Author: Drew Neisser

The Building of Social Media Programs

Posted on by Drew Neisser

I had a chance to catch up with Trish Nettleship, the Social Media Lead at AT&T Business Marketing prior to her presentation at the upcoming B2B Corporate Social Media Summit in Philadelphia.  Trish discusses their newest social media program and the internal training required to make it happen.  

DN: Tell me about the social media program(s) you’ll be presenting at the conference.
We launched a B2B focused blog, the first for AT&T, earlier this year called Networking Exchange Blog. The idea was to bring forth our wealth of expertise, our people, directly to businesses in the industries we serve. We have some of the brightest minds at AT&T, so providing a platform for them to share their thoughts and perspectives on technologies directly to businesses seemed like a great approach to showcasing our thought leadership. We quickly learned that our subject matter experts knew their technologies well, but weren’t as experienced in the ways of social media. We created the Networking Leaders Academy to create an active corps of expert ambassadors who create social proof and digital “trust” in AT&T, it’s people and their points of view on technology. The Academy provides the experts with the incentives, tools, training and support to enable the open and ongoing dialogue with businesses, large and small across the social atmosphere.

DN: What were your goals for this program?
Our initial goal for the blog is about building awareness and credibility in technology spaces not typically associated with AT&T. (i.e. Cloud and Security.)  The goal of the Networking Leaders Academy is to build on the foundation of the blog and empower our experts to do more than just create blog posts, but truly engage with businesses whether it be on blog or in external communities, social networks, blogs or forums.

DN: And how did the program(s) achieve these goals?
We have seen growth in overall awareness of the brand across these technologies. We’ve also seen our experts own credibility and awareness increase through their personal networks, guest blog requests and speaking engagement requests.

DN: Do you see any major differences between B2B and B2C approaches to social media?
The buying life cycle for B2B is typically longer and more engaged. The social media strategy in the B2B space has to take this into consideration. We focus a lot of our efforts on engaging with businesses early in the buying lifecycle. So providing content that is more research oriented in nature is key. If the business doesn’t engaged with us early in the buying lifecycle we may never get a chance to be placed in the consideration set of vendors. Timing, relevant content and the right platform are key to success in the B2B environment.

DN: Has social media become a significant part of your marketing mix?
Yes, our customers want to engage with us on their terms and not be forced into an experience solely created by us. So whether they are on social networks or blogs, or any other digital environment, there is an appreciation of that AT&T is coming to them.

DN: Is there a risk that social media could trivialize your product/service in the eyes of your B2B customers?
No, it’s an evolution of how we engage with our customers or prospects. As more and more businesses are becoming more comfortable in social media, it is expected that we will be there to engage with them.

What Your User Community Should Look Like

Posted on by Drew Neisser

In the hype that is social media marketing, it is often hard to distinguish between the braggadocio and the brilliant. Communities are launched with great fanfare only to slink away quietly into the burial ground of false promise. So to stumble across a vibrant community— one that predates Facebook and supports a B2B brand— is not just surprising, it is downright awe-inspiring.

Thanks to the support of an enlightened board member in 2003, the SAP Community Network (SCN) was able to overcome internal naysayers, and gradually grow into a 2.5 million-member social business juggernaut. Now heading community operations, Chip Rodgers, who I interviewed in advance of his presentation at the B2B Corporate Social Media Summit, the SCN sets a high standard, revealing these 9 ways to know your community is truly awesome.

1. Adding members is no longer a key performance indicator
Because communities are still considered a luxury by some executives and a risk by many (rightly or wrongly) there is tremendous pressure in the early days to achieve scale. The SAP Community Network crossed this threshold in the last 24 months. Reports Rodgers, “Around the time we got close to 2 million, we stopped emphasizing the growth of the community.”

2. Community engagement is a daily activity
“If you build it, they will come,” is pure fiction when it comes to communities, which is why most wither away. Remarkably, the SCN gets about 1.5 million unique visitors per month and 3,000 to 4,000 posts a day. “Our activity numbers are really strong,” Rodgers explains. “I think that’s something we pride ourselves on as there are other communities that may have more members but feel like ghost towns; we have vibrancy.”

3. The community jumps in to defend the brand
It is inevitable that a brand will come under criticism for one thing or another once it opens up a community. Offers Rodgers, “We see this all the time where somebody says something negative or even a little wacky.” But rather than rushing out a brand response, “what ends up happening is a lot of community members [jump in saying] ‘This is way over the line,’ or ‘Nah that’s not really true.’’”

