Google Plus Twitter

Finally! I found a way to post to Google+ and have it sent to Twitter. Which is good, because I’ve been so focused on G+ that it’s hard to remember to not neglect Twitter. Here are screenshots of it working instantly.

 

How’s it work you ask?

The key is a little site called www.manageflitter.com. Give them your G+ URL, sign into Twitter through the Twitter API and your accounts are connected. Their system is set up so that you must post to your Public stream in order for it to work. Alternately you can adjust your settings so that you must at #twt to the post to get it to work. I’ve suggested to the folks at ManageFlitter that they should offer the ability to have just G+ posts to a defined Circle go to Twitter. I could choose my Flitter Circle to post to, or add it to my public post. This might offer a bit more control. I’m not sure if this is technically possible, and they may not want to because, most people don’t adjust their settings, so by default everything will go public, and through ManageFlitter to Twitter.

Keep in mind that content posted to Google+ will be truncated in Twitter, remember that pesky 140 character rule? I’ve also run a test including a video, a photo and a link. I haven’t seen those populate my Twitter stream yet. I’ll update this post once I see results.

 

Update:

Here is a screenshot of the links, and the photo I uploaded to Twitter:

In both Twitter.com and Tweetdeck the links open in a browser window, including the image, which is linked to a file on Google’s server. I have not seen the video link yet.

My Twitter Infographic

 

Thanks to Visual.ly

Google+ing your Blog

So, you’ve heard of Google+ right?

• If yes please read on
• If no please click here

Now that we have that out of the way… You’ve FINALLY gotten your Google+ invitation, you’ve logged in, you’ve figured out how to use everything, what else do you do? It’s time to Google-ize your blog. Oh, don’t worry, it’s not that hard. The first thing you should do is add your Google+ link to you blog. After all, you want your readers to find you everywhere right? There are many ways to share your Google+ URL depending on how your blog is set up. It could be a contact page or, as in the case of my blog, a set of icons:

I keep a relatively short list of my social networks in a widget on my blog. The first one, About.Me is nothing more than a personal landing page with most of the same links. However you share your social network profiles with your readers is fine, just make sure to add your Google+ URL.

About that Google+ URL: most of us using the service agree that it’s ridiculous:

the number, in this case, 116375847890292587823, is your actual Google+ ID. Most of us our hoping that unique nicknames will be added soon, remember, G+ is in beta. Google is moving very quickly with this new service so I don’t think we’ll need to wait as long as we did for personalized URLs for LinkedIn! If you don’t want to wait, you can try a free service a bunch of clever guys thought up called Gplus.to. Just copy your G+ ID number, pick a nickname and you’re all set:

You’ve already got a Facebook Like button, a Tweet button on every blog post right? Now it’s time to add a +1 button. It works kind of like a Like button, nothing more. I’ve looked around to find a WordPress plugin that combines the Like, Tweet and +1 button to no avail. For now we’ll have to deal with:

If anyone comes across an elegant plugin that combines all 3, let me know!

Your blog should be all done! Currently there is no way to have a blog stream your G+ posts, you can see mine streams my Twitter stream, but I expect it fairly soon. At the moment you can’t share G+ posts with Facebook or Twitter either.

Make sure that when you publish a new blog post you share the link on Google+ the same way you share it on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter:

Google+ Gets a Check+ Part 1

The Fourth of July holiday weekend was ruined for most of us by the launch of Google+. In just 4 days the new social platform by Google has exploded. Of course many have still not seen it as it is in real beta (as opposed to Gmail’s multi-year beta status) and the company was so overwhelmed with invitation requests that they’ve had to bottleneck entrance to the system.

WTF?!

Google+ was launched on June 28 following a little over a week in which slight changes to Google were spotted. It is essentially a status/content wall similar to Facebook’s that aggregates Google+ content from people you’re connected to in Google apps, Gmail, etc. You can visit the home page to request an invite and I think they’re giving priority to those who request an invite that have already been added by multiple people already using Google+. That would seem to be the case considering how many of my social media colleagues are signed up but few non-industry friends are. It would make sense from a marketing standpoint as we’re all early adopters and influencers to some degree.

Functionality

Keep in mind that this is beta and some nice folks from Google have already told us they’re taking feedback and making changes rapidly as we go.

The Navigation Bar
The first thing you’ll notice is that the new Google bar that you’ve been seeing now begins with +Michael. You can still reach your Gmail, docs, etc, but the +Username will take you to Google+. The right side of the bar gives you an account dropdown with an alert box that turns red when you have a notice. The Share field allows you to post a quick note (like a Tweet or status update), followed by more in-depth settings. It’s an efficient and compact design. It reminds me of something.

