This is a guest post by author and media strategist Brian Solis

In business, social media is becoming a lot like email: every company has it. But, unlike email, organizations haven’t mastered how to effectively communicate through the likes of Facebook or the tweets of Twitter.

Over the last several years, businesses have increased the pace of adopting social media strategies for use in marketing, service, and other related capacities.

What’s becoming very clear however is that adopting social media and understanding its impact on customer and employee relationships — and, also the bottom line — are not always linked. This disconnect between social media strategies and business value is forcing many executives to rethink their overall approach, and the infrastructure they built to support it. The result of this reflective process is motivating organizations to transform everyday social media initiatives into deeper social business strategies.

Altimeter Group cofounder Charlene Li and I spent the better of the last year studying how organizations approach social media and how planning, processes, and outcomes mature over time. Our findings are included in our newly released report, “The Evolution of Social Business: Six Stages of Social Media Transformation.”

In the report, readers will find common guiding success factors for organizations achieving success in each social business maturity stage, as well as prescriptive recommendations and checklists to grow to the next level of maturity.

Social media vs. social business strategy

The results of our work were surprising, to say the least. We uncovered a notable gap between organizations that execute social media programs and campaigns and those that specifically invest in social business strategies. Altimeter defines the evolution to a Social Business as the deep integration of social media and social methodologies into the organization to drive business impact.

On one side of the chasm, there are businesses (or departments) that are actively investing in social media without intentions or outcomes being tied to business goals. On the other side are organizations that are deeply integrating social media and social methodologies throughout the company to drive tangible business impact.

In a survey of nearly 700 executives and social strategists in late 2012, we found that only 34 percent of businesses felt that their social strategy was connected to business outcomes and just 28 percent felt that they had a holistic approach to social media, where lines of business and business functions work together under a common vision. A mere 12 percent were confident they had a plan that looked beyond the next year.

And, perhaps most astonishing, only half of all companies surveyed said that top executives were “informed, engaged and aligned with their companies’ social strategy.”

But, there’s hope. We learned that the two most important criteria for a successful social business strategy are:

• Alignment with strategic business goals of an organization;
• Organizational alignment and support that enables execution of that strategy.

What separates the two are six distinct stages that we believe most organizations have or will traverse as they mature. The six stages are as follows (for a deeper dive into each, please download the report):

Stage 1: Planning – “Listen to Learn”

The goal of this first stage is to ensure that there is a strong foundation for strategy development, organizational alignment, resource development, and execution.

Stage 2: Presence – “Stake Our Claim”

Staking a claim represents a natural evolution from planning to action. As you move along the journey, your experience establishes a formal and informed presence in social media.

Stage 3: Engagement – “Dialog Deepens Relationships”

When organizations move into this stage, they make a commitment where social media is no longer a “nice to “have” but instead, is seen as a critical element in relationship building.

Stage 4: Formalized – “Organize for Scale”

The risk of uncoordinated social initiatives is the main driver moving organizations into Stage 4, where a formalized approach focuses on three key activities: establishing an executive sponsor; creating a hub, a.k.a. a Center of Excellence (CoE); and establishing organization-wide governance. Organizations should plan for a potential CoE pitfall, however, as creating one may lead to scaling problems in the long-term.

Stage 5: Strategic – “Becoming a Social Business”

As organizations migrate along the maturity model, the social media initiatives gain greater visibility as they begin to have real business impact. This captures the attention of C-level executives and department heads who see the potential of social.

Stage 6: Converged – “Business is Social”

As a result of the cross-functional and executive support, social business strategies start to weave into the fabric of an evolving organization.

We hope this research will help you. In the end, wherever you are in the six stages will be defined by your vision, courage, and tenacity. This really comes down to business transformation and it takes a change agent to guide development in a way that delivers value to stakeholders (customers, employees, and so on) as well as shareholders.

This post was originally published on LinkedIn.

Image via Shutterstock

Symantec may be in the process of laying off up to 1,000 people after announcing yesterday that it plans to restructure the company’s focus and increase revenue, according to Bloomberg – though chief executive Steve Bennett says that’s just “speculation.”

The company made famous by its antivirus products has more recently seemed like a sitting duck. Startups are popping up around it, creating impressive products to meet today’s security needs in cloud and mobile security. Symantec, of course, has its own cloud and mobile products, but with companies like Lookout Mobile entering the scene, Norton isn’t the first name you think of when protecting your devices anymore.

Because of this, Symantec introduced the new structure yesterday, saying it needed to become more innovative and increase revenue.

