Being busy with different kinds of social media a lot, I come across a lot of people that still don’t understand why I do it. Why are you talking that much online, everyone can read it! Is nothing personal anymore?When you’re a social media user you’ll probably recognise these kind of questions and remarks.

Thanks to a book I’ve read, Connect! by Menno Lanting(Dutch), I now know why they’re responding that way.To say it as black and white as possible, it’s pure ignorance. They don’t know exactly what social media is and what to think of it, they’re used to keeping things private as much as they can and sharing only with close friends and relatives. How is this possible? To answer that question I’ll need to explain a few things first.

Image Credit: Duchessa (http://www.rgbstock.com/user/duchesssa)

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When using social media, you create an online identity. If you like it or not, this just happens. Most of the time online identity’s aren’t that much different from your offline ones. When sharing the right information and acting the same on social media as in real-life, you’ll create almost automatically a similar online identity.

My presence on social media is a good example of this I think. I share information about my hobbies, work and post and respond similar to what I do in real life. Not all followers will know that, but they’ll see you’re really being yourself and can make judgements from that and share interesting stuff with you. (more…)

You’ve probably heard from Google+ by now. If not, which is almost impossible, you probably want to read this post first. I’ve played with Google+ for the last five days and every time I open it up, I’m thinking: This would be cool as a business tool. Don’t you guys think so?

Google+ as a stand alone application

If Google could integrate Google+ in Google Apps it would be a killer suite. Your employees would not only be able to use Google Docs and Gmail but also every feature Google+ offers. Communication will be easier when using Google+ and using predefined circles will give someone the ability to send specific news or assignments to the right person.

Chatting and Hanging out

The chat feature in Google+ gives your employees a tool to communicate with each other for quick questions. With the Hangout  feature it’s easy to have a video conference with other branches of your company or flex workers. All they need to do is open a browser, log in to their apps environment and join the Hangout which is of course invite only! (more…)

Last week Google launched its’ long awaited social media project: Google+. I know I’m late with the post, but I need to clear this from my mind. I was one of the lucky guys to receive an invitation. Why? Well, the network has a few rough edges and therefore it’s not yet possible to invite others.

Google+ is different compared to other social media around the web. It does a few things in a new and better way. Privacy is a good example of this. It’s the user that’s in control, you can control who sees what!

Google+ consists of different components. You should watch the YouTube videos on the Google+ Project, it’ll make more sense after watching them! Check them out here. (more…)

There’s been a lot of fuss over the last few weeks about Facebook conquering Google when looking at search. Apparently people are searching more and more through Facebook’s search every day at the cost of Google’s search engine. What is all this fuss about? I really don’t know.

Searching with Facebook

Yeah, Facebook has a really nice search engine to find other persons, cool pages, interests, groups and lots more. So far so good! But that’s it. Try to search for tutorials and other interesting searches you do in a real search engine and you’ll only find a lot of interests and pages with links on them or posts. So you still need to do some extra clicks to get to the source articles which is the bottle neck for Facebook search in my opinion. (more…)