So far, so good!

It’s a pity. LJ was a thriving home to millions of webizens long before modern social networks, but Its new management is bound and determined to turn it into another Facebook, leaving us with no choice but to go to an alternative site that really IS set up for blogging, writing and community exactly the way LJ used to be. Yes, that rival site is updated with cleaner, faster code and support for mobile and social media. Its management truly understands what LJ meant for so many of us: a nexus to share writing and longer posts with friends who are interested in more content than can be conveyed with simple status updates and 140-character tweets.

That site also retained the unique features of LJ, comment titles and threaded posts, which made it easy to have long multi-person conversations. LJ removed them in December and has ignored approximately 20,000 posts pleading for them to come back. The new management simply doesn’t seem to get why that has caused so many users to migrate. Members of the staff mocked us and said we’d “get used to it.” No. Not if you’re taking away what we used the site for.

The livejournal communities, conversations, and writing groups of 13 years will continue, but they won’t be on LJ. Goodbye, old friend. 13 years was a pretty good run.

LJ, we’re writers. We WRITE. Hence the “journal” in the domain name. If we wanted Facebook and pop culture social games, we’d BE on Facebook, okay?

None of that would be me. LOL.

I also think it is important to advertise across multiple platforms with the same branded message. An integrated marketing plan will really allow you to measure your success rate and determine what is working and what is not.

That being said, I still read this because I wanted to see the numbers

And I really question where people get these Google+ numbers from. I feel like most people either have no idea what it is, or signed up and don’t use it. I know of no one who uses it regularly in my entire social circle.

Thanks for the great article

And the opportunity it affords brand marketers for truly leveraging the power of search+social to drive discovery & share is already enormous, as first movers are finding out.

But “uniques”, I think we’d all agree, is not the metric to focus on if we’re seeking proof. Like any other social network or membership program, active users is the KPI to watch.

Defining this is open to interpretation, but it’s not unreasonable to set a criteria along the lines of —

MAU = users who visit AND post, comment, share or create at least once weekly for the past 30 days

This is a mildly high bar for measuring active usership, but if you think about how and how often most people use Facebook, it’s a fair criteria to measure how much enduring engagement G+ is set to poach from the current giant —- as it slays it slowly… ; )

Thom Kennon | +Thom Kennon | @tkennon | bigevidence.blogspot.com