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Well, managed to wangle an invite into Google+ in the first few hours of the invites being issued, so here’s a quick look around. [Update: less than 1 hour after typing that sentence, the invites have been switched off for now!]
Firstly, in case you were unaware, Google+ is Google’s potential rival to social networks such as Facebook. However before everyone tries to suggest that Google will fail in this space, even from the outset Google has obviously learned from some of the ‘mistakes’ that have been made elsewhere, as well as with Wave and Buzz.
Once you have joined, you should first complete your profile. Most people with a Google account may have already added some information to their public profile, but now is the chance to add much more, including multiple profile pics, which you can rotate through simply by clicking. You can connect accounts eg Twitter, Linkedin, Quora, Facebook etc, as well as add photos, bio information, and adjust privacy settings.
Google does appear to have taken into account the many complaints that there have been about privacy issues on social networks, with a full range of privacy options available. The amount and kind of notifications are also easily changed to prevent inundation of your inbox. Interestingly, you can also receive notifications by SMS but as yet this appears to only be available for India and the US.
The black toolbar that has been the subject of much debate these last few days now has easy access to Google+ at the left hand side, and notifications on the right. However, it only appears on Google.com at present, although the toolbar does appear in all Google properties eg Gmail, Reader, documents, calendar etc.
Once your profile is complete, you can add people to Circles, and seemingly these can be unlimited in number, allowing you to slice and dice friends, family, colleagues in numerous different ways. People can be added to various different circles and privacy settings can be customised for each circle. A circle can be added as a tab in Chrome, allowing you to easily click on a Circle and follow what everyone is doing.
You can see people who are in other Google + users’ circles and add them to your own. However, these people do not have to add you to their circles – just as people do not have to follow you back on Twitter. The names of your circles are not revealed, allowing you some privacy over your choice of circle names.
Sparks is a really interesting feature which allows you to search on interests and find sites and news of interest. For any companies putting out regular press releases and featuring in Google News, your keyword optimisation is going to be important if you want to be found here. Sparks may take over from Readers in some ways, pushing the content to you for your interests.
Hangouts have huge potential, particularly for businesses who want to do online collaboration, run webinars easily, and for tech support. There still seem to be a few bugs – avatars not showing if no webcam, difficulty of adding a single person rather than an entire circle, call drop outs etc – but there are some very cool features such as public notifies of mute, sharing YouTube videos, and the sound and video quality for voice does seem to be at least as good as Skype when it is working.
Huddle allows you to have up to 6 people in a threaded text chat, making decision making simple.
There is a mobile app at m.google.com/plus and an Android app already in the store, with an iPhone app coming shortly once it is approved.
The mobile app makes following your stream simple, as well as bringing together all your Google properties in one place eg gmail, calendar etc, which is a long-awaited service.
Adding people to your circles brings plenty of content into your streams and for businesses is likely to prove preferable to Facebook, allowing targeting of users who are not FB fans. Google recently issued a statement that this time last year over 20% of searches were conducted by people who were logged into a Google account, so it is likely that this will rise quickly once the buzz about Google+ gets out and people want to try it.
By limiting the number of invitations, Google is playing a canny game and making this currently a fairly exclusive club that many more will want to join. Once the invites are opened up again, the Find and Invite feature offers a chance to add people who Google has identified are in social networks or linked to you in some way by email etc.
More shortly….going back to play!
For over a decade, websites and email have ruled the roost. Each day now, their overall dominion of the Net is undermined, and it is imperative that any business understands how to capitalise on these changes and new developments.
The most important thing to understand is that any prospect looking for your kind of product or service may well not find you through a search engine. It could be through a link, a tweet, a Facebook status update, a forum signature or post, on an aggregator such as alltop.com, a multimedia press release through pitchengine.com, a video on Youtube.com or metacafe.com, a podcast, an SMS, or much more.
If a prospect is looking for information, for instance, a white paper on search engine optimisation or the latest news on your industry sector, an event in their area, or an expert to ask, you need to be found by whichever channel and means they use to look for what they are seeking. And this means that if the prospect falls over your info on one channel, you need to ensure that the info they are looking for is there and not several more clicks away and a ‘delve into the depths’ search. Or at the very least, there is a clear signpost to the info and an indication they are in the right place or soon will be.
