I have already said that I love , and I had a post where I made a case why journalism students here at Lehigh and elsewhere need to jump in the fray now. But I wanted to sketch out some thoughts about why Lehigh University as a whole needs to be looking at GPlus.

The short version is that this tool is going to change education. And I think it’s here to stay. There will be some quoted sections from my journalism post, which I’ll put in block quotes so you can skip if you read the other ones.

As the new-kid-on-the-block challenger to Facebook, there are many questions out there about whether it’s worth it to learn it. I’m already on record about the fact that I think this thing is a game-changer, and I think it’s time for our Lehigh journalism, marketing, and PR students to get on the train now so they can be ahead of the curve. We don’t want to wait until someone tells us at a leadership or strategic communication seminar 2 years from now.

I’ve been an evangelist for as a journalistic tool since 2007 and first used it in my classes at Missouri in 2008. Back then it had a funny name and wasn’t instantly seen as useful. People thought it was silly or a waste of time. I had (and have) a great role model in Jen Reeves to keep pushing, and over time the journalism crowd came around.

I hear similar things about Gplus. “It’s a waste of time” or “Not ANOTHER social network!” or “Why do I need another Facebook?” or “I don’t understand it.”

Some of my rationale for journalism does apply to universities as well. The page feature, for example, is a great way to interact with alumni who might be using a different product than Facebook, so it’s a space you need to be in. And building those connections is a bit easier than it is on Facebook. When I was building my circles, for example, I discovered we had a Lehigh grad working at Google. That it can be used to drive traffic to your news and department pages also is a big one, and I’m already seeing evidence that it’s more effective than Facebook at this for my own sites (it is early, though). You can’t afford to note be in these spaces at the PR, communication, or department outreach level.

Hangouts in potential represent a great opportunity for the university to put its face forward. Chatting with professors, students, senior leadership, and so forth could be offered to newsmakers or alumni to help build that connection to the university. The interactive components are huge for alumni relations folks.

But there’s much more. As a teaching tool, Plus intrigues me. I’m already planning on holding Hangout office hours this fall for students, where they can get on and ask questions about class material. And because it’s multi-user, others can hang out in the lounge and listen. Sometimes I go over the same stuff with multiple students in multiple meetings; this could streamline that process.

Every student in my multimedia class will be required to sign up for GPlus, and I am planning on keeping a circle for each of my classes so that I have another way to communicate, collaborate, and interact with my students. I also have circles for my former students in case I have things such as job postings or articles of interest to share. This is my Classroom Without Walls on steroids; the learning won’t stop just because the semester ends.

The ability to share videos you can all watch at the same time is huge for me. I can initiate a Hangout with a student in my multimedia classes, watch one of the videos they make, and then go over it with them. Real time feedback similar to a paper conference.

But playing with Hangout now is important if the rumors are true that PowerPoint or OpenOffice integration is coming. You can have up to 10 people in a Hangout; imagine if we could hold webinars or research collaboration meetings online. If we get the ability to screencast slides or even shared Google Docs that we can work up while chatting, look out. But again, get the learning curve of the interface out of the way now so when these components come online you are ready.

Already I can see Plus having a bunch of advantages over Blackboard or the Moodle learning system we use here. About the only advantage those products have is the gradebook. Every other interactive tool those offer is inferior to what we have on Plus right now. Facebook has some great collaborative tools, but the privacy interface is so clunky that I rarely used the tools in classes for fear of being seen as infringing on their personal space. Circles changes everything. We’ll be using GPlus in my multimedia courses as perhaps the most essential course-management tool.

Finally, the university should look at Plus because there is more coming. A lot more. Google is looking to connect its myriad apps, products, and widgets with Plus. That means this thing is going to evolve a lot. I, in particular, am looking at Blogger integration, but that’s just one example. The staggering array of tools Google has already is great for education, but when folded into a social tool made for collaboration then they have much greater potential.

Silagh White and I are going to work to have a meeting on campus that goes over the basics and will have some networking for folks interested in using Plus here. More on that to come, but if you want to take part then please email me or leave something in the comments. And make sure to circle me on my profile.

And if you’re interested in the topic of Plus and education, I recommend taking a look at Brad King’s post on it his own classroom plans.