“In order to make the company more flexible and able to adapt quicker to the needs of customers … there will be fewer executives and middle management positions, resulting in a reduction of the workforce,” Symantec said in a statement yesterday. “This process is expected to be completed by the end of June 2013.”

That reduction may be up to 1,000 people, making room for the investments in research and development as well as sales that Symantec says it will depend on.

Bennett told Bloomberg that Symantec is “an organization that has too many layers.” But while he says that the 1,000 number is speculative, it will be a “material reduction.”

The company promises it is focusing on “10 key areas” that will involve taking existing products and building on top of them to make them fit today’s security problems. These products include Symantec’s Norton Protection, Norton Cloud, Data Center Security, and Mobile Workforce Productivity.

Executives also announced that the company is aiming to increase revenue by five percent and “non-GAAP” measurements up 30 percent in the next two to three years.

Layoff image via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Personalization, mobile, and acquisitions are the big themes in Marissa Mayer’s first announcement of her turnaround plan for Yahoo. That, and peanut butter.

Yahoo excels at personalization, Mayer told Yahooligans, according to Business Insider. And mobile is clearly where growth is happening lately. So neither of those are big surprises.

Turning back to acquisitions is a bit a of a surprise, but it’s very much in line with what Mayer told the board when she said that the $7 billion Yahoo realized in selling part of its Alibaba stake should stay in the company rather than be disbursed to shareholders. That $7 billion could bring in a lot of new acquisitions and new blood to Yahoo.

A least, if hot new startups can be persuaded they won’t be Flickr’d.

One danger to that strategy is the opposite of NIH (not invented here) syndrome. If Yahooligans start to feel that the only hot new projects and major company initiatives are centered around acquisitions and new hires, morale could take a blow.

But another part of Mayer’s strategy is reminiscent of former Yahoo exec Brad Garlinghouse’s Peanut Butter Manifesto, in which he argued that Yahoo was spreading itself too thin over too many products. Similarly, Mayer told the troops she wanted to do more of what Yahoo is good at and less of what it’s not.

Mayer also unveiled four C’s of the new Yahoo: Culture, Company goals, Calibration, and Compensation. Yeah, that sounds hokey to us too.

At least, we can be happy she didn’t unveil a massive Yahoo reorganization, which, as many can attest, is a “wonderful method … for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.”

But it is still very early days, and Mayer is not only unlikely to have unveiled her full strategy for returning Yahoo to its former status as a titan and leader in the tech industry, but also unlikely to have completely formulated her entire plan. It has, after all, been only two months. Most new CEOs get at least a year in the saddle before being expected to produce.

She still has plenty of time to fully form her plan.

photo credit: capn madd matt via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

When the Hoover Dam in your satellite images looks like the Marlboro Man’s drooping cancer stick after his bout with lung cancer, you know you’ve got a problem.

It’s never easy to replace a major and popular app. Pulling out Google Maps and replacing it with Apple’s own Maps application was always going to be a risky move, but risky becomes potentially disastrous when entire websites spring up showcasing your failures and you have the original app — created by one of your key competitors and sworn enemies — stuck on ice in bureaucratic hell.

The Hoover Dam, according to Apple’s Maps app

Aka the app store approval process.

Apple preached patience in a statement the company sent to VentureBeat, saying:

“Customers around the world are upgrading to iOS 6 with over 200 new features including Apple Maps, our first map service. We are excited to offer this service with innovative new features like Flyover and Siri integration, and free turn by turn navigation.

We launched this new map service knowing that it is a major initiative and we are just getting started with it. We are continuously improving it, and as Maps is a cloud-based solution, the more people use it, the better it will get. We’re also working with developers to integrate some of the amazing transit apps in the App Store into iOS Maps.

We appreciate all of the customer feedback and are working hard to make the customer experience even better.”

In other words: We’re aware that there are some problems. Give us some time. Maps is going to improve.

But that really doesn’t cut it.

If you launch an app in public beta, sure, you have some leeway for error, and yes, some tolerance for problems. But when you replace the most popular mapping service on the planet with your own app, without asking permission from users or even inquiring into their preferences, you don’t get the benefit of the doubt.

It’s got to be perfect, from day one.

Unfortunately, that is far from the case, and Apple is now paying the price.

But that’s not the worst part. The worst part is, as The Guardian is suggesting and 9to5 Mac is confirming, that a new and stand-alone version of Google’s Maps app has already been built, and submitted, to the Apple app store, where it is awaiting approval.

