Guy Kawasaki writes a great manual on Google Plus titled, "What the Plus!"

Just finished reading +Guy Kawasaki ’s latest book on Google plus, “What the Plus!”

I tend to keep a manual at hand. To that extent, it’s a much needed manual for Google+, and I guess there’s something to learn from this book for everyone. Besides, the book is very readable. Easy, fast, sharp.Some lessons I got out of the book from my first read:

1. Participate, and take it for a spin (aim for like five posts a day). Get a good profile (he suggests what features to consider for mugshots like forehead and chin)
2. Write often, write clearly, must embed figures and links in your post.
3. Comment on other people’s posts and provide helpful advice, and remain positive.
4. He cites several ways to find meaningful posts and people including using google’s social search (I leave you to read the book to find out what they are, nitfy tricks like “circles shared with me” in the search boxes)
5. When writing long posts, break up and use bullet points.

I think he could have expanded on the hangout section. Perhaps more will come in the next iterations. There are also other tricks and shortcuts that he could have listed (he has listed several shortcuts). A nifty feature in this book is how he has described features in Google plus that stack up with Twitter and Facebook.

I know google+ keeps on changing all the time. Social web is powerful, and I feel that at least I need a strategy to negotiate with the plethora of information. Lately (and quite significantly), we had quite a few books coming out, one of the best to my mind is +Clay Johnson ’s book “Information Diet” (I think it’s really well written, another must read for anyone interested in information management).

Some people complain about sparseness of Google+ interactions, perhaps it is, but it’s a different ecosystem that needs some handholding (which this book does eminently). But it’s also true that it’s largely built around what we are interested in and how to find and interact with contents, much more than intereacting with people in our immediate social networks.

It’d be good to have some insights in these processes, but I guess this was not the book’s purpose. As Guy writes in this book, that fine grained differentiation between perspective (twitter), people (facebook), and passions (google+) is important. I quite liked this typology. There are overlaps on all three, but this is perhaps as good a way to think about what people do on social media as it gets.

Overall, good job, +Guy Kawasaki .

(This was also posted on my google+ here: https://plus.google.com/117270655453846612117/posts/b5RzAamnKoL)