4. You can drive your own circulation
Building and maintaining a healthy community on the scale of the SCN is expensive so there is unavoidable pressure to demonstrate value to management. Rodgers notes, “One of our KPI’s is driving activity to webinars and that turns into real pipeline opportunity dollars traceable back to activity in the community.” In effect, the community acts like a media channel, supporting other marketing efforts and ultimately, top-line sales.

5. The community willingly embraces a direct sales channel
Purists worry that connecting a community with any kind of sales channel will dilute the value of the community. While there is a risk of being too “salesy,” an inevitable by-product of a healthy community are product discussions. Seeing these, SAP set up an online store called SAP EcoHub that started within the community and is now an increasing channel that drives real leads and revenue.

6. The community impacts product development
Customer-generated ideas have long been discussed as the holy grail of community activation, but getting there can be perilous. “The last thing we wanted to do was have a bunch of people contribute ideas and then have nobody listen or act on them,” Rodgers says. Working closely with the “proactive” product teams on selective topics, he has “gotten great feedback and contributions from the community that are already incorporated in the latest solutions.”

7. The marketing group wants in
Successful communities like the SCN are often started outside of marketing departments as a form of post-sale customer service. This orientation gives the community a head start since the emphasis is on creating content of genuine value and not pure product messaging. But with the heightened interest in having robust social media programs, it is not surprising that the SAP marketing department grabbed the reins of the SCN six months ago.

8. The community drives cultural change within marketing
Rodgers, who has run the SCN for five years, might have been apprehensive when marketing subsumed his group earlier this year, but you wouldn’t know it now. “Last year, our CMO said, ‘Guys we need to learn from [the SCN] and we need to have conversations and engage with our audience. We can’t just create another email blast with a bunch of creative and an offer.’”

9. The content developed on the community profoundly improves SEO
With a staff of 12 dedicated to developing formal content like white papers, articles and solutions briefs, Rodgers is able to keep up with his ravenous community, feeding it fresh content on a daily basis. And by optimizing this content for search, starting about 2 years ago, the SCN was able to more than double monthly site traffic. “I mean it was dramatic; it was unbelievable,” Rodgers observes with a sense of pride and awe.

Final note: It’s not often you hear about a huge B2B company operating with a B2C mentality for customer engagement. For my complete interview with Chip Rodgers, see my previous post here.  You can visit the SAP Community Network at and hear Rodgers yourself at the upcoming B2B Corporate Social Media Summit in Philly on October 12th.  This article first appeared on FastCompany.com.

The Anatomy of a Social Business Community

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Most brands dream of having a vital user community that creates on-going dialog between the brand and its customers.  But few have succeeded on the level of the SAP Community Network which is led by Chip Rodgers.  I interviewed Chip for an upcoming case study on FastCompany.com and in advance of his presentation at the B2B Corporate Social Media Summit September 28/29 in Philadelphia.  The following is my Q&A with Chip. Admittedly, it is long one but well worth studying if you are thinking about creating your own community.

DN: Can you give some background on the SAP Community Network?
The SAP Community Network actually started about eight years ago, and so we’ve had a little bit of time to ramp up. We currently have about 2.5 million members, and it’s a very active community. We get between a million and a million and a half unique visitors a month and about 3,000 to 4,000 posts a day in discussions and blogs and wiki pages.

DN: Tell me about the membership of the SAP Community Network.
It’s about 50% customers and then another probably 30% partners and then we have a large group of employee members as well. There are also independent contractors, developers— just people who are interested in the SAP ecosystem. It’s open to anyone that wants to join. There are a few core pieces of information that we ask for and obviously unique email address.

DN: From a content standpoint, with all these members, are you constantly feeding this beast yourself or is it somewhat self-sustaining?
I have two teams. The content team works with about 400 SAP experts to feed the community with a lot of our formal content: white papers, articles, solution briefs, eLearning, videos, etc. I have a team of about 12 working with a group of stakeholders that are SAP solution managers or folks from support or people in solution marketing that have all the actual information, the expertise and are actually the ones that are building the content.  I’ve also got a group of six that are managing the community-generated content, so that’s our blogs and forums and wikis, and similarly they’re working with a group of about 700 moderators that are in the community.

