On Google+, Dialogue, and Shared Learning

Earlier this year, I concluded that Google+ is a shared interest graph - a place to "share my interests with those who share my interests."
Now, I'll go even further and say that Google+ is fast becoming the place I go for shared learning.

In using Google+ for shared learning over the past several months, I'd noticed that there are certain conversations with certain individuals that are more conducive to shared learning than others. Over that time, I'd had a gut sense for that difference, but it wasn't until just the other day that I learned a new term to actually describe it.

On David Bohm's Dialogue  

Just last week, while listening to Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline, I learned of a process for creating shared learning, a technique from quantum physicist, David Bohm; a technique called "dialogue."

Bohm had a very specific understanding of dialogue that he used as a way to minimize the "incoherence" of the human thought processes. At its root is the belief that the human mind harbors an enormous number of biases that distort our ability to comprehend reality. Through the process of exposing these biases, or assumptions about reality, Bohm felt we stood a better chance of getting to the truth of a given situation. This is his notion of dialogue.

Bohm saw the greatest potential for dialogue in the coming together of many minds. In other words, he saw dialogue as a process for shared learning.

This is where I started to see the connection between the more useful learning I was having on Google+, and Bohm's process for exposing biases and assumptions as a way to get closer to the truth. Here, it is worth quoting Bohm:

The word "dialogue" derives from two roots: "dia" which means "through" and "logos" which means "the word", or more particularly, "the meaning of the word." The image it gives is of a river of meaning flowing around and through the participants.  

And:

Dialogue is not discussion, a word that shares its root meaning with "percussion" and "concussion," both of which involve breaking things up. Nor is it debate. These forms of conversation contain an implicit tendency to point toward a goal, to hammer out an agreement, to try to solve a problem or have one's opinion prevail.

A Culture of Shared Learning

Debate, and discussion as Bohm describes it above, both have their place, but I have found that personally I learn more when someone is not trying to cram some particular point of view down my throat. I find that I am personally more open to exploring alternative understandings and to uncovering the biases I bring to a problem, when I am working with others who are willing to do the same. 

This is part of what I found most appealing about what Bohm is describing: a shared commitment to helping one another uncover our biases and assumptions, as a way to get to get closer to the truth of the matter at hand. 

A Platform for Shared Learning

I have been pleasantly surprised at just how frequently I find that kind of shared learning on Google+. True, I have been deliberate in choosing the kinds of people I want in my circles, and that has no doubt shaped my experience of the culture on Google+. 

Google+ is far from perfect. There are lots of little issues, such as the inability to apply Google's powerful search capabilities to post comments and the lack of support for group-functionality. There is still much to be done, and yet, I believe we are seeing something important emerge in this network.

Interest sharing and shared learning on Google+ are not domain-specific. Sure, there is a big base of technology buffs, but I've also found lots of people interested in sustainability and social change, in reforming business, in marketing, and a variety of other interests. In this sense, Google+ is a generic, domain-neutral platform for shared learning, one that will only get more powerful as the company expands its work on the Knowledge Graph.

My Learning

The point of this piece is not that Google+ is superior to other social networks, but simply to explain why I am choosing to focus so much more of my time on it, relative to those other places for connecting with people.

I do believe the tool itself is superior, but more than that, I also find the culture superior - for shared learning.

There is a certain joy to learning that I find everyday on Google+, and a certain culture of civility in the way people go about doing that learning with one another. It wasn't until learning of Bohm's notion of discourse that I had a way to describe it. I like his image of "a river of meaning flowing around and through the participants."

I've come to conclude that, while there are many reasons I'm on Google+, there is nothing more important than finding my group of fellow learners, people interested in similar topics, and willing to help one another uncover our respective blindspots.

I've also come to the conclusion that, when it comes to comments and conversation on my pages, I want to build a "culture of discourse" - a place of openness, where people are eager to teach and learn. I don't want people using posts as a way to to show how right or how smart they are - that simply shuts down the learning and exploration of others.

Ensuring is kind of culture takes work. It takes facilitation, and that's something I plan to take a more active stance on - at least on my own posts and pages.

This is my commitment to shared learning - my commitment to discourse. 

How to Use Google+ and GMail to Track Who and What You Care About

Google recently made some changes so that you can now subscribe to notifications from specific Google+ circles and receive those notifications as messages in GMail. Many people responded to this news with a yawn, and some irritation, but in this post I want to show you how these changes turn Google+ into a powerhouse for tracking what the people you care about are saying about the topics you care about. 

