Tag Archives: Google

Building and Styling your G+ Brand Page

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Though Google has made Google+ Brand pages fairly intuitive, there are a couple features that I want to highlight so your page can be as “you” as can be! If you’re not personally on G+ already, check out our Google+ Walkthrough to familiarize yourself with its features before diving into making a brand page.

If you haven’t created your G+ brand page yet, go to your personal Google+ page and on the bottom right side bar, select “Create a Google+ page.” Google will then walk you through creating your page.  Whether you’ve created your brand page already or not, make sure you take note of these features – highlighted in this image.

  1. Have a Punchy Tagline. Right under the name of your page, you get 10 words to describe your page. Make sure these 10 words (or less) alone gets your message across.
  2. Posting. Like your personal G+ page, posting to your brand page works the same. It is set to default share with the public, so make sure everything you’re posting is relevant and what you want the world to associate with your brand. For more info on posting to certain circles versus public, see our Google+ Walkthrough.
  3. Circles. One of the major differences with G+ Pages versus your personal G+ is that pages cannot add individuals to its circles without the individual first adding the page to one of their circles. However, pages can add each other freely.
  4. Photos. If you’re building a brand page on G+, you probably already have a Facebook brand page. To easily repopulate all your photos from your Facebook page to your G+ brand page, check out Pick&Zip. It will let you select anything from your pages’ albums to your own albums to your tagged photos. Then you can easily go into your G+ brand page and re-upload your albums or use Picasa Desktop (free) which can sync directly with your G+ account. Unfortunately, you will have to redo all your captions and tags. Sorry ‘bout it. For more on Google+ photos, check out Charlie Sorrel’s article in Wired.
  5. Videos. G+ pages has a tab to easily upload and share videos. It also gives a nifty option to disable the video link if you have no videos to share to keep your page clear of clutter.
  6. Scrapbook Photos. The 5 photo spread across the top of your Google+ Page is your “scrapbook photos.” These are photos you define and will not change without your instruction, unlike Facebook where the top photos on your page are defined by the most recently added photos. This gives you a chance for some very creative branding such as these Google+ Pages.

Aside from the design and content on your page, make sure to add your official G+ badge to your website! They provide the code snippet and by adding it to your website, you easily “verify” this is your brand’s official page and drive traffic to your new G+ brand page. To find your G+ brand badge, in the left hand column click “Get started.”

Then follow to “Get the Badge>>.” Also on that page is your direct link to your brand’s Google+ page.

Another important note is that Google+ Pages currently only allows one admin. Mashable has reported that Google+ will enable multiple admins for brand pages before 2012. We’re keeping our fingers crossed.

If you have any further questions, I’d love to help answer them! Leave a comment and we’ll get back to you. Add us to your circles for more more trends and insights!

Google+ 101: A Quick Walkthrough

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Google+’s (g+) new social networking platform is so simple that it’s complicated. What?  Here, I’m going to try to break down g+ to help counter the counterintuitive social platform. It might help if you first go play with g+ and realize you’re a little confused or lost.

From what I have gathered, there are 4 features that g+ currently offer:  Stream, Hangouts, Sparks and Huddle.

g+ Circles: I don’t consider g+’s “circles” an actual feature. It’s more a way of organizing people you are connected to on g+, kind of your choosing who your separate audiences will be. The first thing you should do when joining g+ is add users to circles. When adding a new friend in the future, you will do the same thing by simply dragging them into an appropriate circle. Note: when adding people to circles, they will see that you have added them but they will not be able to see the name of the circle you put them in. Go ahead, put that status-update obsessive friend in your “annoying” circle. Now to move on to actual features.

g+ Stream: Very much like your Facebook newsfeed, your Stream is the main source of activity on g+. First, attach what you want to post (text, pictures, link, video, or location) and right underneath, you choose who you publish to. This chart gives you an idea of who you will publish to for what purpose:

Publish To Comparable To Thoughts
Public Unprotected Twitter Incorporating a twitter like feature into a Facebook like platform – Genius. g+ gets an A+.
Example: You add a celebrity into your “Celebrity” circle. They post publicly, you see it. You post, they don’t see it (unless you’re awesome and they added you into their circles and choose to view that circle’s posts in their stream).
Circles Posting to groups on Facebook but much more useful. Really allows you to compartmentalize your social networking life in one place, instead of having separate sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn etc.You choose which circle to publish your posts to.
Example: Share your latest tech finding with only your coworkers and pictures of last night’s shenanigans only with your close friends.
Extended Circles Varies with privacy settings in Facebook Publish things 2 degrees out of your circle (your circles, and your circles’ circles)
Example: “Looking for an intern for my new startup company!” It’ll hit friends of friends, screening off a good amount of crazy out there.
Individuals Writing on someone’s wall or Twitter’s direct messaging I had some friends complain that they can’t post on peoples’ walls anymore. However, you can! Publish strictly to that individual and that post will only show up on your friend’s and your stream.

