by Mike Coulter, Social Media Strategist

Google+ has 359 million users worldwide .

+1 if you include us.

And according to the highly influential GlobalWebIndex, that’s 359 millionactive users, not just people who’ve been ‘encouraged ‘ by Google to sign in to +, in order to access the rest of their services.

The big number above makes G+ bigger than Twitter, and consequently the second largest social network after FB. (No doubt quite a few people will be non-plussed by that.)

But our enthusiasm for Google+ does come with an ‘however’; however.

Because before we jumped onto another social platform, it seemed like a good idea to look before we leaped. And what we saw was what might prove to be an ingenious way to re-purpose Google+ to help us turbo-charge how we communicate with each other, learn with each other and learn about each other, as a company. You know, like culturally.

Cutting down on the Cmd+c, Cmd+v mentality.

We really didn’t want to add to the stream of yet another public-facing, look-what-cool-things-we’ve-found, so-that-means-we’re-so-cool content curation service.

Rather we use locked-down Google+ Community pages, and the ancillary services such as inbuilt-search, (of course) notifications, hangouts & events as the basis of a highly efficient, super-smart internal comms platform. At team, company and client level it works beautifully, thanks in no small measure to its infinite flexibility & granularity of purpose.

When working on pitches we set up a dedicated G+ Community Page around the business we’re going after. Which makes for a great central hub for sharing the brief, research, ideas, workflow, & progress across the team that been assembled to work on the pitch. (We’re even toying with the idea of giving clients access to this page, even before we get the business so they can monitor/fly-on-the-wall our style as we move towards the pitch.)

On the other hand our creative teams often create a private ‘Community of Two’ to kick around ad concepts, visuals, off the wall ideas, and occasionally have a good old whinge to each other, all within the comfort and relative safety of their G+ home.

While the planning department; geographically spread across the London & Edinburgh offices (not to mention departure lounges everywhere), keeps up to speed and in the loop, in ways Basecamp, Google Docs and email couldn’t dream of. Reviewing the feed, in the last 8 weeks alone our Planners have shared 200+ pieces of easily digestible, but sometimes furiously debated pieces of intel, strategy angles, new business research, consumer insights, hangover cures, industry gossip and fantasy football selections. In short, Google+ keeps everyone, literally, on the same page.

And referring back to email for a moment; we’re finding that a lot of “stuff” we used to distribute by e is now disseminated much more effectively via G+; with the added benefit that email volume (sending & reading), across the entire company is down massively. (SFX: Collective sigh of relief.)

Thanks to the G+ Company Community page everybody in the house knows what’s going on, who said what, who attached what, and who is where when, much of the time. (And you wouldn’t believe how powerful and potent a simple +1 from one of the Directors on the post of a junior copywriter can be.)

All our current thinking easily accessible in one place. Indexed and searchable bliss.

What’s more for senior management activity on Google+ gives them useful insights about the company; What the issues are, spotting smart thinking from unexpected sources, centralising the rumour-mill, what new apps/platforms/services are influencing the collective imagination of the company. Sidenote: Flipboard, Tumblr, Quora (yes Quora) & Google/Twitter/Apple Cards are current topics of debate btw.

So there you have it, a brief overview on how Blonde Digital is using Google+ and how it provides a sense of flow that permeates the whole organisation.

To find out more about what makes us tick, (and plus) please feel free to follow the following Blonde staffers on Google+ listed below. There’s a whole bunch of us who, in addition to using the platform for in-house comms, also use it very publicly and we hope powerfully; personally.

+Mike Coulter, +Anshuman Rane, +Phil Adams, +Caspar Aremi, +Louise Durham, +Rory Natkiel +Megan Lambie, +Jamie MacAdam, +Andy Irvine