We all know how long that can take when Apple feels that an app competes with its own offerings. And it seems odd, to say the least that, after having been the default mapping service for years, Google now has to line up, hat in hand, to beg for approval. I asked Google for a comment, and a representative simply said:

We believe Google Maps are the most comprehensive, accurate and easy-to-use maps in the world. Our goal is to make Google Maps available to everyone who wants to use it, regardless of device, browser, or operating system.

iPhone users can access Google Maps in their mobile browser at http://maps.google.com where they can have Directions, Transit information, My Maps, Starring, Search History and more. Since this is a browser-based version it is limited in its capabilities but does offer a comprehensive, accurate and usable map experience. This experience was launched just about one year ago.

Since the launch of Android, Google and Apple have increasingly had divergent corporate interests. That’s understandable. But Apple’s first and foremost mission has always been to put users first.

Unfortunately, corporate chess games sometimes intervene.

photo credit: ultraBobban via photo pin cc

Nazi Germany controls basically all of Europe, big chunks of Africa. Its soldiers and military machine are large and in charge and have not yet been seriously challenged. So what does genius Hitler do? He attacks Soviet Russia, a country many times its size, much more populous, and with strong, rich allies.

Mark Zuckerberg, are you listening?

Facebook is massive in social, the undisputed heavyweight champ, the global leader. But as its userbase transitions to a mostly-mobile world, its existence depends more than ever on the kindness of strangers … big swinging Micks like Google, Apple, and Samsung, who own the mobile space.

That’s presumably why the world’s largest social network wants its own phone platform. The company has been hinting at it for some time. And now Bloomberg is saying that Facebook is working with HTC to release a Facebook-centric phone by mid-2013.

This is baiting the tiger. Rattling the cage. Hitting the bee’s nest with a baseball bat.

Don’t get me wrong. I’d really LOVE to see what Facebook would make of a modern phone with social baked right into the core — a device that takes the phone back to its roots as a communicator.

(Imagine that, phones used for … actually … connecting … to … people.)

But really, Facebook. How do you think Apple is going to feel about this (after they stop laughing, I mean)? As we all know from the fruitful company’s longish acrimonious history, it does not take well to competition from former partners, or former friends. Ask Adobe. Ask Google.

Well, yes, do ask Google.

Google will just LOVE it when you take the main codebase of Android, fork it and fork them at the same time, then pull an Amazon on the main mobile open-source codebase in existence. Google’s mission in plus-life right now is to beat you, eat you, and spit out the scraps … do you really want to throw extra gasoline on that TNT?

And then the rumored partner: HTC. HTC?!?

Really, Facebook? The company that is just-barely-clinging-with-all-its-might to FIFTH position in the worldwide smartphone market, with a whopping sub-five percent market share? Is this the company that will make the Facebook phone a roaring commercial success?

I admit it: I am not as smart as the geniuses running Facebook. It is entirely possible that they see something I don’t. (And that Devindra Hardawar doesn’t, and Henry Blodget doesn’t, and Alexia Tsotsis doesn’t, and Dan Costa doesn’t, and Billy Gallagher doesn’t … I could go on for a while here.)

But let’s just posit the admittedly-difficult-to-believe proposition that Facebook is smarter than the press. (Work with me here.)

I just don’t see a path for the company to win.

A Facebook phone with HTC is not going to win in terms of market share. It is just not going to beat the installed base and furious innovation rates and amazing technical and design prowess currently leading the mobile market. Not. Going. To. Happen.

And if a Facebook phone that launches doesn’t fizzle on the pad (let’s be optimistic), and wins, let’s say, two percent global market share — it is, after all, launching with HTC, which only owns five percent with all of its phones — it’s simply going to poke giant Gulliver in his fat buttocks with a cheap little plastic toy Lilliputian spear.

And that’s going to make it much less likely those giants will do anything to help Facebook win on mobile in the 98 percent of the market they don’t control.

Am I wrong?

Multinational game publisher THQ announced today that its upcoming strategy title, Company of Heroes 2, will have special technology to simulate brutal weather conditions in-game, making this the first weather tech of its kind in the genre. Set in World War II, Company of Heroes 2 will help players realize the full role the incredibly cold Soviet winter played in the Eastern Front theater in that war. The weather technology, created with the Essence Engine 3.0′s ColdTech system, includes an “extreme cold” mechanic that accurately recreates the chill of the era, which reached -40˚ F in the winter of 1941.

Players will need to keep their infantry from freezing to death by building fires and enclosed garrisons. Snow will build up and accumulate on buildings and vehicles, becoming a hazard to troops and affecting strategies. Players will need to cover their tracks in fresh snow, or melt it from vehicles to continue the campaign. Ice will also play into various scenarios, affecting troop and vehicle movement, collapsing (or being destroyed) underneath armies, and re-forming as the bitter cold continues.