DN: You know the scale of this community is kind of mind-boggling. Can you draw a direct line between your activities and your ROI?
More and more we’re able to show that there is a connection. We’ve gotten to the point where we’re running a lot of webinars on different topic areas, different product areas. We’ve really cut back with list-buying and some of those traditional marketing costs to get people to come in and listen to a webinar, learn about a new product area, and then take the next step as a pipeline opportunity.

Drew: You started this in 2003, which predates Twitter and Facebook, and I’m curious how you brought [them] into your community. Are they adjuncts or are they truly integrated into this?
Having this background of engaging with the community, when Facebook and Twitter came along, they were natural extensions and ways of engaging with the community. We now have a group that is really focused just purely on social media. We work together to leverage the community and our social media activity. A little bit more specifically, we do a number of things like, if you post a blog in the community, we have an RSS feed to a Twitter account so it automatically tweets the title of the new blog that was published. We think of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, even YouTube, as kind of extensions— concentric circles around the community— to reach community members and try to get the word out.

DN: Was it tough in the beginning to get management behind the community?
We laid a lot of groundwork for social media within SAP. We were fortunate that we had a board member that thought it was the thing to do and defended it every time. When we first opened the communities with blogs and forums and wiki, some executives were nervous – saying, “why should we create a place just for people to complain?”  But our feeling was that there are plenty of public places for people to criticize the company, why not create the place where we can be a part of the conversation?  And fortunately, our board defended it.

DN: Has the community ever defended the brand?
What we’ve found is if you work with the community and build trust, and you’re open about how you engage and you answer questions and address issues that come up, the community will support you. It’s not always SAP that has to defend [itself] when someone goes haywire.  We see this all the time where somebody says something negative or even a little wacky in the community, and your knee-jerk reaction might be, we have to answer that. And what ends up happening is a lot of other community members come in and say, “Well you might have a point here, but this is way over the line.”  The whole group kind of comes together.

DN: What are the other ways that you report on the success, or what are the metrics that you guys look at to rationalize your existence?
We actually have a few metrics. One is just purely in terms of activity and contributions in the community, page views, member satisfaction, things like that. We do those transactional kinds of things with the community to makes sure that we’ve got good content that people find interesting, so that’s one level of measurement. One of our KPI’s is driving activity to those webinars that turns into real pipeline opportunity dollars. It’s traceable back to activity in the community.

The third is a part of the community called SAP EcoHub (http://ecohub.sap.com). It started as an online store for our partners to set up storefronts and sell their products.  We’ve expanded it to include SAP products as well. It is connected to the community so that if there are conversations going on about certain product areas, we have links in those conversations going back to EcoHub. If you happen to be on a conversation you can see the product.  That is an increasing channel for us, for our partners and for SAP to drive revenue directly.

DN: You have a few people that are in the conversation, how do you make sure that they are all on brand?
We do have a social media corporate policy, guidelines, best practices case stories, and training courses.  We have an active internal social community, so there’s a lot of discussion and activity and assets [and] resources available to people when they start to put a toe in the water in social media.  A lot of those principles are similar to when anybody goes for media training, for example.  There are a few guiding principles like, “Don’t talk about things that you don’t know about.” And stay away from forward-looking statements like, “We’re going to do this,” or “We’re going to do that.”  But otherwise I think a lot of it is just common sense.

DN: You have this substantive, meaty community where people are actually participating, and you’ve already proven its worth and along comes Twitter and Facebook. Has there been conflict because [social media] is a separate group, and it’s not part of your group?
There is a social media group driving policies, best practices, training, reporting, and other aspects of social media for SAP, but we’re all part of marketing. It’s interesting because community and social media are somewhere in the middle of several traditional corporate groups.  It’s a little bit of marketing; it’s a little bit of communications; it’s a little bit of support, there’s an aspect of listening for product roll-in, and there’s an aspect of sales channel. So there are always discussions about where does it really belong. But community and social media are about people connecting – so if you’re doing it right, the entire organization is responsible for connecting with customers and partners in their respective areas.  So yes, we are separate groups, but we have a communities and social media council of leaders from each of those groups as well as social media ambassadors embedded throughout organizations and geographies at SAP.

DN: With 2.5 million community members, your activities are dwarfing anything SAP might have on Facebook [or] Twitter. How as the marketing/social team dealt with this?
We actually work very well together and leverage each other’s strengths on a nearly daily basis.  But it’s interesting that when we were first having discussions about Communities joining marketing, our CMO was saying “There’s an opportunity to learn from what Community Network has done.   We need to have more conversations and engage with our audience. We can’t just create another email blast with a bunch of creative and offers.”  It’s been a cultural change within the company.

