The bad news? Pretty much everything else brands have come to expect from social platforms from a management perspective is missing.

Vanity URLS?

Nope. This isn’t a deal-breaker. But, ya know, it’s something brands like to have.

Multi-user management?

Nope. This one is especially odd. Right now I have a brand page connected to my personal Google login…that’s definitely not idea for any company. With Facebook you can make multiple people admins so that if one leaves, there’s always someone else who can help carry the torch.

Third party publishing tools?

Nope. I recently talked about Social Media Management Systems (SMMS), and how they’re helpful in letting companies manage multiple platforms with multiple users.  Google+ is not integrated with any of the vendors currently, so your only option is to manually publish content from the one person who is synced with the account.

Metrics or insights or analytics?

Nope. What do brands love? NUMBERS. Not going to find them here. You can see the publicly available info like members in your circles, and you can use your own url shortening/tracking tool to manage clicks. Otherwise Google hasn’t come forward with a native integration into something like say…Google Analytics.

Now, I’m sure that Google will address these things in time, but given how competitive the social space is for brands we’ve all had to clamor and will likely have to use duct-tape solutions until G+ cleans things up.

And, to ensure that I’m not just presenting the glass half-empty perspective, there are some cool features that brands can play with, including:

Circles

If you’re like NVIDIA, you have very different audiences for your brands. With circles people can self-identify and place themselves into buckets based on interest. Then you can publish just to the relevant circles. This may negate the need for multiple brand pages. Wonder how folks will handle regional/language needs?

Hangouts

Video chatting is cool. Hangouts let you “Connect directly with your community via live video chats that can put you face to face with up to 9 people at once.” (I’m trying to remain glass half-full still, so I won’t make a snarky comment about only being to chat with 9 people at a time…)

Google+ Direct Connect

This is a beta feature that hasn’t been fully fleshed out and isn’t available for all pages, but it’s described as a way to let “you quickly navigate to a Google+ page (and even add that page to your circles) when using Google Search.”

Have you launched a G+ brand page? How are you making the most of the new platform? How will you handle content between your different SM platforms?

Here are a few brands that are already active:

Dell

AT&T

Travel Channel

——–

Fans are NVIDIA’s life blood. They’re why we come into work. They’re why we innovate amazing products. And they’re why we put on events like last month’s GeForce LAN 6 on the USS Hornet aircraft carrier.

It’s vital for us to know what fans are saying – so we can understand how we’re doing and integrate feedback into our products.

Social media provides a great way for us to listen to what’s getting said.

Enter the Social Media Command Center:

This is our official social media-monitoring hub, and how we stay plugged into the social web. It also serves as a training center to help NVIDIAns participate in social conversations, using apps like TweetDeck and Spredfast.

It also happens to be where I get to work every day, keeping an eye on fans’ comments. I take all their feedback and deliver it to the right people here, whether the comments are good, bad or just for fun.

The command center boasts eight 22-inch Samsung monitors on a custom wall-mount, powered by two Quadro NVS 450 professional graphics cards. The wall of monitors makes for an impressive display that attracts lots of visitors, including our top execs.  We use watt-stoppers to conserve energy use in the Social Media Command Center when it’s not in use.

Whenever we launch a new driver or product, I stay posted at my station to monitor social media traffic, as do others in the customer care and driver teams. When fans have issues, we identify NVIDIA employees who are best suited to help, and mobilize to resolve these issues as quickly as possible. When fans indicate that they like certain features, we try to focus on those in future releases.

The Social Media Command Center allows NVIDIA to  address fan feedback quickly. While we may not be able to answer each tweet or forum post directly, fans should know that we’re reading all your comments and we definitely care.

If you want to join the conversation with NVIDIA here are some resources to help:

• For technical issues visit nvidia.com/page/support.html
• To become a member of one of our community sites on Facebook or to talk to us on Twitter, check out our “find us online” page. It’s a directory of NVIDIA profiles across product families and regional accounts.
• To join our forums and  talk to other NVIDIA fans, visit forums.nvidia.com

One thing I’ve learned from hearing countless vendor pitches from companies proposing to solve any and all of my social needs: no solution is perfect.

When looking for an SMMS, please keep that in mind.  Every vendor has strenghts and weaknesses, and they’re all trying to prove the features you need right now.  Realistically, the space is changing so quickly, it’s difficult to say which vendor is at the top of the pile because the landscape is constantly evolving. The best you can do is understand your needs explicitly and then see if there’s a tool out there that might help.