Stream
The Stream is similar to Facebook with far more control and is your main Google+ UI much like your FB Wall. You can view your stream with all of your contacts or, with a simple click, see only content from the Circle, or group, you want. More on Circles in a moment. You essentially get the same functionality with your stream as with Facebook Groups or Twitter Lists but with a far superior user experience.

Email
A quick word about Google+ and it’s effect on your email: Once you sign up for Google+ go into the settings quickly and change what you wish to receive alerts on. Every comment in your stream will send an alert to your email. So, unless you want your Gmail account to blow up, make this change soon.

Circles
Google+ allows you control over your contacts like never before. With Facebook you get a few settings that give you the ability to lump contacts into one of a very few categories with no overlap. The problem with this is that human relationships and communications are much more complicated. I’ve written and spoken in depth about this, theorizing that the next big social network would take more realistic human relationship dynamics into account, even going so far as to begin building out the concept behind a possible startup. The fact is that Facebook’s founder and many of it’s young programmers don’t have the depth of experience with human relationships that us old folks have, especially those with some background in psychology, sociology, or mental health.

Circles allow you to create custom groups and organize your contacts into them. Not only can you put a contact into a group, you can out them into multiple groups, say, co-workers AND colleagues, or client AND friends. Once a contact is in this group you can control what content they see and don’t see. I’ve attempted to load 100+ into a circle at once and the platform froze. I haven’t figured out the exact limit but more than 20-30 at once is fine.

 

Simply drag a user into a Circle to add them, the number in the Circle will change. You can drag a user to the gray Circle to create a new one, or just click on it.

You can click on a Circle to open it to add members this way, remove members or rename the group or description.

You can sort users of a single Circle by first name, last name or relevance.

Make sure you’ve updated your Google profile with an avatar or you look like one of these faceless gray icons.

Profile
Your Google+ profile simply pulls content from your existing Google profile. If you’ve been too busy with Twitter and LinkedIn, you might want to go back and clean up your Google profile. You don’t want to be one of the graphic heads as seen above! Your G+ (I”m getting sick of typing Google+) profile has several sections:

Posts – what you’ve posted.

About – this is your Google profile content as Introduction with fields for Bragging Rights, Occupation, Employment.

Photos – you can create albums here just like in Facebook. It automatically creates an album for all photos from your posts. I haven’t tested the file limit yet but will soon.

#1′s – this are posts that you’ve #1′d or Liked, or whatever we’re calling it.

Buzz – this is essentially everyone that you follow or that follows you.

You will see a smattering of people you’ve put in Circles, and those that have added you. On the right you can add as many links as you want, the major ones like Facebook and Twitter come with icons.

 

As delve deeper I’ll show you more of the UI and functionality behind Google+. Stay tuned!

Search Versus Social Media Results

Few companies are willing to post numbers or results from their search engine and social media engagements. This leaves a ton of forums full of people asking what works, what doesn’t, what kind of results they can expect, etc. and no one is sharing answers. Some numbers can’t be shared for competitive reasons: how much you spent on a campaign, your exact numbers, elements of your strategy, etc., but some can. In the charts below the actual volumes have been removed but there is still some very strong data that I’d like to share with you that will hopefully help inform brand and agency strategists.

Data

This data is very specific to my current employer, a financial software company, and some very specific tactics that have been undertaken. The company has a Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn presence. While we Tweet, Facebook, and Linked at least once a day, based on some of the earlier number we received we decided to run ads on LinkedIn. Leveraging these channels as well as spending a good amount of time creating content and optimizing our website for search engines has led to the following findings:

Our Unique Visits from LinkedIn far outweigh traffic from other referring sites. To be clear, these results are outside of direct visits or referring sites like outside blogs, portals, even traffic from our own newsletter. They are merely focused on the traffic from Google, Gmail, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Very often people swill stop investigating here. Focusing on the site sending them the most traffic. But, that traffic isn’t always qualified traffic. In the chart on the right, it’s clear that while our Page Views from LinkedIn users outweigh those from Facebook and Gmail, we get a much larger number of page views from Twitter and Google. To me, this means these sources contain visitors that are much more engaged, qualified and interested in our content.

As you can see above, LinkedIn represents our greatest percentage of new users. Gmail may sound a bit strange except that my company uses Gmail as our email tool so any clicked link in our email signatures or included in the body of an email  shows up as a visitor. This is very important since it remains one of our primary sources of communications and sales. Combined with data concerning Unique Visitors we can differentiate which sites give us more repeat traffic versus which sites give us more new traffic. An important distinction when deciding which marketing messages go to which sites. Bounce Rate isn’t a huge concern primarily because our site is information, not ecommerce. This means that our Call to Action (CTA) is for the user to call or email our business intelligence team rather than visit another page. However, when combined with Page Views and Time on Site, it is a good indicator of user interest or qualification.

Time on Site indicates how long a person spend on the site. It’s interesting to note how closely this mimics the number of page views. The first observation is pretty obvious since reading more pages would take more time, but then again, you could take more time reading a single page.

