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Are Google+ Communities A Thing Of The Past?

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English: Google+ wordmark

English: Google+ wordmark (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Today is the day I pull the plug on Bloggers Unite, the Google+ community I so eagerly and quickly established to build a place for we bloggers to qvetch, klatch, and ‘raderie.

It worked. For a bit.

In the beginning, as with most things new on the Interwebz, the sharing and energy around Google+ was #RockHot. Everyone wanted in on the action, and my community became a friendly place for peeps to read new material and cascade a few plusses around the sphere.

After that, the invasion of the non-English bloggers happened overnight. One day, we all knew one another, and the next folks from Latin America, Europe, and South America joined and posted blogs in their native tongues.

As owner of this community, it became challenging to support and share blogs I couldn’t read. Yes, someone did inform me to use Google Translation; however, my time is limited.

Segue.

It’s All About Time

What did Google+ communities offer beyond a Facebook group or LinkedIn group? The chatter wasn’t different (in my community, at least). We who jumped in together were already connected on other social channels.

Although I did try to jump start the conversation, it seemed bloggers posted something and took off to greater confines where the engagement was more robust. I get it, so did I!

Amber-Lee Dibble, kindly accepted the role as co-manager of the community, and then she got swamped on a wild horse adventure (no kidding, she lives in the Alaska interior).

Are Other Google+ Communities Thriving?

Like you, I joined some really robust communities back in the day. When I was publishing my first book a year ago, Writing With Verve on the Blogging Journey, (if anyone wants a free copy in exchange for jumping onto my list, let me know!), I joined APE The Book managed by Peggy Fitzpatrick for Guy Kawasaki and Shawn Welch. With 3,400 members, it’s easy to get lost and lurk.

After I gleaned all I could (it was crazy with information), I had to turn off notifications as it became too much sensory overload.

Viveka von Rosen owns a community of 600 members about LinkedIn, her specialty, and I still see those notices rolling in my in box.

Maybe that’s the ticket to success for a G+ community? Specialty topics everyone wants to learn about?

Could be! And, what do you think? Are you still involved in any #RockHot Google+ communities?

Please list them here and tell us why as I’m now seeking a new home to visit!

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10 Steps Using Social Media For Business Development

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Institute of Technology and Business Development

Institute of Technology and Business Development (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We all need new business, right? Doesn’t matter if you’re a solo professional, small business of five or larger, everyone has to keep the pipeline full and the leads rolling in.

Digital marketing is absolutely the tier-one method, and I recently met an incredible expert who does it every day exceptionally well. And, the process is highly strategic requiring expertise learned over time and years of testing the methods.

Social media provides another business development methodology that everyone can do and probably does do without knowing it.

The other day, I tweeted, “If you ignore Twitter, it ignores you.” Indeed. When you fall off the ladder into the rabbit hole, it’s hard to jump out. There are a variety of reasons making that hole feel comfortable and safe and most of it has to do with being challenged and trying what’s new and different. While it’s easy to tweet and reshare everyone’s posts all day, what’s the gain besides burn out?

Let’s be more strategic and help fuel your lead generation. And, I’m not talking about inbound marketing right now; I’m talking about good old-fashioned networking.

10 Steps to Fuel Business Development

Step 1: Set Goals

There are four simple goals for using social media for business development:
1. Identify your target list
2. Elevate your personal brand
3. Ask for a meeting
4. Earn the business

Step 2: Track With a Spreadsheet or CRM System

If you’re on a budget and can’t afford a CRM system, then use your QuickBooks or Excel to track lead generation and prospecting. If you’re really on a budget, then perhaps index cards?

Step 3: Develop a Tier-One Target List

Everyone has a wish list of a company with which they’d like to work. Put your list of five or so together. Maybe you select a few out of each category that are different sizes.

For sales teams, this works, too. Select the company with which you most want to do business and get that target list active on a CRM system (but then I don’t need to inform sales how to prospect, right?).

Step 4: Who is the buyer of your services or product?

During the time I was in HubSpot school (I made a major investment in this platform to learn inbound marketing from the big guns), the words “buyer persona” appeared on my radar.

I had to think about the audience most likely to purchase my services and describe them – age, gender, expertise, values they appreciate, and more.

From the list in step one, select the title/role of the person most likely to buy your services or products. Get that title/role into your tracking system.

Step 5: Audit The Company

Here’s where social media comes to play. Using your tiered target list, begin exploring social media activity by the company. Record on your tracking system/CRM each of the channels and which is more powerful for shares and content.

LinkedIn (example). Does the company have a company page? How about a group? Who are the folks who work there? Can you find the title of the person most likely to buy from you? Better yet, take a look at your network; who in your network knows someone at that company to send an introduction on your behalf?