Google+ is a great way to share interests with those who share our interests, but there are times when our interests don't overlap. We need a better way to filter our circles for just the topics we care most about, and while it's still rudimentary and requires some work to set up, GMail integration with Google+ offers a surprisingly useful path to getting us there.

This path is not exactly for everyone. To do it, you're going to need to connect some of your Google+ circles with GMail,  stop using the Google+ notification box, and start using GMail instead. 

Weaning Myself from the Red Box

I have personally made the jump so that I'm now using GMail to handle all my Google+ notifications. That's right; my little red Google+ notification square is now permanently pegged at 99+ and my GMail account is flooded with Google+ notifications. But it actually is working quite well in spite of all that. 

Before getting into some of the benefits of this approach, I'm going to do what most writers avoid at all costs: I'm going to send you to another website, trusting that you'll come back here to finish this post. Mark Traphagen has an excellent piece that explains how to set yourself up so that Google+ posts feed into your GMail. 

Go ahead, read it. I'll wait... 

Done? Good. Welcome back. 

Now remember - depending on how aggressive you are with setting your circle subscriptions, you stand a good chance of pegging your box at 99+, just like I did. My advice is to start small and build up as you gain more confidence and experience using what I'm talking about. This path is not for everyone, but while what I describe here may look a little geeky and hard, it's not nearly as bad as it sounds once you dive into it and start playing around yourself. 

Filter by Your Google+ Circles:

At this point, I'm going to assume that you have some circles set up so that they are now sending notifications as email messages from Google+ into GMail. Everything you're reading below is about how to process those messages within GMail, and I'm assuming that your read what Mark wrote in the above post about how to set up up the notifications in Google+ and set up basic filters in GMail. 

In all of the various filters I illustrate below, make sure use Mark's tip and use (Google+) in the "From" field of the search drop-down. See the "From" field in the image below:

From there, let's say that, like me, you're actually crazy enough to subscribe to more than one of your Google+ circles, and that you now want to set up a filter to route notifications from one Google+ circle into a particular folder and notifications from another circle into a different folder. You will need to set up a different filter for each circle you want to do this for. 

In the above image, I have a Google+ circle called "Tier 1," and so to filter my incoming messages and grab just the notifications from that circle, I type (circle:"Tier 1") in the "Has the words" field in the GMail search drop-down. Note that there is no space after the colon, you need the parenthese, and your circle name needs to be in quotes. I've highlighted this field in the above image so that you can see the query in place.  

Once I do that and then create a filter to route all those Tier 1 circle messages to a GMail folder called "Tier 1," I've essentially just replicated what I see in Google+ when I click on the stream for that Tier 1 circle. 

Why would I do that you ask? Yep. It's way more work that simply looking at those posts on Google+, and it's actually a better reading experience there too. So, again, why would I want to do this? Well, because of what I'm about to show you next.

Filter by Topic:

Here's where it gets interesting because now we're going to start filtering by topics, so that only those posts from people in my Tier 1 circle that match certain words I care about are going to show up. 

Let's say I'm interested in any posts from people in my Tier 1 circle that mention the words: engagement, engage, corporation, firm, social, innovation, influence, soul, leadership, technology, networks, emergent,  identity, mobile. authorship or creativity. To do that, I would simply type the following into the "Has the words" field in the search box:

(circle:"Tier 1") AND (engagement OR engage OR corporation OR firm OR social OR innovation OR influence OR soul OR leadership OR technology OR networks OR emergent OR identity OR mobile OR authorship OR creative)

I can also create another folder for all of the posts from my Tier 1 folks that don't match those topics, and I do that by simply adding a "-" in front of my list of topics:

(circle:"Tier 1") AND -(engagement OR engage OR corporation OR firm OR social OR innovation OR influence OR soul OR leadership OR technology OR networks OR emergent OR identity OR mobile OR authorship OR creative))

It looks like this in the search box:

If you need some help narrowing the flow of posts coming in from Google+, here's a handy guide to Boolean operators to for filtering messages in GMail.

The result of these two filters is that I now have two folders for my Tier 1 circle; one that includes all topics I'm interested in (which I check all the time), and one which does not (which I check less frequently). Here's what it looks like once messages start dropping into the folder. Yep, pretty much like GMail: 

It's only been a week or so since I've been using this trick, so the jury is still out. So far though, I have to say that I am finding way more interesting stuff on Google+ and with way less work. 

