Or Is It Another Dumping Ground?
Photographers have always been the type of creatives to try something new and leave.
Flickr went to the pooper a while back and photographers flocked to 500px for freshness, conversation and inspiration.Then the engagement at 500px went to crap as well. I am not going to bore you with the details but if you want to read up on it read Flickr is getting better. 500px is getting worse from Jim Nix:
Google Plus is one of the best places for photographers to hang out at not just for the SEO benefit from Authorship but because of the networking, relationships, inspiration, conversation,etc. Two of my friends met on Google Plus and have gotten married (yea it happened) and one of them landed a job at Google as the Community Manager for Google Plus Photos. So I’m a huge fan of Google Plus for all of these reasons and more (dare I say Hangouts). However, sometimes people just dump garbage in Communities over at G+ and it gets quite annoying. Even with muting and marking as spam you continue to see the nonsense.
Example 1 is from a WordPress community that I’m a member of and use to gather feedback for Photocrati products… market research if you will. As you can see I posted asking for feedback on a new feature we’re working on for NextGEN Pro. It was not promotion, but rather asking a question.
However, you will also notice a person posting many times about plugins and themes for WordPress that he has linked with an affiliate link on his blogspot page.
Where’s the value?
There is none and so this community has become a sinking ship. Unfortunately the moderators and community owner have yet to do anything about the trolls.
This one really disappoints me as this community is my favorite photography podcast that I have had the pleasure of being a guest on a couple of times.
As you can see there is another person in this community that constantly posts “this week’s photo….” blah blah blah…
Where’s the value?
So here is my advice to anyone looking to enjoy their time on Google Plus and to take advantage of their many great aspects.
Have conversations. Stop promoting all the time and start listening, answering, debating, discussing and so on.
Make friends or make enemies. I do not care, but stop making Google Plus another dumping ground.
With all that said — if you would like to join me in photography discussions at Google Plus, click here and add me to a circle.
I reached 50,042 followers on Google Plus on October 28, 2013. Is it a milestone or insanity?
I hope to see you there.
Scott
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