Anthony J. Bradley
GVP
3 years at Gartner
19 years in IT
Anthony J. Bradley is a group vice president in Gartner Research, managing teams that cover business process management, project and portfolio management, enterprise architecture, IT procurement, IT sourcing, and vendor management. Read Full Bio
by Anthony J. Bradley | November 28, 2011 | 2 Comments
In most organizations, social media established a marketing beachhead. It served its purpose by raising awareness of a new set of technologies based on new principles of peer-to-peer discussion, openness, and cross-boundary communities. Indeed: the marketing organization has put social media technologies to work with very visible effect.
But we need to break out social media and talk about more than marketing and technology. Instead, we need to talk about what social media enables: the ability to collaborate in new ways — which is particularly important for business leaders interested in creating more collaborative, innovative, and engaging organizations.
An executive may boast, "We have Twitter and SharePoint, and we’re on Facebook." But if you were to ask the executive how social media is positively impacting business results, you may raise a significant issue. When social media is applied to marketing, it creates activity — and in marketing, activity is a good thing. But activity alone does not create business results.
The use of these platforms can truly transform a business by moving beyond brand marketing. Social media has enabled business leaders to think differently about how they engage and interact with both customers and employees. But just because you’ve opened the door doesn’t mean you’ve crossed the threshold into a new way of working, managing, and leading. To achieve those ends — we’ve described these as attributes of a "social organization" — it takes more than setting loose the technology and praying that something good will happen.
A social organization strategically applies "mass collaboration" by combining technology, community, and purpose. It addresses significant challenges or opportunities through the creation of purpose-driven collaborative communities that are enabled by social media.
As we have said in previous posts, every organization is social, but few are social organizations. Mass collaboration gives an organization the ability to amplify its capabilities by raising the engagement, innovation, and involvement of people, internally and externally.
Thinking about social media in terms of social organization and mass collaboration increases its potential value. Social media requires more than new technology, and its application can breathe new life into business processes, practices, and challenges.
We need to move beyond social media as a technology tool. We need to determine how to apply that tool along with others in order to do things that were previously impossible or prohibitively expensive.
Some organizations are already doing it. Consider CEMEX’s SHIFT initiatives, which have radically reduced cycle time and increased results via mass collaboration. Loyola University Chicago engages prospective students in ways that have raised the quality of its admission decisions, improving revenue realization by 15%. And Electronic Arts has created collaborative decision making that fosters creativity, rather than fight it.
If we don’t break out social media from marketing, it will likely join other technologies that remain popular buzzwords but have fallen short of their potential value — business intelligence, knowledge management, customer relationship management. Also, we risk breaking the promise of social media marketing when customers are served through autocratic business processes. It doesn’t have to be that way. You can create a truly social organization that can deliver enhanced value to customers and employees who expect more than marketing from these new technologies.
So as a business leader, talk about social media technology, celebrate the marketing results it achieves, but recognize that this is just a start. Break out social media from its marketing beachhead. Think about how you can create mass collaboration and become a social organization.
That will move you past brand awareness and send you on the path to breakthrough performance.
This post is adapted from a version we originally ran on Harvard Business Review blogs on November 16, 2011. There is a good conversation going on around the original post.
I co-authored a book "The Social Organization" on Amazon.com . Check it out!
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by Anthony J. Bradley | November 7, 2011 | Comments Off
In the real estate world, there is a saying: "The three considerations that most impact value are location, location, and location." In the world of social media, they are purpose, purpose, and purpose.
Nothing impacts the success of a social media effort more than the choice of its purpose. Because purpose becomes the cause around which people will rally and be inspired to act, it is also the source of social media’s business value.
What is a good purpose for social media? Would you recognize one if you saw it? And if you could identify a good purpose, would you be able to mobilize a community around it and derive business value from it?
If you’re like most executives (and you’re being honest), probably not.
No wonder most organizations struggle with gaining tangible and significant business value from social media. This single most important criterion for success is also the biggest leadership skill deficiency.
That deficiency often leads to a worst practice we call "provide and pray." Leaders and managers provide access to a social technology, and then pray that a community forms and that community interactions somehow lead to business value. In most cases, adoption never really materializes; communities may form, but their activity is not considered valuable to the organization.
The lesson? People rarely rally around a technology. Success in social media needs a compelling purpose. Such a purpose addresses a widely recognized need or opportunity and is specific and meaningful enough to motivate people to participate. Every notable social media success has a clearly defined purpose:
Facebook’s core purpose is for people to easily track what their friends are doing.
