One of the very first things Maeve, our MD here, said to me when I joined the company was “It’s all about percentages. You can’t tell anything about anything until you know the percentages.” That’s been stellar advice in all sorts of ways. It’s true, of course, that you can mainuplate percentages to show more or less what you want, but that’s statistics, and I refer you to Mr. Disraeli on the subject.

So, yesterday was the occasion of the eircom all-Ireland eGovernment Symposium, and we had some really fantastic speakers, and great attendance. Last year, I gave myself sore thumbs by tweeting (from an iPhone) non-stop through the day, but I was shouting into the void a bit - there were about 25 other tweets about the symposium all day. This year, up to this morning, there were 165 tweets with the official #iegovsym hashtag, and that’s leaving out my livestreaming on the @irelandgov account.  So that’s a 660% increase over last year.

Looking more closely at that, some of the tweets posted were spam. That brings down the signal to noise ratio by a bit, but it’s also a marker of success - in order for the spambots to pick up the hashtag, it had to be trending in Ireland. So for some measure of time yesterday, a bit before lunchtime, #iegovsym was appearing as a trending topic right across Ireland.

There are a few factors in this. First up, the theme of the symposium was “social media”. That’s probably a reason right there for the amount of Twitter traffic. But there was also a much, much higher number of mobile devices in the room. Dan and I were hammering away on our iPads, and I could see four more in the rows near us. There were smartphones all over the place, and there were people who weren’t there commenting as well.

There’s a fairly broadly accepted rule of thumb that for every comment you get, there are twenty silent readers (well, some people say a hundred - I think that’s optimistic). I’d reckon it’s fair to say, though, that you get ten times as many people looking with interest as you get tweets using the hashtag. So that would mean that - not counting my live tweets - there were about 1650 people paying attention to the symposium.

That makes a pretty strong case for the worth of social media.

Many businesses use social media poorly. I’m not going to call out examples; we’ve all seen them - using Twitter only to try to boost sales with special offers, competitions where you “like” their near-empty Facebook page to enter, and so on. This is often put down to the people controlling the accounts “not understanding” the media they’re working in. This is, of course, correct, but it conceals a deeper problem - these are people trying to market in an area they don’t use themselves.

If you’re going to use social media for marketing, then you have to use social media yourself. Otherwise, you’re going to make yourself look like an idiot, as you flail through the process of learning while representing a business, or worse, just don’t learn. And to use social media, you have to sit down and deal with them every day. In fact, it has to become a habit, like checking your email.

It really only becomes evident to me how habitual my social media use is when one of my networks is down. Livejournal, which is an old, well-established network, with little business use (except by genre writers, but that’s a whole different area) has been suffering a DDOS attack for the last few days. This has two effects; first, the one where I hit the LJ tab in my browser, and then wonder why it’s not working, and second, all my other networks are sprouting posts that go “LJ is down, so I’m posting here instead”. Now, with both of these going on, I know LJ is down, but I still keep going to that tab to look at what’s new there.

The same thing happens with Twitter, with Google+, and with all the other networks and network tools I use on a daily basis. And because of this habitual use, I know how it works - I know what’s annoying, what works well, which posts are likely to be RT’d, reshared, or otherwise passed on, and which ones will get responses. This isn’t something you can learn from a presentation or book, or keep a cheat sheet on, because it changes. It will keep on changing, too - what was ‘correct’ two months ago is not going to work now, and the things that will work well in two months don’t even exist now.

If you want to use social media for your business, you have to use social media yourself. Get in the habit.

Google Plus has been in the world for a few days now, and vast numbers of people are subscribed, despite there being some sort of limitation on getting in. You either have to get an official invitation from someone in Google, as I did, or sort of slide in sideways when someone who’s already in includes your email address in an update. The latter doesn’t always work, either; there have been times when the service is closed to new users for a few hours.

So, what is it? Well, it’s Google’s latest attempt at a social network. And rather than the new functionality of Wave, or the near invisibility of Buzz, it’s basically a copy of Facebook’s functionality - so much so that it’s surprising. However, there are some important differences, and I think they’ll become more important in the longer term. Whether they’ll lead to success or not is another matter entirely, of course.