“Company of Heroes 2 is all about authenticity, and no game based on the Eastern Front would be complete without extreme weather conditions,” said Quinn Duffy, Game Director at Relic Entertainment. “Thanks to the enhanced technology offered by the new Essence Engine, we are able to accurately portray the bitter Soviet winter which crippled the German army.”

The first Company of Heroes was released in 2006 and was highly rated by critics and fans alike. The upcoming sequel is scheduled for release on PC in early 2013.

THQ is based in Los Angeles County, Calif.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Among the many compelling sections of Facebook’s landmark S-1 filing last week—which included Zuck’s “The Hacker Way” founder’s letter, its $1 billion in profits last year and of course, the money spent on private jets—one area really stood out among the numbers and hyperbole. The risk, and of course on the flip side, massive opportunity, that mobile represents to the future of Facebook.

In an admission that surprised many, Facebook revealed that while its monthly usage figures on mobile were of course jaw-droppingly huge, the company still hadn’t figured out a way to make real money from those mobile users. As the S-1 states: “We do not currently directly generate any meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products, and our ability to do so successfully is unproven.”

Recent reports now state that Facebook is readying its first foray into mobile ads, with the launch of “sponsored stories” – a well-timed move if so, knowing that its mobile vulnerabilities would be revealed in the S-1.

So, now that Facebook is finally ready to commit to mobile revenues, how can it reap the rewards of having such a huge mobile user base (a stunning achievement of 425 million monthly active users)? What are the secrets behind encouraging high grossing user behavior across the mobile platform?

In my role as VP of Mobile at Badoo, I’ve experienced first hand the challenges and the rewards of scaling mobile users and revenues on a global scale. Here are some of the lessons I’ve learned:

Mobile ads aren’t Always the easy answer

To allow ads or not to allow ads – that’s the philosophical question that founders like Zuckerberg have long wrestled with. Facebook famously delayed advertising on its primary site until it had a critical mass of users that were already hooked into the experience, had willingly given up mounds of personal data, and who wouldn’t desert the addictive platform if ads came along.

So when it came to mobile, they took the same approach. “Users first, revenues later.” Of course, in the case of Facebook’s mobile strategy, it turned out to be revenues “much later.” But, many companies struggle to even get scale in terms of mobile users, and Facebook has managed that better than anyone – nearly half a billion monthly users.

And while we’re on the topic of mobile ads, let’s be clear, turning on an integrated ad platform is no simple task. And while the mobile advertising market is now projected to grow to $17.6 billion by 2015, for a long time, it’s been the runt of the litter in terms of overall digital ad revenues. So while Facebook has been slow on the uptake, it’s hard to fault them for prioritizing other revenue streams that speak to its Internet roots, while quietly building an unparalleled mobile user base.

The challenge for Facebook now is to “turn on” mobile ads effectively, without sacrificing users. At Badoo, we chose not to go the ad route and embraced a freemium model that enhanced the user experience and paid dividends across both web and mobile platforms.

Make the right decisions on what to mobilize

The features that have attracted millions of users and developers to the Facebook Web platform are not just the widely emulated social functions, but the FB “app” platform, messaging and credits, to name but a few. What differentiates mobile at this stage, compared to say, the Web four years ago, is that so much of what makes Facebook special on the Web has already been executed brilliantly on mobile.

Messaging? You’ve got that out of the box on mobile, or you can download apps that will talk to any one or all messaging platforms. Apps? As a mobile developer, I have loads to choose from and they are really rich. I can even get them to talk to Facebook and get access to the social gold mine they’ve built. Credits? Yes. (Although paying for anything on mobile globally is still a challenge.)

And in the latter case, the value chain is very long, from banks and card processors, through mobile carriers, aggregators, specialist payment providers and even Google, Amazon, Apple, etc. – none of whom will want to hand over this key part of their business to Facebook (although some might be too dumb to prevent it).

So Facebook’s challenge has a meta-layer – not how to “port” FB to mobile, but what to mobilize, and how to pull users from apps they might already be using. How they can offer people more than they’re already getting?

Build high grossing user behavior into the DNA of your mobile app

When it comes to mobile apps, analysts predict that in-app purchases and a freemium approach will become the dominant apps business model in the future, and that paid apps will decline as a main source of revenue.