Wikipedia’s purpose is for the masses to collectively build an online encyclopedia.
LinkedIn’s purpose is for people to leverage their professional networks for employment and hiring.
Yes, some social Web environments have strayed from their original purpose. But they made a name for themselves because they started with a clearly defined and tightly scoped purpose, gained critical mass, and mobilized their respective communities.
Choosing the right purpose is difficult (much harder than providing the technology). It requires a new management approach we call "purpose roadmapping" — planning how to use purpose to engage and sustain productive communities. A purpose road map shows how community collaboration and related business value can evolve over time, and provides critical guidance on the required investments and risks. It also informs all lower-level implementation decisions such as technology selection, content seeding, policy, moderating, and tipping-point marketing.
Purpose is a business decision. And business leaders must get involved in strategically choosing and pursuing the right ones. This is why success with social media is primarily a leadership and management challenge, not a technology issue.
This post is adapted from a version we originally ran on Harvard Business Review blogs on Tuesday November 1, 2011.
I co-authored a book "The Social Organization" on Amazon.com . Check it out!
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by Anthony J. Bradley | October 31, 2011 | 2 Comments
We originally posted this on the Harvard Business Review blog site on Wednesday October 26, 2011. It has generated an interesting discussion so I encourage you to join it if you wish to engage.
On the surface, social media and knowledge management (KM) seem very similar. Both involve people using technology to access information. Both require individuals to create information intended for sharing. Both profess to support collaboration.
But there’s a big difference.
- Knowledge management is what company management tells me I need to know, based on what they think is important.
- Social media is how my peers show me what they think is important, based on their experience and in a way that I can judge for myself.
These definitions may sound harsh, and biased in favor of social media, and to some extent they are. Knowledge should be like water — free-flowing and permeating down and across your organization filling the cracks, floating good ideas to the top and lifting all boats.
But, really, is that anyone’s KM reality?
KM, in practice, reflects a hierarchical view of knowledge to match the hierarchical view of the organization. Yes, knowledge may originate anywhere in the organization, but it is channeled and gathered into a knowledge base (cistern) where it is distributed through a predefined set of channels, processes and protocols.
Social media looks downright chaotic by comparison. There is no predefined index, no prequalified knowledge creators, no knowledge managers and ostensibly little to no structure. Where an organization has a roof, gutters and cistern to capture knowledge, a social media organization has no roof, allowing the “rain” to fall directly into the house, collecting in puddles wherever they happen to form. That can be quite messy. And organizations abhor a mess.
It is no wonder, then, that executives, knowledge managers and software companies seek to offer tools, processes and approaches to tame social media. After all (they believe), “We cannot have employees, customers, suppliers and anyone else creating their own information, forming their own opinions and expressing that without our say. Think of the impact on our brand, our people, our customers. We need to manage this. We need knowledge management.”
This is exactly the wrong attitude for one simple reason: It does not stop people from talking about you. Your workforce, customers, suppliers, competitors, etc., will talk about you whenever, wherever and however they want. Even pre-World Wide Web, these conversations were happening.
We’re long past the time to seek control; it’s time to engage people.
Business leaders recognize that engagement is the best way to glean value from the knowledge exchanged in social media — and not by seeking to control social media with traditional KM techniques. That only leads to a “provide and pray” approach, and we have seen more than our share of “social media as next-generation KM” efforts fail to yield results.
So how do organizations gain value from social media, particularly in situations where they have not been successful with KM? The answer lies in a new view of collaboration: mass collaboration.
Mass collaboration consists of three things: social media technology, a compelling purpose and a focus on forming communities.
- Social media technology provides the conduit and means for people to share their knowledge, insight and experience on their terms. It also provides a way for the individual to see and evaluate that knowledge based on the judgment of others.
- Purpose is the reason people participate and contribute their ideas, experience and knowledge. They participate personally in social media because they value and identify with the purpose. They do so because they want to, rather than being told to as part of their job.
- Communities are self-forming in social media. KM communities imply a hierarchical view of knowledge and are often assigned by job classification or encouraged based on work duties. Participation becomes prescribed, creating the type of “mandatory fun” that is the butt of many a Dilbert cartoon and TV sitcom. Social media allows communities to emerge as a property of the purpose and the participation in using the tools. This lack of structure creates the space for active and innovative communities.
Creating mass collaboration involves more than building technology and telling people to participate. It necessitates a vision, a strategy and management actions we will discuss in subsequent posts.