 

g+ Hangout: Group video chatting via Google. It’s about time! You can even share/watch Youtube videos together. If you start a hangout with an entire circle, if they see it on their stream, they can join at any time. Of course you can also just hang out with one or two people and the rest of the g+ world will not know it is happening. I hope Google updates g+ soon so we can view multiple screens at a large size (currently you have to choose the best looking person in your group chat to view larger and the rest are thumbnail sized).

g+ Sparks: I’ll get back to you on that one. So far it looks like a chat room set up to me, have yet to explore it.

g+ Huddle: Possibly my favorite g+ feature, only available on the g+ mobile app. Group text messaging! First thing I thought was: planning excursions with large groups just got so much more efficient! I don’t need to blast out a text to my group of 20 friends that I want to invite to my BBQ anymore. Add them all to the huddle (assuming they have the mobile app) and shoot out one text that reaches them all and have a conversation that keeps everyone in the loop without sending 20 identical messages to each person.

And the last thing I’ll talk about is privacy. Privacy is a big deal when it comes to anything online. My friend was telling me she was trying to figure out how to make her posts private on g+ and I thought about it – by nature of the way g+ is set up, everything is private until you choose to publish to a circle, individual or public. Of course if you accidently publish it to the wrong circle, you might be in big doo doo, but that’s entirely on you. For your profile, you can set each section’s (employment, education, etc.) privacy settings.

Google+ Musings

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It seems this holiday weekend was not just about your typical fireworks, BBQ and beer. This year,  Google+ took center stage in many conversations around grills, campfires and swimming holes. If you were one of the “lucky” beta invitees out there, chances are good you have spent some time over the last few days building your circles, trying to figure out how to connect your Instagram feed, and cheerfully observing the hoopla around Google’s quest to take out Facebook.

The initial pains of building another network, from scratch, AND having to engage were definitely enough to keep me at bay- at least for a few hours.  I finally gave in and started the initial set up, which took about 15 minutes. As the weekend went by, I couldn’t help but check in on my growing circles, attempt to invite more of my friends (which I haven’t been successful with since that first hour) and after many tries, got my Instagram feed to publish. What’s the most interesting thing about Google + for me? Simply all the buzz around this shiny, new toy. I can’t wait to see how it plays out.

The world is definitely buzzing with Google+. Chris Brogan’s recent article provides an in depth look at how powerful, or weak this new toy really is, or has the potential to be.  What are your musings so far? We’d love to hear from you!

White Paper: Shaping the Future of New Media

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Online PR expertise

It was every PR practitioner’s nightmare and further evidence of the fact that we as marketers are the most out of control and the most in control we have ever been. Editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine and author of the book The Long Tail, Chris Anderson listed the email addresses of 350 names he has blacklisted from his email inbox on his very public and popular blog, thelongtail.com. The 350 offenders had allegedly sent Anderson irrelevant PR “pitches” one too many times. To the mortification of many public relations people who were on that list (with their company name in the email address), it served to show no one is safe from the fire hose, not even the people you hire to protect you from the fire (or to start it) depending on your needs. Anderson’s public protest sends the message that you must choose wisely when picking a PR firm to represent you, and it is essential you select one that knows the rules of the game and how to create compelling messaging directed at the right audience. The fact that mass distribution outlets for information exist these days is no excuse to spam irrelevant information in the hopes it randomly catches a reporter’s attention.

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Outrank Your Competition in Google with Online Marketing Tips

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Increasingly, companies are searching for ways to reach specific niches online and capture customer their information. There are many low-cost tactics companies can do right away to improve their visibility and ensure regular communication with potential customers. Anyone on the first page of Google is your competition, so first identify what terms your customers are using to search for products and services like yours and which online outlets your customers visit for information.

Amy Selbach, Business Development Director for Zenzi, a San Diego based PR and marketing firm offers the following tips:

Make a list of search terms you think consumers may be using to find you online.
Use WordTracker.com and Overture.com to indicate key search terms for your business and include those search terms in your press releases and web content.

Create videos and podcasts and host them behind a registration page. I.e. if you are a tax specialist, offer a tax seminar on the SBA’s Web site or a hyperlink to your site where prospects can download in exchange for their contact information which you can pass off to sales teams.

Use customers to do your marketing for you.

Use sites like stumbleupon.com and del.icio.us.com, which allow members of the community to give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down on sites submitted. The more approval votes a site receives, the more it is forwarded to other members of the community who have expressed interest in that type of content.

Establish relationships with key bloggers and Web sites that cover your subject matter. Keep pitching them but also comment on their pages with your product name incorporating key words for your service or product.

Include hotlinks to special landing pages in the first paragraph of your press releases or newsletters rather than your general URL so that you can track where leads are coming from.