So when considering how to make a freemium model work for your mobile app, you should think about the following:

• Are you making your users do the work? If you’re asking users to make purchases from within a free app, you need to make sure that purchase is a no-brainer and that it leads to some tangible and instant gratification.
• Is there a logical flow to the user experience, where purchases make sense? In Badoo’s case, we offer “Super Powers” which are micro-payments that help you stand out in an online crowd. If you want to meet new people using our app, Super Powers will help, so even though the core of our product is always free, there is real value from upgrading your account.
• Are you thinking beyond games? While Zynga regularly tops the chart of high grossing free apps, there is life beyond social games. So think about how to make your monetized features fun and engaging in different ways. And always link it back to the core user experience, and how an in-app purchase could deepen your relationship with your user.
• Location-based behavior can help encourage higher grossing user behavior, but remember users buy into products and services – not technologies. Your location-based services need to add to your product, rarely are they a product in themselves.

Think global, but respect local

There are many challenges inherent in scaling a mobile strategy globally. There is clearly huge diversity in terms of mobile user behavior, platforms and devices, as you look region by region, country by country and even sometimes city by city.

So, how can you build something that represents your global brand, but is local enough to appeal to every user and therefore unlock a high percentage of revenue-generating behavior?

It’s a lot of work. At Badoo, we’ve spent the last 18 months designing and deploying to acquire millions of users in 180+ countries onto our multiple mobile platforms including iOS, Android, Blackberry and WAP (for non-smartphones). And when you think about the hugely complex billing and carrier aspects of a global mobile deployment, which need to be carried out without a whiff of disruption to the user experience, it’s easy to see why mobile engineers are in such high demand. It’s a huge job, it isn’t easy and it takes time.

We built location-based behavior into the core of our product, guaranteeing local relevancy to every user, wherever they were in the world. But getting them there, keeping them there, and encouraging them to make purchases, was and still is, a mammoth undertaking.

There’s currently no good substitute for the hard work of identifying local partners for things like payment integration. In our case, our London location and hugely diverse team from over 25 countries gives us a great head start in building out our local services globally.

Interestingly, when it comes to our mobile revenues, we’ve found that our mobile web users are almost as likely to pay for additional features as our app users. This insight provides some useful cues for companies looking to build a mobile audience that goes beyond “early adopters” in highly developed countries and into the global mainstream.

While apps are clearly hugely successful, and we’ve talked about the potential for in-app monetization, there’s still plenty of room for the mobile web, particularly when building a global product. Don’t neglect core mobile web users at the expense of iPhone and Android users if you want to build a truly global path to mobile monetization.

Wrapping up

Facebook has consistently innovated and executed at a rate that has left most of us breathless over the last few years. While its mobile revenue strategy might have taken a back seat until now, the revelations in the S-1 have surely lit the fire. The path to mobile monetization still has many turns ahead, so it will be interesting to see how Facebook explores the global mobile opportunity.

Matt Woolf is VP of Mobile at Badoo, the largest social network for meeting new people, with more than 136 million users worldwide.

Facebook on Android phone photo: Johan Larsson/Flickr

VentureBeat is holding its second annual Mobile Summit this April 2-3 in Sausalito, Calif. The invitation-only event will debate the five key business and technology challenges facing the mobile industry today, and participants — 180 mobile executives, investors, and policymakers — will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. You can find out more at our Mobile Summit site.

“The dynamics of an insurgency are actually quite similar to startups disrupting an established market,” says Gourley.

Data analysis is becoming ever more important within tech companies but Quid allows corporate strategists to manipulate a data-driven “map” of an entire technology sector’s past, present and even future. The animation below, for example, shows the evolution of the cleantech ecosystem from 2000 to 2010.

The company grew out of Gourley’s Ph.D. research on the mathematics of war. He and his colleagues discovered that the sizes and timing of attacks in conflicts such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Northern Ireland exhibited remarkable similarities, which could be used to predict future attacks and even push a conflict towards resolution. After a particularly grueling month Gourley spent in Baghdad in 2008, investor Peter Thiel advised him to apply the same techniques to technology.

Quid uses natural language processing and semantic clustering techniques to define a set of “entities” such as companies or research groups in an emerging technology sector, and to map their relationships. Each company entity has a signature which is based on explicit events like who is it partnered with, who has it acquired, how much money has it raised. There are also the technologies with which an entity is associated, where it’s located, employee count, traffic, sentiment and many other parameters.

The data used by Quid is publicly-available text in multiple languages, which ranges from news articles and job postings to press releases and SEC or government filings. Quid’s technology map currently contains 75,000 entities and 400,000 events (partnerships, funding, law suits, executive hires, etc.). Building such a map manually, for a particular technology sector, could take months.