The point here is that while they may seem similar, social media and KM are not the same. Recognizing the differences is a crucial step toward getting value out of both and avoiding a struggle of one over the other.
It is also a step toward becoming a social organization.
I co-authored a book “The Social Organization” on Amazon.com . Check it out!
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by Anthony J. Bradley | October 26, 2011 | 2 Comments
"Social media" is one of those terms that means different things to different people. Some history: it was originally associated with Web 2.0, the Web’s shift from publishing to a platform for the masses to share content and opinions. Then the corporate world caught on that social media wasn’t just for consumers; the term Enterprise 2.0 emerged to take Web 2.0 inside the enterprise, and the phrase social media expanded to include both.
Now with the huge and growing popularity and influence of Facebook, Twitter and, more recently, Google+, common use of "social media" is swinging back to the Web, but with a more limited scope — synonymous with consumer-side social networking.
Dizzy yet?
For some clarity, let’s look at the three ways the phrase social media is used today:
- As an umbrella term that covers all uses of the new social technologies — aka social collaboration, community collaboration and social computing. It connotes an online environment established for the purpose of mass collaboration. But it must have a purpose — e.g., Facebook is an online environment for the purpose of interacting with a large number of friends. And new social technologies (such as wikis, blogs, social networks, idea engines, etc.) enable it, although the technology platforms are secondary.
- As a term for environments on the Web — aka social Web, collaborative Web, ReadWrite Web and Web 2.0 — referring to social sites open to the general public. This usage gets most of the press, with the 700 million or so users on Facebook, massive Twitter traffic and the huge Web blogosphere. Though it’s becoming standard for large organizations to maintain a marketing communications presence on the major social sites on the Web, this unfortunately can drown out other, more impactful, mass collaboration opportunities.
- As a term for environments created by non-Web organizations to enhance collaboration between employees or between a business and its customers, prospects, suppliers, etc. — aka Enterprise 2.0, social business, social enterprise and social organization. It is here where many leading organizations are experiencing truly transformational business value.
In our new book, we focus on number 3: achieving real business value from social media. And one of the first steps on this path is understanding how your enterprise can tap into the power of what we call mass collaboration. We believe that achieving this distinctive kind of collaboration is the true “so-what” of social media.
Success involves adhering to six core principles:
Participation. Mobilize the masses to contribute. You can’t capture the wisdom of the crowds if the crowds don’t participate. The value comes not from the technology itself but from user participation and the user-generated content this facilitates.
Collective. People must swarm to the effort. They go to the content to contribute their piece to the whole. This act of going to the content to contribute is a fundamental shift in behavior that enables the scale of mass collaboration.
Transparency. Allow the community to validate and organize content. It is not enough to collect contributions. Participants must get to see, use, reuse, augment, validate, critique and rate each other’s contributions. Through this transparency, the community improves content, unifies information, self-governs, self-corrects, evolves, creates emergence and propels its own advancement.
Independence. Independence delivers any time, any place, any member collaboration. This means participants can contribute independent of any other — no matter where they are or whoever else may be posting content at that time; no coordination of collaboration or pre-existing relationship is required.
Persistence. Contributions must endure for scaled value, captured in a persistent state for others to view, share and augment. Members learn from, reference and virally propagate the best content. An innovative idea, a solution to a problem, an astute observation that could otherwise be lost — all gain value when the masses can seize and act on them.
Emergence. Communities self-direct for greater productivity. The behaviors cannot be modeled, designed, optimized or controlled like traditional systems. They emerge over time through the interactions of community members. Emergence is what allows these communities to come up with new ways of working or new solutions to seemingly intractable problems.
These are the pillars of collaborative success. Conversely, a sure path to social media failure is stifling mass collaboration, the main reason so many efforts fizzle out. As we’ve said, the technology itself is not what matters; no social technology is great enough to save efforts that ignore the fundamental principles of mass collaboration.
We have talked to many clients who are struggling with the term social media. When they use it senior business leaders tend to turn off. They view social media as either something that they don’t need to know about (it is for those marketing folks), that is fraught with risk, or that is almost entirely foreign to them. So here is another reason that I like using the term mass collaboration and the relevant mass collaboration behaviors. Because it makes more sense to business leaders. They would not be leaders if they didn’t understand collaboration already. So this “social media movement” is really about scaling collaboration and deriving value from communities. They can grasp it more easily. Also, collaboration is about behaviors whereas social media is about channels and technologies. This is another important and relevant distinction for business leaders.