With a proliferation of corporate Facebook pages, there is often a failure to make these pages one of the signposts to further knowledge or information. It is a simple matter to use your Facebook page as an aggregator of all that your company is communicating to the outside world. This allows people who use Facebook as a preferred medium to instantly grasp your raison d’etre and the quality and quantity of information that is now available to them from you.
The majority of outputs from services such as Twitter, YouTube, Linkedin, Blogger, WordPress etc are available as RSS feeds. RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication. And this is what you are doing – “syndicating” your content so that it is available through multiple sources. Whilst there should always be a focus on ensuring that your content is syndicated to external sites to reinforce your linking, branding and content strategies, it is always worth checking that your own content is syndicated within your own properties too – whether these are Facebook pages, Linkedin profiles, YouTube channel etc.
Not only does this offer the chance to have automatically, regularly updated content on each of your properties, it also generates an archive of multiple keywords over time to help your sites be found, and shows any visitor that you are alive and kicking and keeping up with all that is happening in your world. Don’t just link to the information, where possible include it directly on the page using the multiple tools available to do so.
So, take a look now. Is your latest corporate tweet showing on your Facebook page? Are your blog posts showing? Is your most recent press release there? Are your YouTube videos embedded?
Once done, your Facebook page will become infinitely more attractive to visitors, who will then ‘like’ it so it shows on their wall and then the feed which all their friends see, which attracts more visitors, who then ‘Like’ it – see where we are going?!
There are some very striking social media icons out there, and they can only add to a website, as well as showing you are aware of social media and its importance in everyone’s online life.
Smashing Apps have put together a full range of social media icons for you to plagiarise, enjoy, to inspire or just to oooh and ahhh over.
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Customer acquisition carries a far higher cost than customer retention, so it is vital that you look after your customers once you have found them.
However, it is surprising how many businesses, particularly small business where the resources are often limited, fail to keep in touch with their customers.
There are multiple ways to do this, and it need not be expensive. Here are 5 quick and easy ways to make sure your customers remember you.
1. Have you sent all your existing and past customers a Christmas card yet? It needn’t be at the expense of trees – send a digital Xmas card. It’ll also give you a chance to clean up your e-mail distribution list for 2010.
2. Write a regular newsletter and email it out. When we say “regular”, it may only be monthly, every three months, or even annual, but make it regular so your customers expect it.And don’t forget to archive it on your site as extra content, and include links in your email so people visit your website. It could include news about new products, clients, exhibitions and shows you have attended, or discounts and special offers.
3. Add a blog to your site. This means that you will need to come up with regular content, but that needn’t be difficult. Pick a time schedule you can keep to, eg every Thursday or the first week of every month if you have limited time and resources.
4. Use the social networks and tools that are available. For instance, create a fan page on Facebook, use Twitter to inform your customers about sales or special offers, join Linkedin and add your news to your profile or discussion groups.
5. Send a present. It might just be a pen with your company logo on it, but every little reminder of you is good. Especially when the present is useful. (I love receiving dongles/memory sticks. And I often watch and read the content before deleting it
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Are you spending time worrying about SEO? Or worse, spending untold money trying to move up the search engine results pages only to find that for no good reason your website has vanished from the top 100 pages?
If you find your days and nights are haunted by keyword research, writing META tags, hunting down keyword density tools, aching over whether the copy is sufficiently optimised……
Then, STOP!
Open your website right now and ask yourself these simple questions:
1. Does my website look good?
2. Does it tell a prospective customer everything they need to know about my products and services?
3. Does it include useful, helpful, valuable, content about my products and services eg how to manuals, articles, links to other resources and so on?
