HootSuite Extends Google+ Pages to All Users

This is a big deal for anyone that manages multiple pages across several social media platforms.  Up until now, adding content to your client’s Google Plus pages was an large extra step.  You couldn’t schedule them, so you had to use your calendar to remind you to update a campaign post.  Well that all changes now!

HootSuite Extends Google+ Pages to All Users

Post is in the News & Events Parent CategoryJuly 18, 2012 by Ashley Jane Brookes0

HootSuite is pleased to announce that Google+ Pages is now available to nearly 5 million users worldwide!

Whether you’re on a Free, a Pro or an Enterprise plan, you’ll be able to efficiently manage Google+ Pages alongside other social channels, providing brands a better way to capitalize on the social power of this rapidly expanding social network.

To add Google+ Pages: Access your Profile from the side menu, then select + Add a Social Networkunder My Social Networks.

I know the HootSuite Pro account had this already, but it’s a nice add for the smaller companies still using the Free version of the tool.    Good Job HootSuite!

Good Hunting!

Related articles

• HootSuite Adds More Awesome to Hootlet with AutoSchedule – HootSuite Social Media Management (roihunters.wordpress.com)
• HootSuite adds AutoSchedule to the world’s most popular social media management toolbox (watch out, Buffer) (venturebeat.com)
• Why You Can’t Escape Social Media Marketing Any More (readwriteweb.com)
• HootSuite adds more applications to its platform with bigger plans… (prweb.com)

HootSuite Adds More Awesome to Hootlet with AutoSchedule – HootSuite Social Media Management

HootSuite / Hootlet has become one of my favorite tools to manage twitter accounts and my Facebook account and Facebook pages for myself and my clients.  I’ve tried many but this web based service seems to have the best of both words and I have come to expect it on all the machines I work on.

HootSuite Adds More Awesome to Hootlet with AutoSchedule

Post is in the News & Events Parent Category July 17, 2012 by Andy Au0

HootSuite adds more awesome to Hootlet with new features including AutoSchedule – a powerful new link share tool that determines the optimal time to schedule social media messaging. Now you can automatically queue messages throughout the day to maintain a consistent social media presence.

via HootSuite Adds More Awesome to Hootlet with AutoSchedule – HootSuite Social Media Management.

Hootlet – Time Saver

This Chrome extension is one of the first I add to any machine I work on.  It has saved me countless hours.  One of the new time savers is Auto-schedule feature.    When I’m pushing content to my to biggest twitter accounts try and space it out.  So you can imaging when you are pushing 20 updates the time management can get a bit tricky.  Now this is taken care of.   I have used it today and like it thus far.

Schedule Still Works

Now, if I’m managing a campaign for a client, I still manage the schedule manually.  I can release the updates to Twitter and Facebook based on the campaign we have designed.  This still remains so you don’t lose anything there.

Possible Improvements

Here are some ideas I would love to see in this new capability:

• Load Balancing – As you put more updates in, they auto-adjust to spread out over time, maybe a range you give them.  9 to 5 or 7 to 7, don’t know.
• More Automation – Since HootSuite is already watching, they should build in auto-responder capability.  That would be awesome.
• 7 Drip Logic – Have a singe post/update  set for distribution X number of times.  The logic here is that a message doesn’t really sink in until it’s heard 7 times by the consumer.

So what do you think of the tool?  What other suggestions would you recommend to HootSuite.

Good Hunting!

Related articles

• HootSuite launches AutoSchedule feature for Hootlet browser extension, for ‘smart’ tweet-scheduling (thenextweb.com)
• HootSuite adds AutoSchedule to the world’s most popular social media management toolbox (watch out, Buffer) (venturebeat.com)
• HootSuite adds more applications to its platform with bigger plans… (prweb.com)
• HootSuite Adds More Social Integration. Is It Time To Switch Your Social Management Service? (smallbiztechnology.com)
• HootSuite adds Instagram, SlideShare and more to its App Directory (gabrielcatalano.com)

foursquare Social Media Ignorance

Image via CrunchBase

So tell me what’s wrong with this picture.  I got this email today:

Hi Tim,

If you’ve opened up foursquare in the last couple weeks you’ve probably noticed that we made a ton of changes. We re-imagined the entire app, Extreme Makeover style, to make it even easier for you and your friends to share and save your experiences and find new places to go. We also gave it plenty of design love and under-the-hood tweaks, so it’s not only prettier but faster than ever – hurrah!