Don't Clutter Your Inbox

If you do go this route and begin using GMail as your filter notification, guess what is going to happen? Yep, you're going to get a lot of email, and you need to make sure it doesn't overwhelm your inbox. To ensure that doesn't happen, you really need to set your filters so that these incoming messages from Google+ skip your inbox. So when you're setting up your filter, after you set your search parameters and click "Create filter with this search" you'll get a second screen where you'll want to use the following settings:

Avoid Stress: Learn to Delete

Even if you are successful in keeping your inbox clean, you're still going to see a ton of messages in whatever folders you do set up to receive your Google+ notifications. You'll be surprised at how quickly they accumulate. 

Here's the thing: you're going to have to be comfortable with deleting them. That's something you don't do today within Google+. When you miss someone's post on Google+, it simply drifts slowly down your feed, never making you feel bad for not doing something with it, because you never even knew was there in the first place. 

Now, you're going to see an actual message. And if you're like me, not reading it is going to bother you at first. Maybe a little. Maybe a lot. It just depends on who you are. So here's the deal: you're not going to be able to read everything; that means you're going to have to get used to deleting people's posts. 

Let me repeat that: you're going to need to get used to deleting people's posts. 

Sometimes, you're going to have to nuke hundreds of these new messages. If you don't, you're going to drive yourself crazy, and this whole process just won't work. If it helps, just remember that these are posts you would have never seen in your old way of doing things on Google+. So with that in mind, bravely "select all" from the top-left corner of GMail, and hit the delete button. If you go for some time without deleting, and you've got more messages than fit on the screen, just "select all" and above your messages you'll see an option to delete all the messages in that folder:

Here's what you do - you click the select all X conversations, even if there are 1,304 of them. Then...you delete them all and go grab a coffee or something to make you feel better. Don't worry, there will be plenty more soon enough. You can read those ones. 

Quick Conclusion

The key in all this, of course, is getting the right set of circles and the right set of topics that you want to follow. I can tell you firsthand that it's an iterative process. I'm tweaking the topics in my filters by doing spot checks on posts I filtered out to see what new words I should add. I'm even thinking about yanking a few words that simply result in too much noise. 

This process is also making me way more careful about who I put in the circles to which I now subscribe. Even with all this filtering, subscribing to someone on Google+ in this way is a big deal because you end up seeing way more of what they share. 

All in all, it's still early in my experience with this new setup, but I have to say that I'm really happy with it. It is dramatically changing my experience on Google+. My guess is that Google will keep the little red notification square as a way for more casual users to use Google+, but this GMail integration is already proving to be a useful power tool for those who want to take their use of the network to the next level. 

If you go this route, and figure out some additional tips and tricks, please share them here. I'd love to hear them. 

Google's Competitive Response to Amazon: We're Not a Merchant

Heads up, online retailers. Google doesn't really like the idea that 30% of online shoppers start their product search at Amazon.com. That's a threat to some of the most lucrative parts of their online ad business. So they're taking action, and it's going to send some big waves through the online world. 

If I were an online retailer, or even a local retail business, I would be very focused on understanding exactly what Google is doing here.

Google Shopping Going Commercial

If you want an in-depth look at what's happening, then check out this video by Jon Venverloh, head of Shopping Platforms at Google (after you finish reading this article, of course). 

If you don't have time to watch it all, here are my key take-aways: 

Damming the Amazon:

Amazon is the competitive threat behind this evolution in Google's shopping experience. Google is clearly differentiating itself from Amazon, positioning itself as not a retailer but a connector and source of traffic for other merchants. 

This is a difficult competitive path for Google. Shoppers want simple, safe paths to buying stuff on the web. When you rely on third parties for fulfillment, that complicates things. 

In the end though, I believe this will be a winning strategy for Google. Why? Because integrating this new shopping experience with mobile will give Google a spot at the table with the much larger market for real world physical purchases. 

I also believe that as Google continues to invest in the Knowledge Graph, and semantic search more generally, the way we describe products and services will become increasingly standardized. As that happens, information decentralizes out of Amazon and shifts some power back to smaller merchants, with Google bridging the way. 

Commercializing Google Shopping:

Google Shopping used to be a confusing experience, by Google's own admission. There were ads mixed with free listings on the Shopping site and it was unclear how these results fit with Google's standard search results. 

Well, go to the Shopping site today, run a search for tents and you'll now get something like these much cleaner results: 

These entries are called "product listings." Let's take the "MSR Hubba Hubba Tent" as an example of what happens when you click through to an individual product listing: 

Scroll down a bit, and you'll see the "product listing ads," along with a very handy map showing which merchants claim to actually have that product in stock. 

Remember what I was saying about bridging into real world, physical commerce? Think about being out doing errands and you remember you need to buy a certain such-and-such before you head home. Pull up Google Shopping, type in your product ... and boom, there you go. No need for next-day shipping from Amazon. Oh, and you also help support businesses in your local community. Nice. 