4. Does it include full contact details that are easy to find from every page?
5. Does it sell? Or, from a customer point of view, is it easy to buy?
6. Have I recently added some fresh content for regular visitors?
If the answer to all of the above is “Yes”, then you do not need to keep worrying about SEO. What you need to do is find who your customers are and where they hang out – in forums, in blogging communities, on Twitter, in social networks, etc – and go and talk to them. Network. Socialise. Share your experience and help people out. Build your reputation as a good person to deal with and you will find that on its own will encourage people to check you out, remember you, recommend you.
When you are asked questions and can give a great answer, add it to the FAQ on your site to help someone else.
There is far more that will attract your target audience to your website than just SEO. Word of mouse is far more effective in finding your target audience. Think beyond the search engines.
If your answer to any of the above is “No”, then you need to resolve some very basic issues with your website before anything else.
And when you feel you have got enough customers from being social, then you may wish to have a look at your needs for SEO again. And you may find it is no longer required because satisfied customers and people you have met in your ’socialising’ are doing more than a little on-page SEO could do by linking to you, recommending you in blogs, on Twitter, to their networks and so on.
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Metcalfe’s Law, which is mainly applied to telecoms networks, but can seemingly equally be applied to social networks, states:
the value of a (telecommunications) network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users
Therefore, if you know 2 people, the value of your network is 4. If you need 10 people, the value of your network is 100.
As social networking has taken off, both online and offline (breakfast networking events, niche networks events and so on), those who have the largest followings are often lauded as great networkers, which seems to instil feelings of jealousy and inadequacy in others.
Obviously, applying Metcalfe’s Law to the size of the networks would infer that their networks are more valuable than our own poor attempts! However, there has to be some consideration in valuing your network of: quality.
In telecoms networks, the value of the network is not affected by the quality of the user, so Metcalfe’s Law needs to now include a quality score. I am not the first to state this, and discussions on this subject have been ongoing for quite some time with even Bob Metcalfe himself getting involved, but maybe it bears consideration again as you go for the World record for new Twitter followers in a week!
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Facebook have announced the launch of vanity URLs this coming weekend, which means that instead of an indistinguishable FB URL for your profile, you will now be able to have http://www.facebook.com/clickthroughmarketing for instance.
There are a variety of views on this latest FB development, as always, ranging from the outraged through to those who think it is a good idea because of potential for SEO. However, FB have had to take some steps to prevent squatters leaping in to get the big names where there may be legal challenges to ownership, and also to try to prevent potential spammers etc. It is probably the handling of this issue which will make or break the system, as FB have not allowed brand name owners to pre-register and hence prevent squatting.
Another oversight is to disallow registration of business pages and groups where there are less than 1000 fans, which cuts out many small but well-established SMEs on the site.
Overall, this is hardly a new idea and many are citing imitation of Myspace which already allows usernames in the URLs, but myspace introduced this whilst in its initial stages rather than with 200million users, which inevitably spells a gold rush this weekend.
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To follow up on the post yesterday about respecting your customers and keeping an eye on what is being said about your company, just thought we would add socialmention.com
This site searches google, digg, facebook, twitter, youtube, friendfeed and many more social networking and social media websites to provide you with real time results for mentions of your company, products etc.It also, obviously, helps you to keep an eye on the reputation of your competitors!
There is a very easy to understand scoring system and with an RSS feed or email alerts, it is a simple task to add this to your Google alerts to monitor your online reputation.
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Comscore have this week announced the release of a new tool to measure the reach of online ads, and recent research using the tool shows that Facebook is the biggest display advertiser in the UK, with 12.5billion ad views in April 2009.
This reflects a growing trend, most visible with Twitter users etc, of the internet moving into real time mode, streaming information to users in a dynamic manner rather than from static websites. Users want information **now**, and are increasingly seeking recommendations from their social network to find the information, products etc they want.
For those who have previously avoided display ads etc in their marketing mix, the availability of tools to conduct serious metrics may provide the impetus to reconsider. However, despite FB displaying so many ads, it is still debatable whether the users are clicking on the ads and hence advertisers are benefiting from such exposure.
The question has to be whether the age old advertising medium is still valid in 2009, and whether what is required is to move with the times and for marketing to be much more ‘real time’ eg with Tweets, live news streams, web TV /live video and so on.
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