Usage Ignorance

Anyone who has me as a friend in foursquare or see’s my Facebook stream knows I use foursquare a lot.  The question is, why doesn’t foursquare know this?  How can I get an email making it seem like I need to be reminded that the screens have changed, the navigation is different, more map features added, and more?  So why is a social media company incapable of using their own data to enhance my relationship?  Why not make me feel special rather then a member of their junk mail list?

Lessons for  Small Business

Even the big boys don’t get it right.  So don’t ever think that you should not try because some major player in your space can always do it better and faster then you.  Often, small business has more chances to beat the larger players at their own game because small business can be more nimble.

So my advice, don’t count out social media in your marketing plan!

Related articles

• What Is the Point of… Foursquare? (readwriteweb.com)
• Foursquare Gets A New Look: Redesign Makes Checking In Stickier And More Social (techcrunch.com)
• Location-based social media service Foursquare gets a major revamp (buzzom.com)
• Choosing the Best Social Media (openforum.com)

Facebook Timeline Ads: A Gift to Google+

Well this morning I checked my Facebook Timeline to see if my latest social apps are still working.  I don’t want to recommend my clients use these features then only to find out that they are not working. So we test … test … test.  In this morning’s testing I find I have new intruders, dare I say interlopers, in my Timeline stream.

Exhibit One – The Interloping Ads!

Ads Are My Friends

I know this sounds strange coming from a person who counsels small and medium sized companies on how to use internet advertising to their advantage, but putting things in MY STREAM seems like a violation to me.  I fully understand the left or right hand side of the page (depending on which Facebook page you are looking at) will hold their ads.  And i want those ads to be relevant, or contextual, to the content that is on that page.  Actually, I’m counting on it.

I and admire Facebook for allowing me to turn off the setting which shows my name under ads.  Even though I may have liked a product, if I’m not getting paid to promote it, why give them that for free.

What does bother me is showing ads in my stream.  The ads so far have been nothing about me.  Nothing about the story i am trying to tell about me.  So why does Facebook now think it’s going to make me want to use their product more to continue to build that story?

In Walks Google+

I see Google+ as walking away with a win on this.  I think this violation will cause many to search out alternate solutions to telling their story.

What do you think?

Related articles

• Facebook timeline your whole life – Lifebook anyone? (marketing.yell.com)
• Facebook Timeline – what it means for your business (simplybusiness.co.uk)
• The Facebook timeline feature and what it means for your page (marketing.yell.com)
• Using Facebook Timeline for Online Branding (blogherald.com)
• Facebook Timeline for Pages: Why is this so hard? (alainawiens.wordpress.com)
• Here’s what your Google+ posts would look like in Facebook’s Timeline view (thenextweb.com)

Google: Learning, Growing, and Attacking Itself

Image by Bruce Clay, Inc via Flickr

One of the guys I follow in my Reader , Gerrit Eicker, had this post “Google’s Graveyard III” (a potion of the text provided below) and it got me to thinking about another post I shared recently “6 of Apples Greatest Mistakes“, in which I suggest that mistakes are only mistakes unless we learn from them.

Marketing Warfare

I want to throw on top of these thoughts another possible activity that is going on: Google is ATTACKING ITSELF to keep it’s leader position.  My contention is that they are following the marketing principles laid out in Al Ries and Jack Trout‘s “Marketing Warfare” text, and specifically “Defensive Warfare”.

Defensive Warfare as laid out in the text is as follows:

• Only the market leader should consider playing defense.
• The best defensive strategy is the courage to attack yourself.
• Strong competitive move should always be blocked.

