Google Plus Circles are basically what I’ve been waiting for for quite a long time, now.

Here’s the video from Google that basically explains what they are:
 

Youtube Link => [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocPeAdpe_A8]
 
That’s all well & good, and it gives you a basic understanding of what you can do with circles, but if you’re “Internet Famous” or even just a power-user of social media sites, you’re going to need a better plan than “I CAN SHARE MY PARTY PHOTOS WITH MY COLLEGE FRIENDS!!! :D LULZ LOL FTW F2F IRL!!! :D”

You’re actually going to need to employ a 3-pronged attack if you’re going to build successful circles. “My College Friends” will quickly become a useless category to you if you have a whole lot of college friends.

This is because your college friends are all INDIVIDUALS and don’t have the same interests and don’t share the same quality of content and aren’t interested in the same topics. o_O

Wait.. Let me back up a little…

People Skillz

The reason I’m talking about this is because I’m popular In Real Life (otherwise known as “IRL”). Most people on the internet are not.

In fact, before Twitter, most people that you see with a lot of followers never had anyone listen to anything they had to say ever in life, which is why the service is so popular. You get to feel like thousands of people are listening to what you have to say. You feel popular. You feel interesting.

Meanwhile, I’ve been managing groups of followers since my earliest recorded memories, around Kindergarten (5 years old, in the United States of America).

As far as internet stats, I currently have 2,879 Facebook Friends and 3,127 Twitter Followers if you’d like to check it.

And here’s what the readership to my website, BillCammack.com looked like two years ago, in July, 2009:

So, Anyway…

Almost two weeks ago, before I received an invite to Google+ from my friend Jeffrey Taylor, I had never heard of it.

I had never heard of it and I wasn’t even checkin’ for Google as far as social stuff after Wave was WACK and Buzz was WACK, I had pretty much had it with their attempts at social.

Fast-Forward 12 days after receiving my invite, and 970 people have added me to their circles (though the lagging stats on my profile page says that only 692 people have me in their circles), or maybe that has something to do with whether people are broadcasting who’s in their circles or not. \o/

Circle Strategy

I started out using circles the way the video tells you to.. Grouping people by level of acquaintance or things you appear to have in common.

It became obvious, relatively quickly, that this wasn’t the way to go.

I hopped on Google+’s “Hangout” feature (no-cost group video chat for up to ten people) and had a brainstorming session with my friend Baratunde.

Baratunde’s an actual comedian. He’s an entertainer. I have fans, but he has *FANS*. I wanted to know what he was planning to deal with “circles”. He spoke on his thoughts about circles in this public Google+ post, entitled “Will Google Plus let me hang out with Halle Berry?”.

One of the things we discussed in that conversation was that circles needed to be concentric, not mutually exclusive.

For example.. I might go to a blip.tv party, and there could easily be 60-80 people that I personally know in the same room.

That doesn’t mean that we all share the same level of friendship, as Facebook would have us believe.

That doesn’t mean we all share the same depth of conversation, interaction or intimacy with each other.

That blip party isn’t a bunch of separate, mutually-exclusive parties.

It’s one large party which contains many, many sets of varying levels of relationships which intermingle with each other during the evening.

Similarly.. When you’re interacting online, you’re not dealing with mutually-exclusive groups.

Some of your friends from college are still your friends now.

Some of your IRL friends are also your coworkers.

Some of your coworkers are your girlfriends. >:D

Some of your girlfriends also like hiking or web design or debating dating situations.

If you group people the way you’re told to, you’re gonna get screwed, because you’re mixing people with differing qualities of content creation.

You’re going to end up with too much noise and not enough signal, and then you’re going to have to write blog posts about how your wife bounced from Google+ because she couldn’t take it anymore.

So.. The first thing you have to know in order to do it properly, is that you need to set up two different hierarchies of circles:

1. Listening Circles
2. Sharing Circles

I have people that I’m actual IRL friends with and I enjoy clinking brews with them at the bar and I totally enjoy their company in person, but the internet content they post is absolute DRIVEL! :D

dictionary.reference.com/browse/drivel – 2: childish, silly, or meaningless talk or thinking; nonsense; twaddle.

It’s complete garbage. I’m not trying to hear that. In fact.. I’m not even trying to have to scroll past that while I’m looking through interesting, relevant material.

