Why not give Google+ a try?
Google+ is Google's answer to Facebook and Twitter. It lets you share posts, documents, photos and videos with ‘Followers'. Google say it's growing fast with over a 100m users and though it's got a way to go before it can match Facebook (800m) and Twitter (140m) for active users, it does have some great features: integration with other Google services like Google Apps and YouTube; really great photo sharing (photos look great in the brilliant mobile app); and Google+ ‘Pages' - standalone ‘Pages' linked to a Google+ account that you can use to promote your company or brand online.
There are a couple of Google+ features that make it stand out from Facebook and Twitter. First, Google+ lets you organise followers into ‘Circles' so you can then share different things with them. So you might have a circle called ‘Family' , another one called ‘Colleagues' and another one called ‘Friends'. You can share different things with different circles - photographs of the kids with ‘Family', embarrassing photographs of the boss at office Christmas party with ‘Colleagues', that kind of thing.
The other feature worth looking at is ‘Hangouts'. This is essentially online chat and video conferencing. You can start a Hangout and talk (and see) with up to 9 other people online. You can share documents with them and also do desktop sharing. There's a new feature called Hangouts on Air - that lets you live ‘broadcast' a Hangout and you can even record it so followers can watch it again later.
The integration with Google Apps (try collaborative document editing in Google Apps - it works) and video conferencing with Hangouts make Google+ a useful business tool - but I guess like a lot of technology you need a problem that Google+ solves.
Maybe one idea is to use Google+ to manage remote learners online. If you spend a lot of time (and money) visiting learners on site then maybe you could use Google+ to give them some support remotely? I think it would have to work something like this:
1. Set up an account on Google+ and then invite your learners to become followers (that's probably the hard bit because each learner would need to create a free Google account if they don't already have Gmail).
2. Organise those followers into different circles (remember, sets or groups of followers) - maybe you'd even create different circles for different courses or cohorts of learners. Now you can target your Google+ posts to different groups of learners.
3. Share some documents with followers. Google+ is integrated with all the other Google tools - so you could create documents in Google Apps and then share them with your learners. Do you get learners to complete induction or enrolment forms - could you do that from Google Apps and share them with Google+?
4. Then the killer feature could be Hangouts. You could use ‘Hangouts on Air' to broadcast a real time presentation (and record it so people can watch again later) or you could get a group of learners online at the same time to talk about coursework, run through an induction or provide support with an assessment.
The other thing to do is to set up your company ‘Page' on Google+. Our embryonic company page is here: +SkillsLogic (yes, we need followers). Google+ is completely integrated with Google search and Google say that a company or brand Google+ page will increase your overall Google search rankings - another good reason to give Google+ a try.