For the sake of brevity, I’m going to layout two assumptions here: 1) Google is the leader in the industry for cloud solutions, 2) through the use of acquisitions the are ‘blocking strong competitive moves’.  These two point could be posts in themselves so I just want to state them and move on, if you wish to comment on these assumptions, fine, but this post wishes to focus on the act of attacking yourself as a form of marketing strategy.

Focusing on Google+: Obsolete Your Old Products

One of the principles in Marketing Warfare is that you need the courage to attack yourself.  In this case by introducing new products which cause old products to become obsolete.  In this way, you are creating a moving target for those that are trying to overtake you or one of the products you have created.

Now through on top of this the ability to absorb obsolete product capabilities into the new product, and all the new capabilities already in the new product, and you have the ability to keep your advisaries constantly trying to play catch up.

And as an added bonus, you can take the lessons learned from the previous product (in this case Google Buzz let’s say) and use them to refine your approach to market, or customer service, logistics, or whatever the lesson provides, to the new product.

A fall sweep

10/14/2011 10:03:00 AM

We aspire to build great products that really change people’s lives, products they use two or three times a day. To succeed you need real focus and thought—thought about what you work on and, just as important, what you don’t work on. It’s why we recently decided to shut down some products, and turn others into features of existing products.

Here’s the latest update on what’s happening:

• Code Search, which was designed to help people search for open source code all over the web, will be shut down along with the Code Search API on January 15, 2012.
• In a few weeks we’ll shut down Google Buzz and the Buzz API, and focus instead on Google+. While people obviously won’t be able to create new posts after that, they will be able to view their existing content on their Google Profile, and download it usingGoogle Takeout.
• Jaiku, a product we acquired in 2007 that let users send updates to friends, will shut down on January 15, 2012. We’ll be working to enable users to export their data from Jaiku.
• Several years ago, we gave people the ability to interact socially on iGoogle. With our new focus on Google+, we will remove iGoogle’s social features on January 15, 2012. iGoogle itself, and non-social iGoogle applications, will stay as they are.
• The University Research Program for Google Search, which provides API access to our search results for a small number of approved academic researchers, will close on January 15, 2012.

In addition, later today the Google Labs site will shut down, and as previously announced, Boutiques.com and the former Like.com websites will be replaced by Google Product Search.Changing the world takes focus on the future, and honesty about the past. We learned a lot from products like Buzz, and are putting that learning to work every day in our vision for products like Google+. Our users expect great things from us; today’s announcements let us focus even more on giving them something truly awesome.Posted by Bradley Horowitz, Vice President, Product

Share with me your thoughts or any other examples of companies using the same Defensive Marketing as Leaders in their industry.

Good Hunting

Related articles

• News: Google to shut Google Buzz (vikypedia.in)
• Google Axes More Services: Jaiku, Buzz, Code Search & More (techcrunch.com)
• A fall sweep (googleblog.blogspot.com)
• Google Will Discontinue Google Buzz and Code Search (googlesystem.blogspot.com)
• Google Product Shutdown of the Day (geeks.thedailywh.at)

Facebook’s Unfriendly Competition Subscriptions

We all, deep down in our souls,  know that Facebook has destroyed the concept of friendship.   Facebook has cheapened the meaning of the word friend, and yet, unwittingly …  somehow, elevated the concept of  “BFF” (best friend foreveeeeer!!!!)

Just the other day, a long time friend came to me apologizing that she had just recently accepted a long forgotten sent Facebook friend request.  She took five minutes explaining how and why she accepts friends in Facebook and said that my friends invitation was simply an oversight and begged for my forgiveness.  My response: “Oh OK, so how you been this week?”

New Competition: Google+ Circles

Not even out of BETA, Google+ has caused some irritation to Facebook.  You can’t help but seeing reviews on the concept of “Google+ Circles” and your ability to project your information to specific circle of people rather then having it pasted to your entire ‘friend list’ in Facebook.  After all, we segment our lives differently then all or nothing.

Google+ calls them “People”, Facebook calls them “Friends”   I can subscribe to people’s feeds in Google+, and yes even narrow that down by creating a sub-set call Circles.  Now in Facebook I can subscribe to ‘someone’ without being a being a friend.