Findings

Initially Twitter looked like a bit of a loss for us. We got a minimal amount of traffic, and to be honest, our audience isn’t really that prolific on Twitter. However, if you look closely, even though visitors from Twitter were minimal, they had the largest amount of page views and a close second for number of pages visited. This means that we’ll continue to cultivate traffic through Twitter hoping for a growth in visits.

I mentioned that we ran a set of 3 ads on LinkedIn for the company. Despite the hype around Facebook ads, based on earlier numbers concerning bounce rate, time on site, pages visited, and contextuality we decided not to run ads on Facebook. LinkedIn ads allowed us to zero in on a highly defined group of users based on industry (we’re a very small niche of the financial industry), countries, states, even gender. LinkedIn best practices says “good ads have a CTR greater than 0.025%“. Our rates were .056%, .074%, and .087%. Our ads worked. We opted for a CPC (Cost Per Click) model rather than a CPM (Cost Per Impression). It’s a good thing, our impressions were 1300 times what our clicks were. Since clicks show interest, and impressions may not even be seen, this made sense to us. In addition our average click cost was actually half of what our click bid was!

Recommendations

Clearly this data is not going to define your strategy. It is unique to our company, not even our industry. I do hope that it will help inform you. You may decide we are nuts not to be advertising on Facebook, or convinced that we’re just not using Twitter effectively enough. All possible. Unfortunately digital strategy, for all of it’s data, still requires much experimentation. I encourage you to experiment, track your numbers (but don’t get wrapped up in daily results, look at trends), and define a respectable schedule to gather data over. Decisions shouldn’t be made over a few days’ worth of data, but over a few months, keeping in mind global events, holidays, etc.

Good luck.

Paper.li. Where’s the context?

So, in my ongoing grumbling over Paper.li, the Twitter link (yes, I do think calling it a “twink” would be fun) aggregator (alligator) it’s occured to me that part of my issue with them is context. While I may have Tweeted or reTweeted a link, my comments on it are missing. In Jeff Cutler‘s recent paper.li one of my Tweets was added, but taken completely out of context:

Ignoring the grammar issue with this article (no space after the period following ‘It” and “Rocker Jon Bon Jovi”) and the fact that Huffington Post has turned into nothing more than a content aggregator, the fact that this is attributed to me would lead some to believe that I support Jon Bon Jovi’s statement that iTunes, iPods, Apple, and Steve Jobs killed the music business. In my opinion, the record industry is what killed the music business by putting out crap music from teenage girls dolled up like Taiwanese hookers, pre-teen boys with bad hair cuts and questionable dance moves, and rappers whose sole talent is knowing how to use a rhyming dictionary. I was in a band in the late 80s. We had a contract. Rock and Roll was king. Then came New Kids on the Block. Followed by angry middle class white kids gloaming onto inner city rap. When the music industry decided to push manufactured teeny bop and urban poems set to stolen beats they put a noose around their own necks. When the music industry decided to push artists for soon-to-be-forgotten “hits” rather than solid albums with long-tail lives, they kicked over the chair beneath their seats.

This was my original Tweet:

Yes! I’m Selling This! Endorsement Transparancy.

I recently spoke at the Social Media Law conference in Boston. I was one of only 2 presenters that were not lawyers (or wore suits, or ties, or left our cars in paid parking, or had a beeper and a cell phone). Some great folks presented including the General Counsel for the Massachusetts Office of Consumer Affairs and Business Regulation. Some fantastic topics were discussed around user privacy, data security, and transparency. One of the more interesting things that was discussed revolved around requiring users to Like your Facebook page in order to access special content or join a contest. This is as illegal as requiring me to buy M&Ms to enter in your M&M piggy bank giveaway. Remember: No Purchase Required.

While perusing Twitter this afternoon I saw an interesting Tweet from a celebrity. Let me be perfectly clear, despite my dislike of Dancing with the Stars, I’m a big Tom Bergeron fan and an even bigger Brooke Burke fan. I’ve been following her career since she was a drunken (OK, buzzed, but she did do alot of shots!) jet-setting travel TV host. But Brook’s tweet took me by surprise. Brooke is a model, TV show host, blogger, author of The Naked Mom, contributor to (or founder of?) ModernMom.com, and founder of BabooshBaby.com. She’s also an all around hot mom. What I didn’t know was that she also endorsed a drink called underWAY. I know about her other endeavors from reading her Twitter bio:

I didn’t know about Brook’e endorsement of underWay because it’s not in her Twitter bio. Why do I know about underWay at all? Because of this post:

The way this is positioned is as a helpful hint. Brooke eats less when she drinks underWAY. To be honest, I first thought she meant that she was drinking while moving, like water or juice. It was the way underWAY was written that attracted my attention. Now, I click on alot of Brooke’s links because, they are often pictures of her, and c’mon, who couldn’t use another picture of Brooke Burke to spice up their day. I clicked on this link for just that reason: oggling. Imagine my surprise when I opened a landing page for a health drink. I scrambled back to Twitter, scrolled down to find the Tweet again.