The early days of a new tech launch are always a test. Should we adopt it or not? Will it be around for enough time to justify the time spent learning and using it? If it dies, will we lose all of our data?

Many are having this same discussion about Google Plus right now. As the new-kid-on-the-block challenger to Facebook, there are many questions out there about whether it’s worth it to learn it. I’m already on record about the fact that I think this thing is a game-changer, and I think it’s time for our Lehigh journalism, marketing, and PR students to get on the train now so they can be ahead of the curve. We don’t want to wait until someone tells us at a leadership or strategic communication seminar 2 years from now.

I’m also making this argument for the university as a whole, and you can read it here. I do think GPlus is going to change the way we do education, but this post is devoted to journalism.

Before I start, I do want to say that Silagh White and I are going to work to have a meeting on campus that goes over the basics and will have some networking for folks interested in using Plus here. More on that to come, but if you want to take part then please email me or leave something in the comments. And make sure to circle me on my profile.

I’ve been an evangelist for as a journalistic tool since 2007 and first used it in my classes at Missouri in 2008. Back then it had a funny name and wasn’t instantly seen as useful. People thought it was silly or a waste of time. I had (and have) a great role model in Jen Reeves to keep pushing, and over time the journalism crowd came around.

I hear similar things about Gplus. “It’s a waste of time” or “Not ANOTHER social network!” or “Why do I need another Facebook?” or “I don’t understand it.”

The reason, young journalists, is because if the past five years have taught us anything it’s that you have to be your own experimenter. When I started out in the business, if I didn’t understand something there was an editor to walk me through it and teach me. Now that teaching editor has been laid off, furloughed or – gulp – YOU are that editor. You have to learn to play with new tools on your own and figure out how to adapt them to your job. Some of them – many of them – will die and be a waste of time. But the more tools you use, the more practice you get and the more versed you are in the concepts of social media. GPlus has a low learning curve for me because I’m immersed in social media tools. If you’re having trouble, it’s because you’re not playing enough.

The other thing is that the new journalist makes the future. You don’t sit around and wait for an editor to tell you that you need to be on Plus. You need to be the one changing the newsroom.

Already I see huge potential in journalism, such as:

• Plus will have a page feature for news organizations, similar to Facebook. This is a space you need to be in. By next year, newsrooms might want a journalist who can manage these pages on occasion. Will you be ready for this new job market reality? For my marketing/PR students, this is the most essential part of Plus that you need to be learning. Now.
• Hangouts - This multi-way web conferencing tool is going to change how we do news. Imagine if newsrooms could make reporters or editors available for a few minutes a day to take questions from random readers. Or what if reporters in the field could chat with editors and other staff? KOMU did what we think was the first-of-its-kind web cast on the air using GPlus. Huge kudos to KOMU, which is a leader in experimenting with new tech and journalism. We need more newsrooms to be imagining ways to use things like Hangout to interact with readers. The ability to share videos with those on the Hangoutcast is already huge. Lots of potential here.
• Circles - As I explained yesterday, to see what your readers are posting you have to mutually opt in. That means you have to figure out the language of Plus, to be engaging enough that people circle you, so that you benefit from the community “police scanner effect” similar to Twitter. Plus is an evolution – it’s not enough to be a brand anymore. You have to add value. This is a completely new social media paradigm, and the time to start learning what works is now. Don’t wait. And by the way, if you’re in marketing think about the implications of having to add value in order to get circled. Being a brand in a space isn’t enough anymore.
• Source building - Circling people in your community, much like finding them on Twitter, will be important. But the granular privacy options that allow for public/private conversations will be another way for reporters to cultivate sources.
• Link traffic - A couple of my blogs are already showing signs that GPlus is a great driver of traffic. If you can connect with people in the ways I talked about above, this will be a big opportunity. As with many social media products, building influence early matters.

Those are just a few ideas. We need journalists exploring this space now. We need young journalists doing this too so they can refresh our newsrooms (and some really original examples of what you’re doing just might land you that dream job). We’re past the point where just being on social media is enough for newsrooms. Can you talk intelligently about it conceptually and use it wisely? Does your use reflect that?