If I made a circle called “Good Friends Of Mine”, it would be populated with garbage.

Fortunately, Google+ enables us to *IMMEDIATELY* promote and demote people in pretty much less than two seconds.

As soon as you see something that disturbs your reading experience, you hover over their name and get “Add to circles”, then hover over that and either demote them or remove them from your circles entirely. No muss, No fuss! >:D

After almost two weeks of dealing with content quality interruptions, I realized that the way to go is grouping people by the quality of their content… IIIIIIII HAVE A DREEEEEEAM… THAT ONE DAYYYY…

Listening Circles

So that’s your first set.. Your hierarchy of Listening Circles, grouped in order by quality of content.

What this allows you to do is cascade down levels of relevance.

First, you click on your circle that includes people that you always want to hear from.

This circle is valuable because Google+ moves very quickly, like Twitter does. If you don’t have a circle where you can find things posted hours ago or even days ago from the people you REALLY want to keep up with, you’ll never be able to find them if they’re mixed in with a bunch of other people’s content.

Once you’re up-to-date with the important posts, click on the circle of people that always have something relevant, intelligent, intelligently humorous, insightful or important to say.

This is where you’re going to experience your first round of demotions. :) SOMEBODY in this list is going to disappoint you with drivel and get demoted to a lesser ring.

Next, check the circle with people that post good material, but it’s leaning towards leisure-time reading.

This is where you’re going to experience your first round of promotions. Some people are going to surprise you with insight or relevance, and you’re going to want them to be in a higher-priority circle next time you do this. :)

After that, you have the circle with the cat-picture-posting people… The circle with the people that came from Tumblr & Twitter and don’t know to do anything other than incessantly post drivel every hour on the hour… The circle with the people that never, ever, EVER have anything to say for themselves that doesn’t have to do with Social Media, Search Engine Optimization, or shilling for their company or brand… The circle with people that you don’t know anything about, but you’re willing to give them a chance to make it into a relevant circle…..

If you want to do Pot Luck, you click on “Stream” in your sidebar, and you can see material in chronological order from everybody in all of your circles.

Sharing Circles

Second.. You need sharing circles.

“My College Friends” don’t all care about the music you’re working on or your business connections or actually *ANY* one particular topic you might feel like posting about on the internet.

You have to develop lists, groups, sets, circles, whatever, of Passionate Consumers of whatever your blog topic was.

If you post about social media, add the people that +1 or contribute thoughts to that thread to your Social Media Sharing Circle. Same thing if you post about dating or video production or whatever else you normally like to discuss online.

What you end up with is people in overlapping circles which work efficiently in the same way that your IRL interactions with people work. You hear what you want to hear from people when you want to hear it, and you tell (to a degree) people about what they’re likely to want to hear about.

If you have something you want to generically broadcast to everyone, you can elect to share it to either “Extended Circles” (a complicated version of “Friends of Friends” in Facebook-Speak) or “Public” (a complicated version of the main timeline, if you’re used to Twitter).

The one problem I have right now with “Public” is that there’s no way to restrict comments on your post to people that you’ve vetted. You can do that on Facebook by making your post visible to “Everyone”, but having your privacy settings restrict comments to people that you’re actually connected to.

Of course, you can block people for making inane comments in your thread, but I’m more of a Prevention person than a Cure person, Nah Meen? >:D

Hangout Circles

The third set of circles you’re going to need, well, if you’re the type of person to take advantage of group video chatting, that is.. is Hangout Circles.

A Google+ Hangout is a video chat between anywhere from 2 – 10 people.

well… unless you do it like Facebook press conferences and have 10 people bum rush the show on the same video camera.. then, I guess, hypothetically, A Google+ video chat fits up to 100 people. :P

But seriously, folks…

Group Video Chatting is definitely the move, but the quality level depends on the people that you get to join the chat.

When you create it, you have the option of sharing the invitation with individuals or circles (or extended circles or “public”).

If you don’t curate your hangout circles, you’re going to end up with pot luck, which may or may not go well for you.

On top of that, if you have thousands of followers, there are only 10 slots to begin with. It doesn’t make sense to invite 900 people to something like that.

