Are You Really Open For Business?
Oh, the madness! If you’ve been living under ground, chances are you might not have heard about Google Buzz. To sum it up in one sentence, “A Friendfeed like platform integrated into Gmail” pretty much takes the cake. Mashable has been going crazy, tech blogs have been going crazy, and even I did a live show about it (which I forgot to record by the way).
You see, what Google is aiming for is a far more open online community. Sure, you can still keep things private but the powers at be and all these social media platforms, want you to share everything and hold back no details. Of course you always want to use common sense, but you get the idea. To reach the goal of becoming a larger and more robust social platform, it’s very hard if much of the community is private. Social media just doesn’t work that way…
It’s meant to be open and to be able to create just an unlimited amount of “open” connections from one person to the next, without all these privacy walls that stand in the way. When Facebook changed their privacy settings, the community freaked. People thought it was the end of Facebook and that they’d have to flock elsewhere. Facebook did it because they understood that to grow on an even larger scale, private was not the way to do it. They had to become more open and basically switch things around a little bit.
After watching all these big, more open changes being made, it still makes me wonder why so many individuals who are marketing their business and building a brand online, still choose to keep private. By all means keep your personal accounts private but if you’re a business or have a business and you want to be private, your customers and potential customers will hide behind walls too and not make the effort to connect.
Social media is all about being open. It’s the basis of every platform and network out there. Your customers want to know what you’re doing and what you’re up to. Your friends want to know what you’re doing later, etc. By making and keeping things private, your making it less and less convenient for others to get in contact with you. And whenever something is less convenient and harder for the end user, they’ll move on.
How do you feel about this massive shift towards a more open community and are you still private?