The typical Quid customer is a VP of strategy at a large technology company, government department or financial firm. Once the customer has a basic map of the sector, and where his own company and competitors fit in, he can look at adjacent entities and ask questions like, “Where is this space going to move?” or “Which technologies could be recombined?” For example, a particular field of cryptography could be starting to overlap with mobile if researchers are paring down the relevant cryptographic algorithms to be able to compute them on a mobile device.

Most crucially, a customer may want to identify “white spaces” in the map which indicate future growth opportunities. ”If you are a large company you tend not to want to be the first one to market in a new space,” states Gourley. “You want to use those white spaces to see external R&D. ‘What has everyone else tried? What am I most able to do myself? What are my competitors doing? Should I do it myself or just acquire someone?’ Because everything changes so quickly, this is something which you must be able to do on a daily basis rather than in a 3-month report, which is the traditional way of analyzing a space.” Tracking how a sector evolved over time and how it may develop in the future is also extremely important to customers. All data is time-stamped so that the entity map can be rolled back to some point in the past.

There seems to be an obvious overlap between Quid’s technology and the work of a venture capital fund or angel investor. Gourley laughs when I ask him if VC funds are customers. “There’s a tremendous about of overlap but they can’t, at the current pricing, afford what we can give them,” he says. The current pricing averages about a million dollars a year. ”We normally work with large multi-national companies with hundreds of thousands of employees. Even a big VC firm with a few hundred million dollars under management won’t have the cash.” Microsoft, on the other hand, has been a customer for the last year and a half.

Quid’s main rivals are Recorded Future, which deals with data available on public companies, and traditional business intelligence platforms. There is one even bigger competitor: the consultancy industry. Quid’s target customers currently spend millions and millions of dollars on consultants. “What they get out of that is a Powerpoint presentation and a 200-page strategic document. They like us because we put the decisions back in their hands. You can give this to a C-level executive and show him the world that he is dealing with.”

Quid is based in San Francisco, has 50 employees and has raised $14 million from Niklas Zennstrom’s Atomico Ventures, Ron Conway’s SV Angel, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and others.

There are two different types of social networks, private and public — each defined by its default privacy setting. Facebook is by default private and meant to connect actual friends. Twitter by default is public and anyone can follow anyone else. Google+ is decidedly in the Twitter camp — meaning you can follow anyone, including Google CEO Larry Page. Google+ lets you see Page’s posts and “like” his photos of kite surfing in Alaska. When posting on Google+, it forces users to select specific social circles they are posting to, which includes “everyone” as an option that mimics a Twitter-style broadcast. If not for the lawsuits and FTC settlement about Google Buzz automatically broadcasting posts, it is likely that Google+’s default setting would be public posts.

Although Twitter is growing (having just hit 200 million tweets a day), Twitter has left itself open to be displaced with a slow pace of adding features. Even newly returned founder Jack Dorsey has said that it was too difficult for “normal” people to use Twitter.

So, how can Google go after the 21 million people who are actively publishing on Twitter, and, more importantly, the few thousands that own the majority of Twitter followers? These types of posters are generally publishers, and Google’s core competence is serving publishers. Publishers pay a lot of attention to Google, from search engine optimization to increase the ranking on Google searches, search engine marketing keyword ads to drive traffic, and on-site advertising solutions ranging from AdSense to DoubleClick.

Publishers are interested in increasing their search rankings and improving their reach. Posting content to Google+1 increases search rankings. The black toolbar across the top of all Google services (other than YouTube), which integrates both Google+ and Google+ notifications, definitely provides reach and is now in front of as many user minutes as Facebook commands. Users commenting or liking on items from publishers will show up in their friends’ toolbars. Even if they only have a few friends, the overall traffic bump will be significant. The Google+ bar has not yet been activated on YouTube, a key publisher and celebrity channel, and likely will broadcast YouTube likes, comments and shares.

While Facebook is not sweating about Google+, the threat to Twitter is significant. Google has the opportunity to displace Twitter if it gets publishers and celebrities to encourage Google+ follows on their websites as well as pushing posts to the legions of Google users while they are in Search, Gmail and YouTube. Google was turned down when it tried to buy Twitter for $10 billion, and now it is going to try to replicate it. With Google+, the company actually has a shot.

Peter Yared is the vice president of apps at Webtrends, which acquired Transpond, a social-apps developer he founded. You can  follow him on Twitter.

Times have changed. What was once a fun diversion is fast-becoming a threat. Last month, with more than 400 million active users in tow, Facebook articulated an ambitious vision to map the web via the way it knows best — through people, their relationships and genuine interests — instead of through hyperlinks between pages.

