now find things they care about through their personal networks, without having to search for them. If you want people to talk about your brand, your brand needs to be worth talking about. Work on that first.

Even if you can’t attend in person, please join us online. We’ll be using the #1USAgov hashtag on Twitter and we’ll be chatting in SimpleGeo’s campfire room and in the #1USAgov channel on freenode irc. Don’t be shy!

If you’re planning to participate, here’s a quick overview of a few hacks that people have already come up with based on data from 1.USA.gov. We hope these give you some ideas of what you’d like to work on.

GovClicks

GovClicks is a tool we created to show daily rankings of 1.USA.gov links. It’s based on a bit of python code we call Gogogon that gathers 1.USA.gov data, filters it, sorts it, and makes it available in json and csv files every 24 hours. Gogogon is open source and available under the MIT license. Please fork it!

Bitly’s visualization of the final NASA shuttle launch

Bitly’s data science team created a video showing the location of clicks on 1.USA.gov links throughout July 8th, the day of the final NASA shuttle launch. Watch the video and read about it on their blog.

Socrata OpenData

Chris Metcalf from Socrata has created a dataset of 1.USA.gov data on Socrata OpenData. Socrata makes it really easy to analyze the click data. Chris even created a screencast showing how to create a list of the most popular links.

Chris wrote some ruby code to send 1.USA.gov data into Socrata that he’s shared on Github.

Video of clicks worldwide

Helmut Hissen created this video that shows IP-based locations 1.USA.gov clicks worldwide from 2 June 2011 to 14 July 2011. Red flashes represent clicks from non-mobile devices. Green flashes represent clicks from mobile devices. Note that the final NASA Shuttle launch occurred on July 8. You can see a dramatic increase in activity at the 1:24 mark.

Interview on KPBS

This isn’t a hack at all, but I spoke with Maureen Cavanaugh at KPBS yesterday about the hack day and explained a bit about 1.USA.gov data and why USA.gov has opened it up. Listen to the interview at KPBS.org.

We will continually update this post to maintain a list of U.S. government agencies and programs that use Tumblr.

List of U.S. government Tumblr blogs

• USA.gov – The USA.gov Blog
• Department of State
• National Archives – Today’s Document
• National Archives – Our Presidents
• National Archives – US National Archives Exhibits
• Peace Corps
• National Endowment for the Humanities
• The State of Rhode Island

RSVP on Eventbrite!

Why this hack day will be awesome

The 1.USA.gov Hack Day is designed to encourage coders, entrepreneurs, and curious citizens to come together and explore the data created by 1.USA.gov and discover new ways to use it. This is a great opportunity to meet other San Diegans interested in using technology to solve the world’s problems. You will get to work with a rich set of open government data and come up with ideas for applications that can help people get the government information they need most.

In addition to the event here in San Diego, 1.USA.gov hack day events will be hosted on July 29th by bitly in New York City, OpenGeo in San Francisco, and USA.gov in Washington, DC.

Why 1.USA.gov is awesome

We helped create 1.USA.gov as part of our work on USA.gov’s social media strategies. 1.USA.gov is a URL shortening service provided by USA.gov and bitly. Whenever anyone uses bitly or a service that uses bitly’s API (such as Tweetdeck) to shorten a .gov or .mil URL, they receive a 1.USA.gov URL in return.

This is significant for many reasons, but here are two big ones:

1. 1.USA.gov lets anyone create short .gov URLs. That’s pretty remarkable. Part of the rationale for creating 1.USA.gov was that normal short URLs were too opaque—a normal short URL doesn’t tell you anything about where it will take you when you click on it. USA.gov wanted to make it easy for people to know when a short URL was going to direct them to trustworthy government information. bitly’s broad reach made it easy for us to make this happen.
2. Because of the broad reach of 1.USA.gov, the service produces a huge amount of data that shows what people find interesting across the entire government. Most people don’t realize that most government websites are run on different servers, which use different analytics software, and are managed by different people. This makes it essentially impossible to know what government content is most popular at any given moment. Until now, no one has ever had such a broad view of how government information is being shared and viewed.

Why 1.USA.gov data is awesome

bitly provides a real-time feed of data created every time someone clicks on a 1.USA.gov URL. Among other things, the data includes information about the user’s browser, what city they’re in, and what time they clicked. No personal information that can be used to track users is shared.

The video below shows all of the clicks on 1.USA.gov URLs in the United States throughout the month of June, where clicks from mobile devices are shown in green and clicks from non-mobile devices are shown in red:

Get started with the data now!

You can access the 1.USA.gov data and find documentation on USA.gov’s developers page right now.

You can use the 1.USA.gov data to create tools that show what government information is being shared and clicked on in San Diego. You could use it to identify trends in how government information moves as it is shared around the world. You could use it to spot emerging news stories by tracking which URLs are growing in popularity.

Keep in touch

We will be sharing more information about the hack day and the 1.USA.gov data over the coming weeks, so follow us on Twitter for more information as the date approaches!

As the site indicates, Sekisui Medical acquired the diagnostics division of Genzyme Corporation on February 1, 2011.  As a result, the newly formed Sekisui Diagnostics need some help communicating to existing and potential customers and employees about what they should expect from the new company.  We at Measured Voice were excited to be able to partner with Sekisui Diagnostics to produce a great product.  Here’s just a quick review of how we did it:

Step 1: Research

Because we are so passionate about using the internet in ways that make sense, we usually have to do a bit of research in order to understand what will make sense for each client’s particular situation and context. In this case, that meant stakeholder interviews of both employees and customers of the old Genzyme Corporation, that had transitioned to Sekisui Diagnostics.

Step 2: Strategy

Based on our findings, we crafted a strategy that we believe will be the most efficient and effective way to accomplish the needs made clear in our interviews. We found that the messaging had to do two (seemingly very different) things. First, it had to promote the strength, reliability, and stability of the new brand and business. Second, it had to appeal to individuals as concerned parties who may perceive that their careers and livelihoods are on the line.

Step 3: Implementation

Site content, design and video were all executed with our two messaging goals in mind. While we sought to create a visual experience that was clean and polished, the language intentionally trends toward casual and accessible. The video element was added to the project, partly in order to involve a subset of stakeholders (employees), but also to humanize the new brand. Aside from this, we recommended that the client complete their business profile on LinkedIn and use that as an additional opportunity to connect with potential clients and employees.

Step 4: Delivery

According to our original project pitch, the final product was delivered with the following features:

• Fully functional website, including custom design, content, straming video and animation.
• Original video from footage shot on location in each Sekisui Diagnostics office location.
• Offline version of site files, packaged with video, for sales team to use locally when wifi is not available.
• Mobile version of website optimized for Apple, Android and Windows mobile devices.

We think We are Sekisui does a great job of meeting our clients’ needs and we’re excited to share it with you! As always, feedback, questions, and kudos are welcome in the comments!