Step 6: Social Sharing

  • Google+. Similar to LinkedIn, check out the business page for your target company on Google+. Perhaps you’ll also find the folks who work there and you can do a search. (Not to mention, you can also do a name search on Google itself, of course!) Begin to +1 posts on Google+ by the company and also reshare it if you think it’s worthy.
  • Twitter. Companies tweet, obviously. Star the company into your Faves List and begin retweeting posts you like from that company. Pay attention to who’s tweeting; it may be an agency and there may also be initials on the posts indicating someone on a team.
  • Blog. Here’s where you can really influence and elevate your identity and brand. Visit the company blog frequently; in fact, subscribe and never miss a post. Read for a week or two (depending on the frequency of blog posts) and get a feel for the topics the company is writing on. All the while, you’re preparing to comment on the blog while resharing it on social media channels.While the blogger for the company may not be on your target list, you can still use the fact that you commented and shared that company’s blog post in your eventual pitch.
  • Your Blog. If you really want to make an impact and impression, invite the person you’re targeting to do a Q&A with you, write a guest post or to link. You can also follow them on the Interwebz; but, do not be a stalker! Use discretion and caution, please!

Step 7: Engage and Build Relationship

We who have been on social media longer than five years know how to build relationships with total strangers. It’s what the channels were built on. Today, that ‘raderie is next to nil; yet, people appreciate genuine authenticity with real professionals and people.

Use that concept to build upon the relationship you started. Of course, your goal is to get a meeting and perhaps earn some new business; however, there should be a common interest you can draw upon to build a true and solid foundation.

Step 8: Ask for a Meeting

If you’ve done a great job making small talk, sharing content and following your target list, then it’s time to ask for a meeting. Make it casual under the guise of networking because that’s what it is. No one wants a hard sell, and the recipient of your attention is smart enough to know a sales shakedown when it happens!

Essentially, be you and be real.

Step 9. Stay in Touch

If the meeting doesn’t product the result you wanted, do not fret. Sales pipelines sometimes take months to fill and business also takes time to close. If you drop off the radar, what happens when your prospect wants to find your name and number and can’t because you fell back into the comfy rabbit hole?

Step 10. Smile and Show Me Some Personality

I needed a step 10 to round this out, and maybe it’s the most important step in the bunch. Think about when you get a cold pitch; how’s your demeanor on the phone? Abrupt and impatient, right? Now think about paving the way to a prospect with smiles, laughs, personality, kudos and more. How do you think that person will feel about you with all that in front of the ask? Selling with heart couldn’t be more important, and think of it this way – if you get a “no thank you,” then move on to the next one and pretty soon it’s like riding a bike.

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Google Outage A Business Wake Up

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Credit: Mashable

Credit: Mashable

Where were you when the lights went out in Georgia? How about when Princess Diana was killed? Or when Michael Jackson was pronounced dead?

In an unexpected show of the mighty servers, Google inadvertently strengthened its image of world power when an internal software bug shut down Gmail, calendars, Google+, and documents for an hour on Friday Jan. 24, 2014. Where were you and with what Google feature were you engaged?

Life as we knew it was disrupted.

For those among us who didn’t know a mishap was brewing and wanted to share a post, we continued to click and try to get G+ to obey only to see five different shares of the same thing eventually turn up. (That was my experience.)

If Gmail was your primary email, you were screwed just when you were doing the Friday scurry to the weekend. It’s a bit scary, isn’t it, to rely on a behemoth like Google which keeps growing and expanding into new sectors of innovation? Is your business 100 percent dependent on Google for email, social media, calendars and document sharing?

Wake Up Business

Do you remember the days of yore when there was no email. We relied on the phone, fax and snail mail to communicate and instant global engagement was nil.

What we experienced was a first-hand feel for the powerhouse Google has become. I have to think in a boardroom deep in the confines of Google HQ that some executives may be grinning along with the grimace — just a tad.

  • Does your company rely strictly on Google for email, calendars, document sharing, analytics, and many other services?
  • Do you rent space on Google servers for blogging?
  • Maybe you rent space on WordPress.com, Yahoo! or MSN for a website, blog, message board, or other shared-server situation?

Perhaps back in the day, it was easier to just go with what’s “free.” At the risk of your privacy, online security, hacking, and outages you cannot control, among other horrors we’ve yet to experience, your business is subjected to the new whims of the Internet, and you never know what’s coming.

How will you prepare?

Author Rank Guidelines (Infographic)

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Google+ Author Rank is a topic that is not going away anytime soon. In fact, it’s heating up again. The folks at Vertical Measures have done a fabulous job with this infographic. Let’s start the conversation again with this:

The Author Rank Building Machine #verticalmeasures #Infographic #Authorrank
Data Graphic by Vertical Measures

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Get Ready For The 2014 Mobile Marketing Revolution

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Soulati-Media-mobile-marketing.jpgMobile Marketing. It’s ubiquitous; yet few businesses truly understand what it means. Let’s break it down to the basics and see if we can’t get you pushing brain power to smart devices to better understand what this means for you.

Smart Devices Are Prolific

  • When you’re waiting in line at the retail center this holiday season (it’s what I did this weekend), look at the moms with strollers and shopping carts. What are the kids holding to occupy them whilst mom shops? Tablets! There were more children on tablets strolling through the store than I’d ever seen (and each kid had one so they wouldn’t fight).
  • When you’re sitting in the movie theater waiting for the junk and previews to stop (what, like 20 minutes?) count how many peeps are surfing or reading on tablets, smartphones or e-Readers. Bet you can’t count that high, can you? Uh-huh.
  • Now, step up your thinking a notch and imagine the shoppers doing cost comparisons online as they stand in front of a store display. Do you know what’s happening? Retailers are offering a 10 percent cut from online prices.