Here are some tips I’d recommend to others who might be exploring SMMS options for their brands:

• Think realistically about the personalities of your users.   Ultimately, adoption of an SMMS is key to getting value. So, if the tool is too complicated for the people you want to use it, then it doesn’t really matter how feature rich it is.  We learned this the hard way. It might be better to take a simpler tool with slightly reduced functionality, if your users aren’t necessarily focused on SM.

• Understand what kind of load the tool is built to handle. If you have hundreds of accounts with hundreds of users, does the SMMS’s system have the capacity to still process functions quickly? Drill them on this one, and ask for similar client use-cases.

• Map out exactly what your workflow will be for publishing content, acquiring content from multiple sources, monitoring content after it goes live and responding to content.  Unfortunately, a lot of these tools don’t give you good test trials so you can’t really find out some of this until you’re fully spun up.   It’s important to see if the SMMS you pick will fit in with your existing workflow, or at least offer a better alternative to what you’re already doing.

• Think about what functionality you like on the social platforms you use, and ask if those are mirrored through the SMMS. For example – you can’t tag another page in a status update using an SMMS, from what I understand none of the tools offers this, but it’s a good idea to start a list of that kind of functionality so you can set expectations internally on when you might have to veer away from the SMMS. Another scenario we ran into was with YouTube. While you can schedule videos to go live at a certain time using NVIDIA’s vendor, we couldn’t access the embed code early – we need that embed c ode for blog posts that we schedule to go up at specific times, so we discovered that although there was YT uploading functionality, it didn’t solve our problem.

• As with all these new services, try to find some kind of guarantee that once you’re through the door, your will have a service rep on hand to help with training and support.  As enterprise users, we have insights that the people making the tool don’t – so our feedback should be integrated and timelines/roadmaps should be flexible to accommodate that feedback. Again, our vendor started out very rusty on this but they’ve improved over the last couple of months.

• Know that none of these vendors is perfect, and no matter what you’ll have to do a little bit of shoehorning to make the solution work for you.  Just make sure you go to the vendors with a clear idea of what you want to achieve and then see if their proposal fits that.

Happy shopping

• Mashable delivered the easiest to understand recap of all the news: http://mashable.com/2011/09/22/facebook-changes-roundup/
• AdAge did a good job explaining the potential impact brands: http://adage.com/article/digital/brands-facebook-page-coming/229990/
• Facebook blogged about their own news. Straight from the horse’s mouth: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=10150289612087131
• Another Facebook blog post, this one more focused on the changes to app, and open graph features within Timeline: http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/563/
• TechCrunch tells you how to enable timeline early (only for developers…and crazy impatient people): http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/22/how-to-enable-facebook-timeline/

Facebook is doing huge things with an even more huge user-base. (They’ve hit 800 million users)  Of course there will be friction when this all rolls out, but Facebook has proven it can adapt and evolved based on user feedback. That means that we shouldn’t feel scared to voice our opinons, positive or negative  – although I’ve seen a lot of people complaining about the people complaining – because if enough people feel the same way, Facebook will be able to integrate changes that make the experience better for everyone.

So, what do you think so far?

Photo Credit, Buzz factory

I went to college to become an electrical engineer at UCSD. My logic was that my father and sister were both EE grads, and both seemed to have a good experience finding work. Unfortunately, after one year of trying that on for size, I realized EE and I were not to be (to know me is to understand why it’s pretty funny I even considered becoming an engineer). And so began my divergence from a path I thought would be so cut and clear: EE degree in 4 years, EE job in a big tech company, standard 9-5, steady income, many free company/conference t-shirts.

Instead I graduated with a degree in management science (UCSD’s BSc for econ), and after a short stint in executive compensation consulting, landed my first PR job thanks to the advice of a college friend. She was working at a small boutique PR firm called Krause Taylor Associates (KTA).  At KTA I learned that I had a passion for technology, and for translating companies’ stories into something compelling to an audience.  It was amazing, doing something I was good at and actually enjoyed.  It didn’t hurt that I also had the chance to work with two of the most amazing women in PR, Betty Taylor and Barbara Krause.

From KTA, I joined Voce Communications where I met some of the most fiery characters in valley PR. And, fatefully had my first introduction to social media, from the original social media guerilla – Mike Manuel.  When I first learned about the concepts of social media I knew I had to get “in.” The team that was doing social media seemed so cool, and what they were doing so fun. So, after bothering, stalking, hounding, they finally let me in on my first social media account with Sony Computer Entertainment America.  It was like opening the flood gates, and soon I transitioned completely away from PR to full-time social media with a variety of interesting companies.