DN: Have your content development efforts had a measurable impact on SEO?
We are very much SEO champions, and it’s been through experience. We had to figure out what to do on all those pages to do better with search engine: where things are laid out; how are we tagging pages; what are the titles in the pages, how are URLs formed. So many things factor into it. We had this three-month project just to go through everything and then get the word out to all the stakeholders and get everybody to update all their pages. I mean it was dramatic; We were bumping along at around 400,000 unique monthly visitors, and all of a sudden we shot up to like 900,000. It was unbelievable— just blew me away.

How to Sell More by Selling Less

Posted on by Drew Neisser

He was harder to shake than a telephone poll and just as dull.  Another financial advisor spouting out his expertise into my ears before I’d even downed my first cup of coffee.  I didn’t know the guy from Adam and he sure as heck didn’t know me.  Nonetheless, he droned on until my patience expired, forcing a polite but stern, “thanks but no thanks,” followed by a hope-ending click. [Funny enough I just got another cold call much like the one described here. Make them stop!]

Later that week, I attended my fifth Media & Technology CEO Summit put on by my friends Tom Livaccari and Ken Shapiro, two UBS financial advisors who are about as far from the cold-calling yacker as you can get.  Long-time proponents of the approach I call Marketing as Service, The Livaccari Shapiro Wealth Management Group offers a textbook case on growing your business by selling less and doing more.

Know your Niche
For Marketing as Service programs to be effective, it’s essential to have a tightly defined target to whom you can deliver a meaningful benefit.  Having been entrepreneurs themselves in the ‘90s, it’s not surprising that Livaccari and Shapiro decided to focus their practice on advising entrepreneurs and CEOs of Internet, media and tech companies. Remembering the unique issues these entrepreneurs faced, Shapiro noted, “We always wished we could find an advisor that would in essence partner with us.”

Start Small
Since Marketing as Service programs can be costly, start small and build from success.  When Livaccari and Shapiro first realized they could help their clients by bringing them together, they started with a roundtable discussion among a few CEOs facing the same issues. The program grew quickly. Reported Shapiro, “They found [the events] so valuable that [attendees] suggested other CEOs that they thought could benefit from similar discussions in the future.”

Vary the Value Add
At the core of every successful Marketing as Service program is something of genuine value to the target.  For Livaccari and Shapiro, the value to their prospects and customers is more than just useful information.  Explained Shapiro, “Clients tell us that these summits have helped them stimulate meaningful ideas, make valuable connections and in one case even initiated a conversation with a party that later acquired their company.”

Rely on Relevance
One of the more obvious aspects of Marketing as Service is the benefit of pinpoint relevance to everyone concerned. “Because the content and the other participants in these events are so relevant to our clients and prospects’ lives we find they are eager to join us,” added Shapiro.  “This leads to these events being excellent ice breakers, which enable people to experience first-hand our consultative and value-added approach.”

Differentiate by Doing
The essential notion behind Marketing as Service is the fair exchange of value between buyer and seller, during which the seller earns the trust of the buyer by doing something meaningful instead of just talking about how good they are.

“These events are an excellent way for us to provide prospects a window into the way that we interact with clients, put their needs first and help them with a wide array of issues that are not commonly addressed by others in our field.”

Triumph with Trust
It is the mandate of any form of marketing to build trust. Without trust, there is simply no brand, especially in the financial services arena. Marketing as Service programs like Livaccari and Shapiro’s CEO Summits are particularly good at building trust.  “From these events prospects often begin a dialogue with us regarding whichever matter is most pressing to them, and over time this often leads to them becoming a client as they gain comfort with us, our approach and our thought process.”

Extend your Engagements
Done correctly, Marketing as Service programs offer unique opportunities for meaningful engagement that go well beyond a specific event.  With the goal of being recognized as “uncommon partners,” Livaccari and Shapiro have built a community of likeminded CEOs who are thus positively inclined to share what they’ve learned. “We know that as long as we put our clients’ needs first then over time they become our best sales force as they share with their friends the positive experience they have had.”

Final Note:
Having been in their client’s shoes, Livaccari and Shapiro have built a successful practice by simply doing what they wish others had done for them when they were entrepreneurs. Its not rocket science. Just smart marketing.  For more insights on their approach, see the Q&A with Shapiro on these pages.  (This article first appeared on FastCompany.com.)