First and foremost, where Facebook defaults to sharing all the input you give it with whoever will listen, Plus defaults to setting up “circles”, such as Friends, Family, Acquaintances, Work, and so on, straight off the bat. And then you choose which circles each piece of data you add goes to.  Facebook can do this, but it’s functionality that was added much later, and which is not easily evident. People can’t see what circles they’re in, only that you have them in some circle or circles. They can, however, see a list of the other people who can see a given post.

Second, it has none of the annoying games, quizzes, and spam-producing applications for which Facebook is notorious. This makes a vast difference in the overall signal to noise ratio.

Third - and this is a subtle one - where Facebook has “like”, Plus has “+1″. This is more important than it seems, because a lot of the feedback one could give on Facebook is stymied by the semantic discomfort of clicking “Like” on a line that says “2000 killed by earthquake”, or “My dog died last night”. But the “+1″ communicates much more effectively that you feel the content is important, worth marking as such, rather than that you approve of it.

Plus is a sensible blend of technologies, terminologies, and sensitivities to privacy. It has the gradation of access from Livejournal, the ease of use that Facebook could have, if it had been properly designed, an underlying technological robustness, and very low barriers to entry, since it’s integrated with existing Google accounts.

So, it’s technically solid, but will it take off? Can it challenge Facebook? That depends. I’m bad at predicting these things, because the technical solidity means more to me. I reckoned Wave was the business, and didn’t think at first that Twitter would get anywhere - so wrong on both counts. On the other hand, I didn’t think Orkut would rise to much, and I was pretty sure Buzz would remain mostly invisible, so I haven’t been altogether wrong.

Here, in any case, is my set of predictions: Plus will never be as big as Facebook, but it will be better, and have a more loyal following. It will also be easier to monetise, which will help it immensely.

Let me deal with those in order. It will never be as big, because Facebook has now expanded to a huge number of people who have very little concept still of how the internet really works. They won’t move to Plus because they won’t really know it’s out there. Maybe some of them will move eventually, and maybe they won’t. Either way, they aren’t the core audience Plus is aiming for.

On the other hand, if you’re reading this, you’re almost certainly part of that core audience. You have an awareness of marketing and a notion of how the internet works. You have some concept of which information you want to keep private or limited, and which you’re willing to release into the world. You’ll use Plus because you know it’s better, and that makes a difference to you.

These technically informed circles are the people Google need to reach with plus, because we’re the people to whom they can offer advertising that works best. Google will monetise Plus, there’s no question of that. But they’ll do it with subtle, sensible ads, targeting keywords and demographics in a very, very precise manner, like they do with gmail today - except more so. There will be a point where you are never offered an ad that doesn’t have some appeal to you, either on a basis of want or need.

Facebook, I reckon, will be left as the place in which you communicate with more distant people - relatives you don’t often see or deal with, school friends, neighbours from three houses ago, and so on. Plus will be where your core networks, your closest circles, end up.

I’m just back from a trip to my wife’s homeplace in Finland. This involved travel through three airports - Dublin, Oslo, and Helsinki. We’ve travelled through Copenhagen and Stockholm in the past, and were stranded in Frankfurt for nine hours on one less pleasant occasion. So I’ve seen a lot of North European airports in the last few years. There is one thing, now, that makes airports stand out in my mind, and it’s not the shopping, the restaurants, or the shower facilities, nice as each of those can be. It is this: does it have free wifi?

An airport with free wifi makes me comfortable, because I can pass the indeterminate time I’m there - even if I’m standing waiting to go through the gate - in familiar virtual environs. This makes me a far happier passenger.

Now, I’d be happy to pay something for wifi as well, if I could predict how long I’m going to need. But the nature of airports is that you’re waiting an indeterminate amount of time, which is in no way under your control. If you pay for three hours, and then there’s a gate change after an hour, and the plane arrives early, and so on, you can end up having only a fraction of the time you paid for. Or you have to go renew it after an hour because the plane is late. And by the time you’ve changed some money, found out how to access the paid network, and so on… it’s too much hassle.