A few years later, I was given the ultimate opportunity: to become NVIDIA’s first social media manager and strategist. To build something from scratch.

The reason I love social media, is it hits on all my favorite things: Metrics, messaging, strategizing, translating news to suit an audience and even elements of PR.  People joke and ask me if I just play on Facebook everyday. Sure, being on Facebook is part of it. But there’s a whole different element of complexity involved with social media, when you’re doing it at the enterprise level.  It’s not just a matter of publishing a status update. It’s about thinking what to say, when to say it, who to say it to, where to say it, who to partner with and how to know if what you said made a difference…

At first people told me going into social media was a gamble – which scared me, because I’m extremely risk averse – but I couldn’t help being drawn to it. I followed my gut and stuck with social media and it’s been one of the best decisions of my life.

Now, I watch the news as political anchors talk about the tweet that this congressman published, or that blog post from the Whitehouse. I see commercials for major multinational brands, that end with “Find us on Facebook.”  Even the wax paper that wraps my sandwiches at lunch time have Facebook and Twitter usernames for the high-end bread company.  Social media is everywhere, used by almost everyone (did you know that over 60 year olds are one of the faster demographics adopting social media?). Social media is constantly evolving, so while the tools may change the need for a means of communication that is truly egalitarian, that levels the playing field, and puts the power in the hands of the people, will not soon go away.

It’s so exciting to be in this field, watching it evolve and grow from the ground up. I can’t think of a job I’d rather do, and I can’t tell you how lucky I feel to be a part of it.

You can watch the full keynote below, but I was even more interested in this article by Read/Write Web’s Scot M. Fulton III: Analysis: Are We Ready to Become Friends With Things?

It’s a great article that explores the potential ways we can develop online relationships with physical world things. Some really cool, some potentially frightening. And, ultimately asks the question of whether trying to take advantage of all this social connectivity will ultimately backfire as consumers get oversaturated with enterprise involvement.

“…at what point will this leveraging of social media for the purposes of data mining and customer engagement drive back the social media revolution, and force millions upon millions of new users to dial down the volume? Knowing that they could trigger a tidal wave at any moment, will people be more careful about what they share, or will they simply share less? And if they do, will all the pop dispensers and cash registers and Wi-Fi routers and automobiles of the world, notice or care? Or will they just talk amongst themselves?”

As marketers we know, more or less what we’re saying about ourselves, but we’re less attuned to what others are saying about us.  With social media, however, it’s more and more important to monitor what kind of feedback we’re getting in order to better tailor our social media endeavors. It’s also like unsolicited focus group feedback. Why wouldn’t you want to hear what people are saying?

The challenge is then, how to gather all that monitoring data and make useful conclusions.  I’ll get to this in a later blog post (or ten), because it’s really a deep discussion.

What I really wanted to highlight was a simple tactic that has had suprisingly positive results at NVIDIA, and might work at your company too.

To raise awareness for Twitter and conversations about NVIDIA on Twitter, I set up a huge big screen TV in a high traffic location (cough:: near the bathrom:: cough), connected it to a laptop, and fired up TweetDeck.  I set up different relevant searches within Tweetdeck’s columns, and let the good times roll.  I can’t tell you how much attention it has garnered. I have people asking questions, surprised at the volume and types of conversations there are about us on Twitter. In fact, I’ve heard rumblings of groups wanted to replicate the Twitter TV model in their buildings.  Execs have asked me to set up similar rigs in their workspaces so they can keep an eye on things…

It’s been a great low cost (used recycled hardware) way to educate and raise awareness. It’s like my own personal Discovery Museum exhibit. Check it out:

NVIDIA+TV+Twitter

Key highlights:

• 65% of all U.S. adults now use social-networking sites, up from 61% a year ago and just 5% in 2005
• Most growth occurred in the over 30 age range (and primarily seniors, within that group)
• People 18 and 29 years old remain the overall biggest group tapping social networks today, accounting for 83% of the total
• On a typical day, 43% of U.S. adults said they visit sites like Facebook and Twitter, up from 38% a year ago

Now we just need the more brand-centric information to tell us how much of the time they’re online is spent looking at company information/pages/profiles.

More info, here.