Have you been successful with the term social media (outside marketing efforts)? Does it present a hurdle? Do you use a different term? If so, what is it? Let’s find a better term.
This post is adapted from a version we originally ran on Harvard Business Review blogs on Monday October 17, 2011.
I co-authored a book "The Social Organization" on Amazon.com . Check it out!
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by Anthony J. Bradley | October 24, 2011 | 1 Comment
Slowly but surely, org cultures are shifting in attitude toward social media — from seeing it as a threat to discovering its very real opportunities.
And attitude matters, a lot. Social media is about people, not technology. Its business value does not come from social software or a snazzy website, even one with 800 million users. Its value stems from how organizations, from senior executives to managers to line employees, use it to foster new collaborative behaviors that materially improve business performance.
Organizational culture is critical to social media success. It is among a company’s most fundamental social media asset — or liability. Here are the six basic attitudes toward social media:
Folly
Organizations with this predominant attitude consider social media a source of entertainment with little or no business value, and they typically ignore it. Where a folly attitude prevails, the approach to a social media strategy must emphasize direct business value tightly tied to well-known and recognized organizational goals or challenges — and it must avoid flabby value statements around improved collaboration and stronger relationships.
Fearful
Fearful organizations see social media as a threat to productivity, intellectual capital, privacy, management authority, regulatory compliance and a host of other things, and often discourage and even prohibit its use. This attitude can reduce the potential risk, but it also stifles any possible business value. To counteract fear, the strategic approach should focus on relatively low-risk initiatives, even if other, higher-risk opportunities might offer greater business value.
Flippant
Leaders and managers may not ignore or fear social media, but they don’t take it seriously, either. This typically leads to a technology-centric approach where the company simply provides access to social media and hopes that business value will spontaneously emerge. This rarely bears fruit. Important in countering this attitude is convincing leadership that purpose matters, and that they should progress beyond the technology and identify good purposes for social media — causes that are strong enough to catalyze and mobilize communities of people to act in a way that delivers value to the community and the organization.
Formulating
Formulating organizations recognize both the potential value of social media as well as the need to be more organized and strategic in its use. The right approach here should build on this positive foundation, emphasizing the broader strategic value of social media and mass collaboration, with a succinctly expressed set of business opportunities that (1) demonstrates social media’s potential impact across many areas of the business, and (2) is strong enough to capture the attention of the most senior leaders.
Forging
In companies with a forging attitude, the whole organization is starting to develop competence in using social media to assemble, nurture and gain business value from communities. To keep progressing, leaders should recognize previous successes, capitalize on growing momentum, advocate continued evolution and increase investments. They should also promote additional grassroots social media efforts as critical in becoming a highly collaborative social organization.
Fusing
This is the most advanced attitude, and still rare. Fusing organizations treat community collaboration as an integral part of the organization’s work, ingrained in how people think and behave. This is a description of a social organization, and in such organizations the need for an explicit vision and strategy subsides — all business strategy and execution already include community collaboration where it’s appropriate.
How do most organizations shape up? Right now, our analysis indicates that leaders of most organizations have yet to progress to the Formulating stage, which accounts for the high social media failure rate. We know treating social media as strategic can lead to tangible business value and competitive advantage, so the goal is for business leaders to move quickly past the Folly, Fearful, and Flippant stages and get right to Formulating. Ignoring social media, or throwing it over the fence to Marketing or IT could create serious business risk.
Where does your organization stand?
Take Gartner’s free Social Readiness Assessment and find out. The assessment is 4 questions and takes about 5 minutes. It provides a mapping of where you fit on the 6F model, comparison to where others fit, and a report that provides guidance on how to move forward from where you map. You will need to register (free).
This post is adapted from a version we originally ran on Harvard Business Review blogs on Monday October 17, 2011.
I co-authored a book “The Social Organization” on Amazon.com . Check it out!
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by Anthony J. Bradley | October 10, 2011 | 1 Comment
News flash: Organizations consist of people. How well an organization works depends on how its people interact and work together. Thus, every organization is "social." But so what? How do we make use of this universal fact?
Organizations work top down through social interactions structured around the organization chart, or hierarchy. And they work end to end structured around their business processes. These two dimensions — hierarchy and process — shape the way organizations see the world, its challenges and, more importantly, the portfolio of potential solutions to those challenges. There is nothing wrong with hierarchy or process. They are effective organizational approaches to managing complex operations.