This can be extended to other places as well, at home as well as abroad - although given the potential data roaming charges, it’s even better abroad. Cafés, parks, waiting areas in train stations, even, as The Atlantic points out, trains and buses themselves. In short, the best thing you can do, if your business involves any amount of waiting on my part, is give me free wireless access. I will be back. Further, I will tell people about it, and they’ll come there as well. It’s a tiny extra thing from a business point of view, but for a data junkie like me, I’ll go for your wireless before I’ll go for your coffee.

I got a mail this morning from connect.me. The tagline on the website is “connect.me helps you discover respected people across…” followed by the familiar square icons for Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Fair enough.

The mail goes on to remind me that I signed up via Twitter to reserve my usual online nickname (not that anyone is likely to take it; I think AOL chat is the only place I’ve ever been unable to get it, but still). All good so far. And then it says that if I “tag” ten other people on the website, I’ll get early access to the service. Now, this is where alarm bells go off in my head, and connect.me are making one principal mistake - they’re not immediately reassuring me. I don’t know what tagging is in this context - it may just be attaching a descriptive tag to someone’s Twitter username in the the website’s database, but it could be anything up to sending them a direct message going “Please sign up to this service!”.

So what I want to see when I go and look at the website is “here is what we mean by tagging”. At the very least, I want to see “We won’t send Tweets without your explicit consent”. And looking across the privacy statement, their “trust” page, and various others, I’m not seeing that. The website has a good feel to it. I don’t think they’re going to spam my twitter followers. But I’ve had enough applications send out messages to not be entirely happy until I see them say they won’t.

Essentially, this “tag 10 people to get access” thing feels a bit like a pyramid scheme, and it’s making me distrustful. I’m pretty sure that’s not the early impression they want to give.

Finally, having read up and down the website several times, I’ve found a line in the email I got that reads, “For now, tags = tweets. So be considerate to your followers. The official Connect.Me site will not require tweets” - which instantly makes me feel much happier, even though it says it’ll send tweets. But I now know, and can adjust what I want to do accordingly.

So the lesson is: if you’re providing an online service, provide reassurance as to what you’re going to do with the data you’re given. Lots of reassurance, even for things that are patently obvious to you, and in multiple places, so it’s easy to find.

In the past few weeks, I’ve been working with a number of clients to get Facebook pages up and running for them. There are all sorts of stumbling blocks in this, between accounts that have already been set up, pages that are being run badly, and even people who are willing to run the business Facebook page, but don’t want to be on the service themselves. All of these are surmountable, in one way or another, but in the process, it’s very easy to lose track of the basic question: What does your business get out of being on Facebook?

There’s a simple answer to this, and there’s a slightly more complex one.

The simple answer is this: it’s where people are, online, right now. We use billboards and hoardings to reach people in public spaces, radio and magazine advertising to reach them when they’re commuting, television to reach them when they’re relaxing. Facebook is a ‘place’ where most users spend upwards of a hour each day, and if your business doesn’t have a presence there, then those who do are going to reach your customers instead of you. This applies whether your customers are actually customers, or are volunteers, students, clients, vendors, or whatever other contacts you’re dealing with.

The slightly more complex answer is that if you don’t keep up with networks like Facebook (or Twitter, or whatever), even if they seem silly or trivial, you’re going to be running to catch up when something more serious comes along in the same vein. We’ve seen this in a very serious sense in the Middle East and North Africa over the last few months, during the ‘Arab Spring’, when social networks were used to enable revolutions. The authorities in those countries hadn’t the slightest idea how to handle social networks, and in some cases, resorted to cutting off electricity to try to shut down communications.

So, as one client asked me last week, “Do I have to be on Facebook?”. No, you don’t. But there’s a cost associated with not being there, where you lose access to existing and potential customers, and there’s a future cost when you don’t have the understanding of some future network. And it’s very possible that you will have to be on that future network.