David Politis is the founder and CEO of BetterCloud, the leading provider of Google Apps extensions that create security and management. Follow David @DavePolitis.
Google+ arrived last summer armed and ready to compete with Facebook. Yet despite more than 100 million users, the network has failed to slow Facebook?s growth or diminish its market share.
Many have already dismissed Google+ as a failed venture, but it would be premature to write off the network as a social experiment gone awry. Just as Gmail was key to Google?s enterprise play, Google+ is fast becoming the enterprise social networking tool of choice for savvy office workers.
The consumerization of IT certainly plays a role in this. In fact, a Forrester study found that the market for enterprise social collaboration is projected to increase tenfold in the next four years as more traditional services like video conferencing decline. Tools that succeed in this new era will combine communication and collaboration services with social features in much the way G+ does.
This is why G+ truly is Google?s enterprise Trojan horse. As Microsoft Office 365 becomes a viable competitor to Google Apps, G+ is what separates the two cloud-based services. The following are some of the features that make G+ a great tool for social enterprise collaboration.
Circles
If you?re familiar with G+, you?re aware of the Circles feature, which allows users to easily segment followers into different groups. That?s a particularly powerful concept in enterprise because a company can create Circles for various departments, clients, partners, and more.
Circles compartmentalize relationships, help save time, and provide a company with a targeted approach to content sharing. By the way, Circles can be shared, so if you just hired a new sales exec, he or she can gain instant and personalized access to your client base.
In the IT department, admins can create custom organizational units and then add users to the appropriate units, depending on what a company wants a given user to have access to. To make it even more useful Google should consider adding the ability to sync organizational units with G+ Circles, which would save time and effort for admins and end users.
Hangouts
As a whole, Google Apps is cutting costs for enterprise IT. Hangouts further reduces those costs because it can be used for anything from an impromptu meeting with your satellite office to a customer demo.
Admins should consider eliminating pricey web conferencing services and implement a company-wide Hangout policy for web meetings. For this to happen on a large scale, Google should consider Hangouts integration with Google Voice and the ability to dial into a Hangout via a phone line, much like with traditional web conferencing services.
Google Docs
Google Docs is an amazing Google Apps feature. The tool not only provides word processing and editing capabilities, but allows you to share your work and collaborate in real-time with co-workers and other business colleagues.
This March, Google integrated Google Docs into Hangouts, making word processing truly social. Users can now update documents with co-workers who may be on the other side of the world, all while feeling like everyone is working in the same room.
Search Functions
The new Search Plus Your World feature added to Google?s search function has received its share of criticism. In reality, it has a lot to offer from a brand marketing perspective. With G+?s integration into Google Apps, employees were given the chance to create separate personal and work networks.
Circles may have helped separate work life from personal life, but G+ for employees actually lets workers brand their pages in the company?s image. It makes for great marketing. Every time an employee +1s or shares, it?s another impression for your business.
It would be great to see G+ give users the ability to switch back and forth between work and personal accounts from the same login. This would help speed user adoption, with professional users creating personal accounts and vice versa.
Organic Connections
As with any social network, G+ is a great way to organically build connections that can be meaningful for your career. Check out who your co-workers are following and add them to your Circles. This could lead to idea sharing, a new sale, or even a partnership. Plus, if you?re new to the company, you can quickly get the lay of the land by following important influencers in your company and industry.
That said, creating and maintaining Circles can be tedious. A nice addition by Google would be an opt-in auto-suggest service to populate and create Circles.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, franckreporter
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