That’s how I just bought my new Babolat racquets; strolled into Tennis Zone and asked how much (after months of demoing each one), and the clerk looked up the online price and cut it. Pretty soon the smart retailers will have Wifi-ready touch screens installed throughout the store for folks to comparison shop right there and see that the deal in the brick and mortar is better than the online price (it’s a no-brainer because of shipping and other service fees, right?).

  • Let’s think about one b-to-b example here…I do a ton of online research because I’m a professional blogger. I have to back up my content with a few proof points when I’m really trying to be smarter than the average bear. Research takes time, and I appreciate those 20 minutes in the movie theater to scroll through websites for the best downloadable content I can read later. That content looks primarily like a stale PDF; what’s your take on that?

Navigate Backward From the Mobile End User

To fully understand, because we can list about 50 examples like the ones above in a nanosecond, let’s do a backward navigation from the movie-theater surfers and the comparison shoppers’ end-user experiences.
What do they need on those smart devices to 1) Keep them clicking 2) Earn their loyalty and 3) Earn a high net promoter score? (You know what NPS is, right? Those who love it promote it; those who hate it detract with negative posts and shares.)

  • A Mobile, Responsive Website. We’ve been speaking about this for more than a year now. Every website built must be designed two ways – for desktop and laptop computers AND for smart, mobile devices. For the latter, it takes some design strategy to determine how to present the website onto the small, vertical (iPhone) screens. The design needs to scale to each screen regardless of size; the site needs to “respond” to the device’s parameters. If your company isn’t mobile ready in early 2014, you will play serious catch up (kinda like the social media train? It left the station two years ago?).
  • Interactive Content. Consider switching your content format from the dead PDF to an interactive magazine, whitepaper, newsletter and infographic. For anyone using the iPad or other tablets, this format is necessary and required. Because smart devices (phones and tablets) will be the most popular gift this holiday season, according to Gartner, tablet shipments will increase 53.4% to reach 184 million units by the end of 2013, you need to take a hard look at how you’re presenting content.
  • Long-Form Content & Video. If you’re a professional blogger or a budding blogger writing for a company blog, you need to look at lengthier content, about 1000 words on average, with links, imagery, tips and teachings. It’s never a dull moment in Google land, and SEO continues to shift seismically (hmm, didn’t know that was a word!). Video has always been important to a website and blog because of the marriage between Google and YouTube, for one; not to mention the 80 gazillion users and videos viewed, shared, posted, and embedded on YouTube daily and globally.
  • Engage on All Screens. https://blog.readz.com/driving-conversions-sales-mobile-inbound-marketing/ Remember, your television is a screen. People don’t always watch their favorite shows on TV; they turn to a tablet, notebook, laptop, or desktop. Think about how you can cross-pollinate each screen available to the end user with some activity that makes them engage. According to Google’s Mobile Playbook 2013, 84% of multiscreen shopping experiences include mobile devices.

NBC The Voice

Let me provide my favorite example…do you watch The Voice on NBC? It’s coming to a head where America will choose the winner in the next 10 days or so. To select the contestants who get to stay in the competition, America votes by text via sponsor Sprint, via Facebook, by downloading single songs on iTunes, and via The Voice website. This year, a brilliant strategy was introduced – the Twitter instant save. As the bottom three contestants were standing there to see who was saved, America got five minutes to tweet the name of the singer they most wanted to save along with a hashtag. The Voice engaged America as they tweeted their favorite choice to save, and in five minutes the votes were tallied, and the singer with the highest number of tweets and retweets was saved. This is ingenious, and a perfect example of how The Voice team engages viewers on all screens.

Google published The New Multiscreen World report detailed in this blog post here by Readz, the company creating “amazing mobile experiences” online by bringing dead whitepapers, PDFs, newsletters, and more alive with interactive links, images, and user-engaged elements.

Get the Website Mobile Ready First

It’s daunting, isn’t it, when you see all of the above above? It’s hard to know which step to take first, and that’s why you start at the beginning with your website. If your site is not mobile ready, I’m going to suggest to you a complete review and likely overhaul of your site.

You need to get a new mobile responsive template and design and develop the site for a variety of screens (see above) that scale. Get it working on the largest iMac screen, and then get it going for the smart devices. Find a developer who really knows what she/he is doing; it’s critical. All the rest will follow in good fashion.

Engage in Message Mapping, Too

I’m also going to suggest you launch a Message Mapping exercise with me to ensure you get your content strategy for external audiences solid. You might like this e-book I wrote (sadly, it’s in a dead PDF…hmm, maybe I need to engage with Readz?), Message Mapping: How to Deliver External Communication with a #RockHot Tool for Leaders.

By the way, what’s a long-form blog post without some required self-promotion? Got any questions? You know where to find me!

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