Big Dollar Signs for Local

These product listing ads are, of course, paid for by merchants. When this transition to the new shopping service is complete in October, that's all you will see on Google Shopping - paid for product listings. 

From Google's perspective, this is going to be a very lucrative extension to their search business, with potentially significant implications for the company's overall revenues. Product listing  ads currently have a click-through rate that is twice as high as ad-word text ads. With those kinds of margins, you can bet that Google will be pouring a lot of energy and investment into these offerings to merchants and consumers. 

Suddenly all those purchases of travel information providers like Zagats and Frommer's makes a lot more sense now, as does the integration and out-and-out prominence of Places in Google+. Local is going to be an absolutely huge business opportunity for Google as they complete this transition from simple ads to transaction facilitation. 

The Hard Parts

Don't expect this transformation of e-commerce to happen overnight though. I once ran a very high-volume online car buying service for Microsoft. The service was called CarPoint, and we served seven million customers every month at our peak. There were two really hard parts about running that service. Do you want to know what they were? 

The first difficulty in running CarPoint was standardizing all of the automotive specifications that we got from the manufacturers and from third-party content providers like Kelley Blue Book, so that customer could easily compare a Honda Accord to a Toyota Corolla. I can't tell you how hard it was getting all that heterogenous data wrangled so that it was useful for our customers, and that was for just one product category: automotive. Google will have way, way more categories to wrangle. This is an area where Amazon has a huge base of experience from which to draw. 

The second difficulty in running CarPoint was that we were dependent upon local car dealers to complete the actual purchase transaction. When they did a good job, our customers were happy. When they did a bad job, our customers were not. We would often have to intercede on customers' behalves, and to be honest, the results depended 100% on how much leverage we had with that particular dealer; in other words on how much business we were sending their way. 

On that measure, I doubt any other company in the world has the kind of ability to drive traffic that Google does, so the company should have some decent leverage to ensure good merchant behavior, and that is no doubt part of the rationale for Google's Trusted Stores program as well. 

Big Battle Ahead for E-Commerce

I believe we are about to witness a battle between Amazon and Google that will dwarf anything we are currently seeing between Google and Apple, Facebook or Microsoft. Amazon represents a threat to Google's core business, which is search. Facebook does as well, but in not nearly as direct a fashion as do those 30% of online shoppers who start their product searches at Amazon. You can bet Google will work like crazy to drop that number down to single digits as soon as possible.

If I were a betting man, I'd put my bet on Google over the long-haul. It will take time, and it's anything but a done deal. With that said, if I were running a local retail store right now, I would be all over this thing like salsa on a hot tamale, trying to figure how to use Google's new direction to my fullest advantage.  

Comment Hashtags Now Searchable in Google+

Did you know that you can now place a hashtag in a comment on a Google+ post to make that post discoverable via a search for that hashtag? 

That's cool. Because now you can easily tag posts to make them more discoverable for yourself and for others. That means, for example, that I can tag one of your posts with a hashtag I think would make it easier to find, but that you hadn't thought of. 

Let's say, for example, that I was interested in linking together a series of posts comparing WordPress to Blogger. I might go in and add a #bloggervswordpress hashtag in one of my comments on your post, just as I did to this post by Mark Traphagen: 

Then, when I do a search on that hashtag, I see the following results, with Mark's post showing up second from the top. 

Not bad for a simple hashtag in a comment.

Thanks to Drew Sowersby, way, for making me aware of this comment hashtag functionality. He and Andrew Carpenter sound like they're up to something in terms of taking full advantage of this feature and I'm looking forward to finding out more from them on this later. It also looks like Ronnie Bincer discovered this about a month ago, but it really hasn't gotten the coverage it deserves. 

I see the potential for lots of collaborative curation via this feature. There's also the potential for a lot of spam, so I'm betting Google will have to keep a close eye on it. I'm really excited about the potential here. What ideas do you see for taking advantage of this (in a non-spammy way)? 

"It's harder to be kind than clever."

Some of you may have already heard the story about Brandon Cook, whose ailing grandmother's request for Panera clam chowder triggered a kind act from the manager of the local Panera store - and an avalanche of social media attention.

It's a great story, both because of the story itself and the emotions it triggers within me, but also, as Fast Company co-founder, Bill Taylor points out on the Harvard Business Review, because of the response it triggered in so many people.

We long for this kind of humanity in our interactions, not just with companies, but across the board. This is an aspect of what I was trying to get at in my "soulful company" TED talk, and it is so, so very important.