Oh and if you found this content useful, feel free to subscribe via email or RSS in the box at the top of this page.  Thanks.

How to Build Trust with Clients & Prospects via Marketing as Service

Posted on by Drew Neisser

The following is an interview with Ken Shapiro, who along with his partner Tom Livaccari, have grown The Livaccari Shapiro Wealth Management Group at UBS through the judicious use of Marketing as Service. This interview focuses on their event series called Media & Technology CEO Summits which I’ve attended many times and always found useful.  [This interview is also the basis of my upcoming post on FastCompany.com.]

DN: Tell me what you call your event series and how it came into being?
The program began when more than one client asked us during the 2008 downturn if it was better to fire employees before or after Thanksgiving. Having struggled with the question ourselves when we were entrepreneurs during the internet crash in 2000, we suggested that we facilitate a roundtable discussion on this topic with a few other CEOs facing the same dilemma. They found this so valuable that they suggested other CEOs that they thought could benefit from similar discussions in the future. As this grew to 50+ CEOs at an event, we decided calling it a roundtable was a misnomer so we renamed it the Media & Technology CEO Summit.

DN: Describe the basic structure of these events.
The CEO Summits consist of a networking breakfast and then an interactive panel discussion consisting of industry leaders such as those that built Gilt Group, DoubleClick, About.com, Take 2 Interactive, and, Omnicom, to name just a few examples.

DN: What were your original goals for this program?
Our primary goal was to provide a forum that would help our clients be more successful and to reinforce for them that we go far beyond the norm to help them achieve their goals.

DN: How did you decide on your niche and what distinct value are you trying to bring to your target?
In the 90s we were both entrepreneurs of internet and tech companies ourselves and saw that we had needs that wealth management professionals were not fulfilling in a way that was of value to us.

Principally, having much of our wealth tied up in the illiquid and risky stock of our own companies, we always wished we could find an advisor that would in essence partner with us to not only conservatively manage the money we had already made, but as importantly be an additional member of our extended team of core advisors to help us think through the myriad of issues we faced while trying to build and maximize the exit value of our companies. These included everything from sophisticated wealth planning, to having a sounding board to help us think through critical business and personal issues to selecting the right M & A advisor to ultimately help us sell our companies.

Because of our experience [as entrepreneurs] we realized that if this was a problem for us then it likely was for many others. We therefore narrowly focused our practice on entrepreneurs and executives building digital media, marketing and technology companies and architected and built every component of our practice to provide them the comprehensive advice that we were not able to find when we were in their shoes.

We were confident that our unique perspective and approach would enable us to be an uncommon partner to these individuals and enable us to provide such distinct and value-added advice that would separate us from our competitors.

DN: What do you think these events say about your practice?
These CEO Summits have been a great way for us to foster a sense of community amongst our clients and other leaders in these niches. Clients tell us that these Summits have helped them stimulate meaningful ideas, make valuable connections and in one case even initiate a conversation with a party that later acquired their company.

DN: Have you been able to meet prospects and ultimately gain new customers as a result of this program?
Because our clients derive so much value from our CEO Summits they often ask if they can invite CEO friends who would similarly benefit. This ends up being a great way for new prospective clients to be introduced to us and our way of thinking. Ultimately, people hire us because the trust us, like us and believe that having us by their side with our differentiated approach will help give them the highest probability to achieve their personal, family and professional goals.

These events are an excellent way for us to provide prospects a window into the way that we interact with clients, put their needs first and help them with a wide array of issues that are not commonly addressed by others in our field. From these events prospects often begin a dialogue with us, as their situation dictates, regarding whichever matter is most pressing to them and over time this often leads to them becoming a client as they gain comfort with us and our thought process.

DN: How do track down your speakers and persuade them to come?
Speakers include clients, friends and other notable industry leaders. Because our attendees are amongst the most important and dynamic leaders in their niches, we find that speakers welcome the opportunity to participate and engage in a dialogue with them.

DN: How hard is it to get your target to show up to these events?  Does it beat cold calling?
Because the content and the other participants in these events are so relevant to our clients’ and prospects’ lives we find they are eager to join us. This leads to these events being excellent icebreakers which enable people to experience first-hand our consultative and value-added approach.