Facebook has introduced a new look to ‘Lists’.  You could always create friend lists, but most people never used them because they were not the easiest to create or maintain.  Now they are more predominant on the screen and they include showing the number of new updates since last time on.  I will post more on this later.

Facebook’s Unfriendly Subscribe Option

Finally, I can follow a person without giving them the false hope that we have somehow become anything other then an non-friend acquaintance, if that.  My casual hook-up with them is simply a matter of convenience to satisfy my natural curiosity of what they have to offer.    Our relationship simply lasts as long as they provide me what I need, and I can drop them as quickly as I met them.  No emotional strings attached!  How nice of Facebook for finally allow such unfriendly relationships.

Subscription Button Info

Here are some things to remember about this new Facebook capability:

• a person must turn this feather on to allow someone to subscribe to them.
• you get to decide how much you want to see from your subscriptions, photo’s only, or how about ‘no more game messages!’ – that’s actually a good thing.
• If you can’t subscribe to someone, just remember “It’s not you, it’s them” and you don’t have to feel left out, no one can then subscribe to that person.
• Facebook Pages have gone through a lot of changes expect more changes to come that way as well.

Good Hunting

Related articles

• Q&A: Sorting Subscriptions in Facebook (gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Facebook Tests Friend Filters to Challenge Google+ Circles (hubspot.com)
• Facebook’s Smart list V/S Google+ Circles (dirtech.wordpress.com)
• Facebook Adds New ‘subscribe’ Button: Watch out Twitter (pcworld.com)
• Have You Activated Facebook Subscriptions Yet? (smallbusinessmavericks.com)

Social Media Busyness Doesn’t Equal Business Value

Image via Wikipedia

Lately, I  have been pounded with a theme of challenges around the question “Why take part in Social Media if it takes up so much time and has such poor tangible results?”  And my general response is, it should take as much time as needed to accomplish your business objectives which have been created to help you reach your goals.

I also have to explain that social media, executed poorly, is far more expensive then doing nothing at all.  The below article caught my:

Top Five Social Media Marketing Mistakes?

You know about all the wonderful things the blogosphere can do for your business. But how can you prevent the not-so-wonderful stuff?

Social media initiatives have become standard components of companies‘ marketing and communications strategies. Large or small—from the local bakery to General Motors (GM)—businesses see the value of engaging in online conversations already taking place about their brands. While social media best practices have emerged, brands still struggle with how best to engage with their consumers. Here are five common mistakes:

1. Not (or Barely) Monitoring:

2. “Down-sourcing” to Interns or Junior Staff:

3. Fast Beats Perfect:

4. Faking It:

5. Having an “Off” Switch:

At the end of the day, brands must earn their “social currency.” There are no shortcuts or substitutes to authentic engagement in the realm of social media.

via Top Five Social Media Marketing Mistakes – BusinessWeek.

Busy-ness vs Business

Unfortunately, I see many small or medium sized companies try their luck with social media and treat it like some shiny new toy that consumes all their attention, as they forget about all the other things they could be doing.  I find they over tweet, over post, and over blog themselves to the point that they justify leaving the scene altogether because it’s not worth the effort for the little results they see.

This is where I come in.  I sit down with them and ask some simple questions.  What activities, events, promotions, or other marketing objectives are coming up in the near future?  After I have that list, I can then sit down with them and explain the role of each of the social media tools and how they can fit into the marketing plan for the upcoming several months.  We also start by setting up measurements so that they understand where their leads are coming from.  As a simple example, this may include a unique 800 number for each channel (print, tv, radio, and each site they are using – it’s not that expensive really)   I explain how their phone bill or on-line phone records can then be used to measure campaign success, if inbound calls are one of the means by which we will measure the campaign success.

Social media can be a valuable tool for small and medium sized companies.  It can level the playing field quickly for a company that is dealing with a regional or national player, especially if these companies have their marketing and advertising plans controlled by corporate.  Often these larger companies are incapable of adjusting to local pressure applied by small companies and their ideas.

I’d love to hear of examples in which small companies attack the larger companies by using social media.  Please share them in the comments.