With social plug-ins and “like” buttons strewn across more than 100,000 sites in a little more than two weeks, a very natural step in a few years would be to start selling advertising across the web (although Facebook has never explicitly stated this).

That would create direct competition to Google’s advertising network AdSense, which brought in $2.04 billion in revenue last quarter. Furthermore, the “like” button, and the data Facebook collects from it, will pave the way to an improved search engine that could rank results by your friends’ affinities to them. In a more distant future, that could become competitive to Google’s bread and butter, its search keyword service AdWords.

To be clear, Google is doing fine. It pulled in $6.5 billion in net income last year and has a market cap of $162 billion, compared to Facebook’s implied market capitalization of $22 billion based on recent trades on SharesPost, a secondary exchange for shares of privately-backed companies. And search and social networking aren’t exactly competitive. In many cases, they’re complementary.

But Google’s mission of organizing the world’s information is undeniably tied to human relationships. People construct meaning in their lives through their connections with others and like all mediums that have come before it, the web is a tool of expression for and by people, not machines. In a few years, Facebook could present Google with some serious competition for targeted online advertising dollars. Plus it would have the data to track consumers through their entire decision-making cycle.

So now, Google is rethinking its social strategy from the ground up. It’s on the hunt for an executive to lead the way, according to a listing for a “Head of Social” published this week.

What that person will inherit is a patchwork of products that are social in one way or another but don’t fit together to form a coherent experience. Google needs to articulate how peoples’ identities and their relationships figure into its core mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Then it needs to get its ducks — or mess of vaguely social products — in order. Some should go while others should probably be merged. Here’s a list of them:

Buzz: This is Google’s sharing and status update service embedded in Gmail. The company hasn’t updated stats since the product launched, when it said the social networking service attracted 9 million posts and comments in two days. There is also a mobile component to Buzz that overlaps with Latitude and involves “checking in” or temporarily sharing your location. It also integrates a number of tools from below like Reader, Profiles, Blogger and Picasa.

Orkut: Google’s original social network, created by and named after engineer Orkut Büyükkökten, is now defending its last bastions of popularity in Brazil and India. The company says it has more than 80 million users worldwide, with 30 million photos shared per day.

Social Search: This product brings in search results published or shared by a person’s friends into regular queries. There aren’t any public stats on usage.

Aardvark: This real-time social question-and-answer service had about 90,000 users in the fall before it was acquired for a reported $50 million.

Latitude: Google’s location service, which continuously shares a person’s whereabouts, has 3 million active users. It doesn’t use a check-in model — yet.

Wave: There also aren’t any exact stats here, except that Google says the service has more than 1 million active users. The Wave team also got the technical talent from AppJet, the company behind the really neat, real-time document editing tool EtherPad.

Profiles: These are the personal profiles that Google users can show off when using one or more of the company’s many products. There also aren’t any public metrics here.

OpenSocial: This is a set of common application programming interfaces (APIs) for social networking apps that Google built alongside MySpace and other social networks and launched in late 2007. As of last summer, the company said OpenSocial reached 800 million users worldwide and had 15,000 applications. hi5, Orkut and Ning are users too.

Friend Connect: This is Google’s way of sprinkling social features across the web and allowing users to log-in and identify themselves. As of last November, it was on at least 9 million blogs mostly thanks to Google Blogger which hosts it on most of its blogs. Facebook Connect is on 250,000 sites.

Blogger: Blogger had 300 million 30-day active readers as of last September and came to Google through the Pyra Labs acquisition in 2003. (Co-founder Ev Williams famously went on to co-found Twitter.)

Picasa: Google’s photo-sharing service. There aren’t any stats on total photos uploaded per day, except these rather vague ones: “Every 16 seconds people view enough photos from Picasa Web Albums to cover an entire football field. Every 8 minutes, more photos are viewed on Picasa Web Albums than exist in the entire Time-LIFE photo collection.”

Google Reader: Google’s RSS reader. There aren’t any recent public stats.

Gmail: There aren’t any public statistics, but Comscore estimates that the e-mail service had 176 million unique visitors a month.

Gtalk: Google’s chat service. Again, no public statistics.

This stable of loosely connected products is a legacy of Google’s university-like culture of bottom-up innovation, which lets engineers come up with all kinds of projects in 20 percent time. By contrast, even though Facebook pushes a strong hacker culture, the big product ideas tend to come from the top with founder Mark Zuckerberg playing visionary.

It’s also the result of a culture that never had to take social networking seriously. Flush with AdWords revenue, Google had the luxury of being able to fail. It could build “show-car” products that didn’t have to win dominant market share. And it never wanted to — at least not one-thousandth as much as Zuckerberg did.