DN: Seems like these events must be time consuming to put together, especially when you consider all the pre/post event follow up you do.  Is it worth the trouble?  And if so, why?
Though these events take a tremendous amount of time and effort to organize and run, we feel they differentiate us substantially from others and are well worth the effort.

DN: How have you been able to keep the hard-sell out of these programs?
We begin each day thinking about how we can be most helpful to those with whom we interact. Because of our problem-solving mentality we never think in terms of sales cycles. We know that as long as we put our clients’ needs first then over time they become our best sales force as they share with their friends the positive experience they have had.

What’s the Difference Between Google+ and Carmageddon?

Posted on by Drew Neisser

The northbound 405 freeway came to a standstill Sunday afternoon just before Seal Beach.  For the next twenty minutes I worried that Carmageddon was more than just clever name for a traffic jam and I would miss my flight back to New York.  Radio reports said otherwise.  In fact, it was just your run of the mill auto accident, a temporary glitch quickly forgotten.  Arriving at the terminal early, I couldn’t help but wonder if the contrasting hype versus reality of Carmageddon was an appropriate metaphor for Google+ (the new social networking service from Google that hopes to rival Facebook).

The Hype
Even if LA was not on your itinerary last weekend, chances are you heard about the feared mother of all traffic jams anticipated because of a temporary shut down of a 10-mile stretch of concrete connecting the City of Angels with the San Fernando Valley.  Every major news outlet covered the so-called Carmageddon, which also inspired a real rant by Stephen Colbert and a comically imagined one by Adolph Hitler.

Like Carmageddon, the stories about Google+ came at us fast and furiously especially in the tech arena.  Some believed it was a monumental affair.  Wired’s Ryan Singel offered high praise, “Google+ is smooth fast and intuitive – a product that feels far more akin to the revolution that was Gmail.” Stephan Shankland of CNET was even more effusive, noting, “Circles is the next biggest improvement, far and away over Facebook.”

Then last Thursday CEO Larry Page reported that Google+ had gained an eye-popping 10 million members in its first two weeks.  Page also noted, “we are seeing over 1 billion items shared and received in a single day.”  Explaining that Google+ was “still only in field trial with limited access as we scale the system,” Page implied that once unthrottled, extraordinary growth was simply inevitable.

The Reality
Fearing the worst, most Angelinos actually stayed put for a change, avoiding the 405 in unprecedented numbers.  Not only was there no Carmegeddon, traffic was so light that one intrepid driver zipped around town, reporting that it was the best conditions he’d ever seen!  More amazingly, the city’s construction crews finished up 18 hours ahead of schedule making this the biggest non-event since the premier of the infamous Ishtar.

While the reality of Google+ is far from certain, voices of caution are already emerging.   Blogger Robert Scoble told his minions that Google+ was for “geeks and early adopters” and not your mom. C-Net’s editor-at-large Rafe Needleman shared his reservations, “I like G+ but I’m finding setting up my network kind of slow going.” And David Berkowitz of 360i posted a yellow light on MediaPost.com, noting, “Google+ will hardly win over the masses overnight.”

In fact, Google+ is using a clever “invitation only” marketing ploy that piques curiosity, especially among social media practitioners like myself.  For these folks, trial is not an option but an expected mandate, one that also comes with a critic’s eye.  And from this critic’s perspective, so far Google+ is underwhelming, lacking the “the gang’s all here” reach of Facebook and the disarming simplicity of Twitter.

Now What?
For the mayor of LA and his constituents, the fact that Carmegeddon never happened was a triumph of perverse engineering.  Scaring people off the streets with weeks of apocalyptic predictions was brilliant, pretty much guaranteeing that the worst was not to come.  Leave it to Los Angeles to make headlines with a media mirage titled after an obscure video game.

As for Google+, its future is hardly certain despite smart marketing and early user adoption rates.   Undoubtedly new users try it out but only a few brave souls are prepared to forsake Facebook in its favor.  This lack of commitment reflects a growing sense of social media fatigue.  As one worn out user noted, “I’m already on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube.  Who has time for all this crap?”

Lots of other questions remain, the most fundamental being–is there a meaningful plus in Google+ that will propel the user experience well beyond Facebook’s?  So far, Circles (the primary organizing principle) is more of a roundabout than a great leap forward.  Hopefully Google has more pluses up its prolific sleeves. Otherwise G+ may go the way of Carmegeddon, a much-ballyhooed balloon of hapless hype.

Note: this article first appeared on MediaPost.com.