But there is a crucial third dimension to organizational effectiveness. We see this when people get things done by working in the so-called "white space" in the organizational structure, or by working across the "seams" of a business process. In their ways of working and connecting with each other, they do more than just what they are told top-down and more than what is defined as their job. This is the social dimension.
Every organization has a social dimension. The challenge is that the social dimension is not accurately reflected in either the organization’s hierarchy or its process flow. For years, social systems were described not as valuable systems to tap into, but as limits on innovation and change. We gave these systems names like culture, core beliefs, norms, tradition, shared thinking, or "just the way we do things around here" — each term describing factors that are so slow to change as to become assumptions that limited either strategy or operations. This was great if you had a positive and successful culture, and a death sentence if you did not. In response, executives relied on organizational command-and-control or process prescription to run the enterprise and effect change because there was no way to readily and repeatedly access the power of the organization’s social systems.
But what if leaders could create a future where customers, associates and suppliers are no longer seen as objects in the system but as valued sources of innovation, ideas and energy? What if they could truly tap into the creativity, knowledge and experience of their organization’s people? What could possibly enable such a transformation?
The answer is social media. And before you roll your eyes, let us say that we know very well that accessing your social potential requires moving beyond simple social media solutions such as blogs, wikis, etc., to truly changing the way your organization works. This means becoming a social organization.
A social organization mobilizes its people — from associates to customers, suppliers and others without regard to hierarchy or position — and their interests, passions, knowledge and experience. Tapping into the collective wisdom of everyone creates a new source of competitive advantage, agility and future innovation.
A social organization is one that is able to address significant business challenges and opportunities through creating this "mass collaboration." As we show in our new book, this collaboration extends well beyond common social media to enable employees, customers, suppliers and all other stakeholders to participate directly in the creation of value.
Are you on the path to becoming a social organization?
This post originally appeared on HBR.org on Monday, October 3rd 2011.
I co-authored a book "The Social Organization" on Amazon.com. Check it out!
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by Anthony J. Bradley | October 5, 2011 | Comments Off
The short answer is, no.
In a recent client meeting where we were discussing a collaborative environment specifically for developing and rating ideas. One of the meeting attendees said something to the effect of, “Why are we creating another collaborative environment? We should just be using the one we have.”
We need to recognize that collaboration is not a “one size fits all.” It sounds great to have one environment where everyone goes to collaborate but it isn’t reality. Not all collaboration is created equally. There are different “purposes” for collaboration that require different styles. Look at social mediatechnologies for instance. We have social networking, collaborative authoring (e.g., wikis), answer marketplaces, prediction markets, social ratings, idea engines, crowdsourcing, etc. All have different collaborative “styles” that require a different participant experience, functionality, social incentives, gamification, seeding options, etc.
I could just as easily ask, “Why can’t we just have one ERP application?” Or “Do we really need a World Wide Web. Can’t we just have one Web site?” How about, “We don’t need Wikipedia. Let’s all just build an on-line encyclopedia on Facebook.” For some reason many people seem to apply this “one size fits all” mentality only to collaborative environments. It seems silly when you apply it to other computing genres.
Facebook is a good example from the social Web. I see organizations with grand plans for what they want to do on Facebook. But they forget the basic purpose of Facebook is for people to easily collaborate with a group of “friends.” If you expect to substantially depart from that purpose then your chances of success are minimal. Why? Because that is what Facebook is built for and why people are there. And if Facebook itself tries to expand too much from that original purpose it runs the risk of alienating its current base and overwhelming new users.
I’m not saying that we need to have 100 different collaborative environments. I am saying that we need to expect more than one and that we need to effectively manage an ecosystem of collaboration capabilities depending on the needs of the organization. There will most likely be a mix of general and specific collaborative environments.
What do you see? Do you see this “one size fits all” collaboration mentality? If so, how do you deal with it? Or do you have a counter to my stance?
I co-authored a book "The Social Organization" on Amazon.com. Check it out!
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by Anthony J. Bradley | October 3, 2011 | Comments Off
I’m very happy to announce that “The Social Organization” is now available for purchase. I co-authored the book with Mark P. McDonald, Group Vice President in Gartner’s Executive Programs. Harvard Business Review Press is our publisher.
So you may be asking, why write another book on social media?
We wrote it because, despite the number of social media books out there, there is still a significant hole. And that is, how, as an organization, do you actually do it? How do you use social media to identify, catalyze, empower, and derive value from a community and their mass collaboration? How do you, as a leader and manager, help your organization build a competency in using social media to foster productive collaboration—with your customers, your clients, your employees, and others along your value chain?