What you need to do is either get your set of 10 people together ahead of time, perhaps using a Facebook Event, since Google+ doesn’t have Events yet, or at least get a core of people together where you know you’re going to have a good conversation once you invite more of your circles to the hangout.

There are way more issues with hangouts that I’ll talk about in another post, but essentially, to me, hangouts are the killer app to Google+.

The only reason I haven’t logged more hangout hours already is that I’ve been focused on figuring out circles.

Long Story Short… (too late)

Google+ is still in a closed format they call a Limited Field Trial, but you should be able to join up at plus.google.com/up/start/ pretty soon.

Most of what I said isn’t going to be useful to you if you know like 49 people, total. :)

In fact, most people didn’t bother to read this far, and they really don’t need to.

The people that need to read this are those of us that experience diminishing returns from social media sites because they eventually become popular.

Foursquare was very useful before it became a fad to be connected to people on that particular LBS (location-based service). As soon as the civilians found out about it and were able to add people they already followed on Twitter and Facebook, we had to make a choice between being sociable and using the service for its intended purpose.

Google+ Circles are a good way to deal with posting private and public content from the same account.. Private, meaning sent to people you specifically want to get that communication, not Private as in “Let me send this chick a picture of tha dilznick and get fired from my job.”

I think a lot of people are going to bounce from the service because they’ll feel like it’s Twitter with the 140 character restriction removed.

That’s pretty much what Jaiku was, back in the day.

Google+ is a new game, altogether. It’s an incredible time sink because there’s so much information (though, granted, a lot of it’s reduntant reposting) that you receive from so many people, and then you can actually follow the conversations connected to that content.

It’s not going to be for everybody. Trolls will probably have no presence on G+ at all, especially since their accounts are linked to their government names, like profiles.google.com/BillCammack and they’re not going to be able to hide behind fancy screen names and try to act disrespectfully.

Lurkers will be there, silent in the background, as usual. Google+ is the opportunity for ACTUAL thought leaders and aggressive debaters to shine.

The time is NOW! >:D Skynet has been activated. The online and offline worlds have been brought one critical step closer to each other. If you have your listening circles and sharing circles set up properly, you’ll thrive in this environment.

If not, you’ll suffer through a flood of minutiae and drivel from cat-picture and animated .GIF posters and decide that Google+ isn’t worth anything to you socially.

For cyborgs like The Kid, Google+ is gonna be big! :D hehe I’ll see you at the top, or I’ll see you at the bottom.

Welcome to Gladiator School! >:D

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Facebook just announced their “Places” app which enables people to send updates about where they are right now to their FB friends.

That’s all well & good, except they added the ability for people you’re connected to on Facebook to broadcast YOUR location by tagging you in THEIR location updates. :/

This is clearly a disaster, as your girlfriend’s going to find out on her own FB home page that you’re actually at a party with a bunch of chicks instead of studying in the library like you told her so you could free yourself up for the evening.

Fortunately for you, Facebook added the ability to opt-out of other people putting your business in the streets. You can’t stop them from adding your name, but at least they can’t use your own wall to bust you.

Here’s how you disable the ability for people to dime you out:

1. Go to your Facebook account.
2. Click “Account” in the top right corner.
3. Click “Privacy Settings”.
4. In the “Sharing on Facebook” section, click “Customize settings”.
5. Scroll down to “Things others share” and make the option next to “Friends can check me into Places” read “Disabled”.

If you’d like to watch the video of the launch announcement, here it is:

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This is a response to Bobby Miller’s Huffington Post article, “Has the Internet Killed ‘The Experience’?”. There’s a word limit on HuffPo responses, so I only really got to print HALF of what I said, so here’s the entire comment:

ok. I see what you mean. That’s a good point, and yes… I was referring to the use of social media to make people aware of what I wrote or a video I created.

To directly answer your question, I have *NEVER* received an IRL comment about something that I Twittered which was an actual status update. Then again, I don’t Twitter actual status updates. :)

To use your example of television, I really enjoy this season of “24″. While I’m watching it, and great stuff is happening, I definitely have the urge to inform whomever cares to listen that I’m having a quality experience right now, and this is why. I’m not saying “I. Am. Watching. “24″. Right. Now.”, but instead, I’m letting other people know what I consider valuable so that if they feel that I have any taste in selecting decent entertainment, they might check it out themselves and have a good time.