Good Hunting.

Related articles

• Things to Keep in Mind When Getting Started With Social Media Marketing (ronmedlin.com)
• Yes You Can! How To Use Social Media Marketing to Meet Your Home Business Goals (theworkathomewife.com)
• Effective Social Media Techniques (cash-bandit.com)
• Philanthropists Make the Most of Social Media? (bjconquest.com)

Flickr improves sharing options

In my weekly review of feeds concerning Web 2.0 and Web 3.0  I ran across the news that Flickr has improved their ability to share content with other sites.  As I continue to collect material for my “WEB 2.0 for Students” class that I’ll be teaching at our local college, this one hit home.  I use Flickr for my photo repository.  So it is nice to see new feature showing up in this service since I haven’t seen to many in the last year.

Flickr adds to sharing options, now easier to share photos across the Web

by Erez Zukerman on March 31, 2011 at 03:30 AM

It sure is nice to see some new developer action over at Flickr. The relatively slow-moving photo-sharing service has just announced a new sharing update, which consists of several new and easy ways to embed or link to your photos:

via Flickr adds to sharing options, now easier to share photos across the Web.

So the thought came to me that this is nice but what could be implemented to improve the experience:

1. Photo comments made on Flickr would also be shown on the shared item in Facebook.
2. Post comments made on the shared item would also be available on Flickr.
3. Multiple authors – One pool.  One of the biggest problems I have with my clients.  Many photographers, one common pool to associate them with.

Either way, Flickr is a great tool to use to keep all your photos.  It’s worth a good look at if your in the market to implement such a capability.

Good Hunting.

Facebook expands @ mention tagging to comments

A while back, Facebook introduced Twitter-esque @ tagging, allowing users to mention specific people in posts and status messages. Now Facebook has expanded that same functionality to include comments. The update also provides users with a notification when someone tags them, the same way Facebook notifies you about — well, about nearly everything.

via Facebook expands @ mention tagging to comments.

The use of “@ mention tagging” is one of the tactics I teach my clients to use.  It is one of the fastest ways to get your status post to show up on someone’s wall, and by that I mean their fiend list.  Now with the instruction of @ mentions on comments we can even push this further then before.  This comes in very handy since the share button is no longer visible on our page updates.  I think I need to get my clients on a conference call and retrain them on this new capability.

Usage Recommendation

This exercise is about Marketing Reach.    And this introduction of comment @ mention’s now opens up any status update to increase your brand awareness.  Also let me say, this is not about spam either, remember your comments can be deleted by the status author and they can remove you from their list as well.

Here are some ideas, and remember you need to switch to the ‘fan page author’ so your fan page get’s the credit for the comment:

• Affinities – If you know that one of your fans has in interesting or passion in something you have run across, you make a comment with and @ mention to that fan and your fan page is then showing up on their wall and to their friends.
• Awareness – something new that you find and want to share it with specific fans, especially very active fans,  you make a comment with and @ mention to that fan and your fan page is then showing up on their wall and to their friends.
• Praise – share the love so you make a comment with and @ mention to that fan and your fan page is then showing up on their wall and to their friends.

I’m sure there are other applications.  Please share with me your ideas on how your are using this new capability.

Good Hunting.

LinkedIn Today gives you social news from your peers

LinkedIn Today

LinkedIn has introduced a news aggregation service called LinkedIn Today. This delivers a personalized news experience, letting you quickly discover the top headlines of the day based around what your connections and industry peers are reading and sharing.

via LinkedIn Today gives you social news from your peers.

Well this really isn’t much of a surprise, but it is a feature I think is long overdue.  Anyone that has a large network will tell you that it’s difficult to keep up with what everyone thinks is important.  We started receiving emails with the ‘top stories’ from our networks some time ago.  I really thought that new email was helpful.  Now if they can merge in my delicious and stumbledupon and (name your tagging tool here) to this mix and make it contextual based on something you also have deemed important then we are well on our way to heading to web 3.0, in my opinion.

Either way, this is a welcome add on to LinkedIn and I look  forward to the tool’s growth in capability and features.

Good Hunting.