But that is my bottom line. This is gut check time for young journalists. If you aren’t relishing the opportunity to play with new tech now, you might not be cut out for this business because curiosity about tech tools, both current and future ones, is part of the job. Because of the nature of the classroom experience I can only pack in a fraction of the tools I know about, but I try to give them the essentials. What I can’t teach is curiosity. My students can’t afford to wait for me to show them the next big thing and explain it to them. I try to teach students to understand the concepts so that they can figure these things out themselves long after they’ve left Lehigh. When it works well, my upper-level classes become a conversation about new tools I’m seeing and new tools my students are using; we learn from each other.

But the time to start is now. Be curious or think hard about whether you really want to work in media. I’m not sure I can afford to be less blunt about this.

As I’ve played with Google+ more the past few days, I’ve gotten to know the interface a bit more and am seeing some possibilities. To recap, here’s the review I wrote and here’s a helpful post by Jen Reeves about getting started on G+.

As I said in my previous post, one of the more intriguing features is Circles, which gives you granular control of sharing. You can share with the public, with anyone in any of your circles, or with individual circles. At the same time, the only things you see are from people who have circled you.

So I find myself wondering whether G+ could solve the social media spam problem. You know the drill, those unwanted replies you get on Twitter or random friend or direct message requests on Facebook. On Twitter, for example, I can block someone and keep messages from getting through but I can’t do it until after the fact, and it doesn’t stop spammers from creating new accounts to send me replies.

The G+ interface solves this because it requires both people to circle one another for a message to get through. A user can send me a message either privately or to me in a circle on G+, but I don’t see it if I haven’t circled them back. The only reason I see spammers at all is I get followed by random people I don’t know and have never heard of. A quick profile scan tells me whether they’re worth following, but even if I just ignored new circles I’ve learned with social media that discovery through other peoples’ conversations is better than random follows.

Google gets the benefits of granular privacy controls. By making it opt-in on both ends, it helps you block out things and people you don’t want to see.

This has enormous implications for my journalism students. The ones who have been focused solely on branding themselves well and selling their links will have a lot harder time getting traction in an environment where it’s easier to ignore you. That means you need to make sure that you are building influence by adding real value to the conversation communities of which you want to be a part. That means being knowledgeable, interactive, and producing something original. Branding still matters, but it’s not everything in this kind of environment.

It also makes me think that marketing and PR folks may have to think about their G+ strategy differently. The usual way it works on Facebook or Twitter isn’t going to work on G+, not when blocking makes discovery harder.

It gets more intriguing when you consider that the ability to share with limited circles or even with individuals means that Google+ looms as a personal email killer down the line. The principle is the same: I don’t see messages unless the users have approved of one another. Obviously the fact that G+ will never be universally adopted means this won’t happen anytime soon, but there are possibilities of linking it to Gmail, perhaps, that allow you to approve messages from some email addresses and have them delivered to your Plus interface. It would take some thinking on Google’s end, but I see it as possible without killing the freedom of passing out an email address.

The email spam possibility is probably a pipe dream for now, but that’s one of the things I really like about G+. There is so much that can be connected to this skeleton.

I love way too much. I just hope it doesn’t go the way of .

I have been tooling around on Plus, Google’s latest foray into social, for a couple days now. Plus is being sold as a social network competitor to Facebook, and the comparison makes some sense (and it’s illustrated hilariously by xkcd). There are equivalents to status updates, commenting, Likes, and posting content that mirror Facebook. But there’s a lot more to Plus than that. It has some of the best features of Twitter in that you can do things publicly but also group yourselves into different types of tribes (more on that in a second). It also has a reblogging feature that mirrors some of what is good about Tumblr.

But the backbone of Plus is essentially a salvo at Facebook’s glaring weakness: privacy and control of how you share. Enter the organizing tool for Plus known as “Circles.” The best way to describe it is that it’s a way to take all the people you connect with and put them in buckets that serve as categories. Then when you want to do a status update, share a post, and so forth, you can pick the circles who see the message. Or you could just enter one user’s profile (or even an email address) and thus it’s viewable only to them. Essentially they have integrated email and your news feed into the same space. Read more