Similarly, I wouldn’t Twitter “Sitting in XYZ bar”, because that’s irrelevant. OTOH, I might say “Hanging out with @erikbeck & @bobbymiller, because there’s social value in that information. Similar to shouting-out “24″ as a quality experience, I’m announcing that I’m having a good time, and this is why.

“I’m at a concert” isn’t worth sharing, unless you consider yourself a lifestreamer, and your goal is to let anybody who will listen eavesdrop on the mundane aspects of your day. “I’m at a concert and this band ROCKS!” is valuable information that might lead to someone else having a good time, if they see your post and take your word for it.

For me, personally… I have a lot of fun, and I hang out with enjoyable people. I like being able to document that and represent WHY I had a good time on that particular evening. It’s really for myself and for the people that were there, but at the same time, it’s my own version of a “show”. It’s a new format of entertainment where each one of us gets to be as interesting (or not) as we can be, and we get to “see our name in lights”, plastered across our friends’ Facebook pages, and we get those twinges of fun or excitement as people comment, “like” or reblog our material… Then we get it again, when we’re hanging out IRL and someone says “Love your work!” or “How do you DO that?” :D

The fact of the matter is that you’re right as far as the addictive need of sharing. It’s like the “experiencing” isn’t enough. That’s one of the reasons television’s falling off. It’s talking AT you, not enabling feedback and/or conversations like video blogs do. At this point, when we have a good time, we’re triggered to share that… because we can. It’s part of the fun of the whole situation. It’s like hooking up with that FOYINE chick, and then you don’t get to tell your boys about it… What’s the point of THAT? ;)

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I’m experimenting with Google Ads. I don’t actually LIKE them, so this experiment will probably be rather short-lived. :D

I used to use them a long time ago, but then I stopped. The general point was that they were poor-looking and at the same time generated close to *ZERO* revenue, hahaha. I think that when I went to reactivate my account, I had accrued like $10 or like $9.50 or something. Meanwhile, I could have stood in front of McDonald’s opening doors for people and requesting change from them as they left the establishment and made that much in one day…. well… actually in just a couple of hours.

The reason I decided to bring them back was that I get a lot of random traffic now. Most of the traffic I got before was from my posting links to social media sites, so it didn’t make sense to tell people “Come to my site to look at advertisements! :D “. At this point, most of my traffic comes from Google, and they tend to bounce pretty quickly, so if they decide to bounce to an ad link, that’s fine with me. :D

Still, I didn’t want the ads to show up to people who ‘normally’ browse my site, like actually going to my home page and seeing what’s on it. For that reason, I took Tyme‘s advice and implemented the ads in my single post code.

I decided to use link units instead of ad units, because I could get link units that were only 15 pixels high. The “thinnest” ad units I could get were 60 pixels high.

I immediately noticed a problem with relevance… Not that adsense was having trouble parsing the text on the page, but because I talk about so much different stuff in my posts. I don’t even TALK about cars, yet they were posting automobile links on my pages. One of my titles included the name “Nichelle”, so all the ads on the page were for “Helle” shoes or something. So, without the ability to specifically say “give me these type of ads”, there’s an incredible relevance ‘problem’. They would probably work better if my posts were only a couple of paragraphs long and about specifically one topic.

In general, I’m not a fan of random advertising anyway. I’ve been saying for probably a year now that product placement and sponsorship is the way to go. This is another reason these ads will probably have to vamoose immediately. :) I don’t enjoy seeing mentions of items that don’t have anything to do with anything on my pages. I also can’t imagine why anybody would want to click on the random words they come up with. Then again, I’m not aiming them at ME, I’m aiming them at people who randomly search through google for topics they want to read about at that point in time.

I guess part of the experiment is to gauge the worth of random google ads vs sponsored ads… which is practically ZERO since you’re guaranteed to get paid whatever amount by a sponsor by the nature of the relationship. Google ads are like a gamble. “I DEFINITELY show your ads, and I MAYBE get a couple of cents out of the deal”. :)

Anyway, it’ll be an interesting experiment. I’m up to 83 page impressions since this morning, with ZERO clicks and ZERO page CTR, hahaha. I’ll most likely be done with this experiment when I wake up tomorrow morning. :D

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