A prospective “Head of Social” will have to confront many more deep, underlying cultural issues at Google. The company’s focus on data and sheer computing power have often come at the expense of its empathy and understanding of user experience in social products. This culture made it acceptable for Google Buzz’s designers to think that algorithmically inferring your friends from Gmail would be okay. There was a telling observation by early Facebook investor and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel in the forthcoming book, “The Facebook Effect,”

He said: ”A very profound difference is, I think, at its core, Google believes that at the end of this globalization process the world will be centered on computers, and computers will be doing everything…. The Facebook model is radically different. One of the things that is critical about good globalization in my mind is that in some sense humans maintain mastery over technology, rather than the other way around. The value of the company economically, political, culturally — whatever — stems from the idea that people are the most important thing. Helping the world’s people self-organize is the most important thing.”

The biggest and best social companies that have grown out of Facebook’s platform start the product design process by thinking about human compulsions. Social gaming company Zynga has psychological rewards and points of frustration down to a science.

The “Head of Social” will also face a “brain drain” that has seen company talent often leave to lead the charge for the other side. Former Google vice president Sheryl Sandberg, Bret Taylor, who saw through more than 25 Google product launches including Maps, and Gmail creator Paul Buchheit, not to mention scores of other product managers and engineers ended up at Facebook as the search giant grew to more than 20,000 employees and became encumbered by bureaucracy. (Of course, there was also no longer a hanging carrot of an IPO or exit left anymore.)

With the right level of authority and freedom, a “Head of Social” could do a number of things. Google could fork over enough money to convince Williams and Twitter’s leadership to finally give up their independence. They could then heavily push Twitter integration with social search, so users could pull up results from friends. They could finally put Wave of its misery or at least, make it usable. They could clean up iGoogle and put status updates from friends organized by popularity on the company’s historically spartan homepage.

The problem is anyone who has a whiff of talent in this area might be better off building a company than navigating the internal politics of Google. Whatever seven-figure compensation package the company could offer may not stack up against the potential impact and wealth that could come through creating a company from scratch. Or better yet, a company that leverages Facebook’s graph.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

(Editor’s note: Pamela Springer is CEO of Manta, which provides information on small companies. She submitted this story to VentureBeat.)

As strange as it might sound, the key to success in startups is not always knowing where you are in your revenue and profitability growth cycle. Instead, it’s much more important to keep track of people, strategy and capital – and in that order.

Understanding the strengths of your team – and your leaders in particular – allows you to build the details of your strategy that you can proactively manage.   Aligning your strategy with your team’s strengths increases your chances of staying focused on sustainability.

On-the-job training is expensive, so check resumes and gauge how prospects for key roles have performed in previous jobs. If you have strong generalists, recognize you might need to evolve them into specialists. And keep an eye on balance: Having too many people on the team who have never experienced the start-up life (and the duties and responsibilities that go with it) can be dangerous.  Ideally, you’ve got committed, passionate and experienced leaders who can help navigate the inevitable bumps.

Having said this: Skills aren’t everything. The team needs to work well together. Many people are hired on skills, but fired due to their traits.

It’s very easy for a business to stray from its core mission. A clear focus on your company’s strategic goals is the key to staying on course  - or knowing when it’s time to modify things. Focus initially on “adoption” or revenue – confirming you have a product or service the market wants to buy.  Use the first few sales to gather feedback on missing features and what your customers like. Your next batch of customers will typically be more profitable (since you’ve made improvements and streamlined processes based on initial feedback).

As you start to establish a foothold in the marketplace, you’ll need to determine if your product has the capability to scale and bring a critical mass of customers and revenue to your company (depending, of course, on the market size and opportunity).  If not, think of adjacent markets to leverage or where you can re-package your existing product. (Note, though, that it is foolhardy to expand into a new segment before your initial product is well established.

It goes without saying that it’s important to have appropriate financial resources.  Bootstrapping an early stage company is typically the best option, as it allows you to validate the market and get initial feedback from customers. Once you’ve got a better sense of the market (and have secured a few customers), then it’s safe to begin thinking about outside investment.

Assuming you can find a willing venture capitalist or angel investor, deciding whether to accept a cash infusion ultimately depends on how fast you want to grow your company – and what you have planned for your exit strategy. Keep in mind that it’s best to secure capital when you don’t need it, as trying to raise or find money when you do need it is tough.

Understanding where you are in the maturity curve of each of these three categories will help you position your business better for the future. Cash is obviously important – but if you don’t have the right team and strategy, you’ll never see the capital.