This book is not an introductory book. It assumes you have a basic understanding of social media, and its potential value and are now interested in strategically employing it for business or mission value. Also, it is not a technology book. It is a business book targeted at business leaders. We believe strongly that organizational success with social media is fundamentally a leadership and management challenge, not a technology issue.
And real success is far more than creating a marketing presence on Facebook, Twitter, QZone, etc. This is a book dedicated to the bigger question of how to achieve broad and sustainable success, as an organization, using social media. It addresses the leadership, management, and operational capabilities you must build to achieve meaningful, repeatable, and significant business value with these powerful new technologies.
We created this book based on extensive experience working with business leaders around the world and observing social media successes and failures. In 2009 we began an extensive study of more than four hundred social media initiatives to further explore and analyze findings from our regular Gartner client interactions. We focused on how “traditional” (in other words, non–Web-based) companies are using social media to create collaborative communities that include their customers, their employees, their suppliers, etc. We intentionally avoided initiatives that used social media simply as additional marketing communication channels. It’s not that social media communications aren’t important to business. But much greater value comes from the mass collaboration—both inside and outside the enterprise—that social media technology now makes possible.
I don’t want to spend too much time here describing the book. The Amazon.com “Look Inside” capability provides a wealth of information including the Table of Contents, Preface and Chapter 1. I encourage you to check it out.
Here are some other good resources for the book:
Gartner’s “The Social Organization” Web site
Our “The Social Organization” Facebook page
We spent almost three years researching and writing this book. Our goal is to provide you with guidance, techniques, and tools to accelerate your progress and dramatically increase your chances of success in strategically employing social media. We hope you find it enlightening and highly useful. We also hope you enjoy it but we know this is asking a lot of a business book 
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by Anthony J. Bradley | July 26, 2011 | Comments Off
I work with far too many clients who don’t realize that, with social media and mass collaboration, popularity matters.
So what do I mean by this? For effective mass collaboration, and certainly for scalable mass collaboration, you simply must provide the capability for participants to express that they like or support a post. And it needs to also have a way to aggregate that feedback. This can be functionality such as “like,” star ratings, point system, thumbs up etc. This relates back to transparency, one of the six core principles of social media/mass collaboration.
The community needs the capability to easily pass collective judgment on posts with those that are deemed more valuable accumulating status and increased visibility. Without this capability you are not capitalizing on the communities ability to vet its own content. You also are not enabling the community to self-learn from its own successes and missteps. As contributions gain status they help the community see what is considered valuable and other participants can learn from this and contribute more productively. Some ideas, comments, etc. can more easily gain momentum.
Of course, this is predicated on the sponsors of the social media environment actually believing that the contributions and feedback of participants has value.
If you don’t empower the collaborative community with collective judgment then you can end up with a morass of content that you must manually sift through for value. Do you have those resources lying around?
Also, if participants feel their contributions will just get lost in a big hairball of feedback then you will discourage input.
Popularity is a critical aspect of a healthy social media environment.
This may seem obvious but it must not be because I see organizations consistently make this mistake.
Thoughts?
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by Anthony J. Bradley | July 21, 2011 | 4 Comments
Back in February in my post “Social media is for Personas Not People” I explored Facebook’s competitive vulnerability due to the lack of support for social circles. Viola, in July Google launches Google+ which centers on social circle capabilities. Coincidence?
Simple and easy, Google+ is basically activity streaming to user defined social circles. You can add some pictures and video too. I am pleased to see that the user experience of creating social circles, inviting people to them and then posting or viewing content by social circles is quite easy. It also pulled in a few hundred people from my Gmail account for me to invite into my circles (literally by dragging and dropping them into a circle). In a heartbeat I had numerous people in my newly formed “Gartner” circle. I also created a very select “Circle of Trust” consisting of those people who’s advice I hold dear.
I’m going to give Google+ a good shot simply because I believe in social circles and want that level of control. I won’t be dumping Facebook as of yet and will continue using it for general public types of things. But when I want to network with a smaller circle, I’ll go to Google+.
This may give Google+ a chance against the Facebook machine. I’m not saying it will beat Facebook but it just might compete. Hey, Facebook trumped the MySpace incumbent.
Google needs to play up the social circle side and even target market around specific circles users should create, work friends, school friends, circle of trust 
…., something.
They might want to point to the Fired by Facebook group as evidence of the risk in not thinking in terms of social circles.
What do you think?
You can respond here, or just Goolge+ me
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