I wouldn’t think much of this because I see it all the time, especially from celebrities, even Twitterfamous celebs like Robert Scoble and Chris Brogan. I’m sure many celebs have very lucrative endorsements that are very savvy in leveraging the celebs social media presence to sell products. That’s not a problem. In fact I know that Chris Brogan is very careful to disclose links to books for which he is an affiliate, clients, and products that have been given to him to review.THis is an example of a non-celeb promoting a website. The difference is that she refers to the site as her site so we know it’s an endorsement:

Here is another that is blatently selling, but that is obvious from the tone:

But a quick trip to their Twitter bio shows that they’re selling cooking products:

Here is the problem with celebrity selling via their social networks; Very often these celebs are doing the Tweeting themselves. I applaud them for this, it’s very honest and has a great impact when it’s very personal. But celebs aren’t lawyers. They don’t understand the laws around endorsing products.They don’t understand that they need to disclose products they are endorsing.

Part of what I spoke about at the Social Media Law conference was the need for corporate social media policies, a basic what you can, cannot, and what we’d like you to do in social media. It’s obvious that celebrities need the same kind of social media policy. Knowing that this is happening, should Twitter allow for longer bios? Currently, and in true Twitter fashion, they allow 160 characters for a bio. Should celebs link to a landing page with a list of their endorsements?

So, I’m officially offering to fly to LA to give Brooke Burke a weekend-long social media bootcamp.

Even Agencies Don’t Get Twitter (A Black Tweet Case Study)

I received and interesting @Reply on Twitter today from a young woman named Vanessa Contes asking an odd question: “Interested in learning about corporate communications…”. I asked if she was asking me for help or offering it to me. The later would mean that she clearly had no idea who I was or what I did, the former offered me an opportunity to share my expertise with someone interested in communications. I was more than happy to help. At first. Then I got a similar message an hour later.

The message was slightly different with a different shortened link, that led to the same URL, a Twitter account for a corporate communications company called Carnegie Orr in London:

I followed Carnegie Orr, I like to follow some ad/communications/marketing/pr firms since I’m interested in what others are doing in the industry. Of course I got an automated reply…

…and I sent them a DM back to ask who @CNessa1083 was and if they were looking to sell to me or hire me. Of course, they were not following me back. As a matter of fact, their Twitter stream @CarnegieOrr)only has one-way conversations. At least their intern/employee/contractor @CNessa1083 peppers in a little bit of news about Egypt in hers. Although, it’s hard to tell as Ms. Contes’ Twitter stream is primarily the same 2 @Replies for at least 11 hours!

The strategy must be working. When I first hit Carnegie’s Twitter feed, I neglected to take a screenshot. I should have. When I decided to write this piece just an hour ago I took a screenshot and I just took another. They’ve Followed 315 new people and captured around almost 141 new Followers in just over an hour:

I think their original Followers were in the 20s when I first looked, but I may be wrong.

I’ve seen “Black Hat” tactics to game Twitter. Some might say publishing an iPhone picture of Demi Moore’s butt would be a good example, but at least it’s offering some value!

What is surprising about this instance is that not only is it blatant spamming, but it is coming from a communications agency with some pretty big corporate clients. This has been a surprising weekend for Black Hat tricks. On Saturday I caught the New York Times article on JC Penny’s black hat efforts to game Google and how Google spanked them over it, dropping the from #1 ranking to #71. Shocking considering that JC Penny already spends $2.46 million on Google ads. Carnegie Orr did all the things we expect from Twitter spammers:

1) Use a picture of a young pretty girl in a tight/revealing outfit
2) Use a real girl’s name, abbreviate it and follow it by a random number
3) Have the account target specific influencers
4) See value solely in quantity

But we’re talking about a supposedly upstanding company with a professional website, some very forward thinking on marketing and social media and a consideration for the rules of social media:

I’ve sent Carnegie Orr an email asking for comments or clarification on their initial contact and subsequent tactical execution but have yet to hear from them. Should I hear from them I will add their response.

Addendum:

Carnegie Orr responded today, 3 days after I requested feedback on their Black Tweet tactic with the following:

“Dear Michael,

Thank you for your email.

Unfortunately, one of our suppliers has deployed tactics that do not represent the values of our business and we have since severed any relationship with them. Over the course of time, we will be making contact with all new followers on Twitter to ensure they are genuinely interested in following our views on best practice corporate communications, updates from our thought leaders and relevant retweets. As you rightly point out, our Twitter account is in it’s infancy and over time we very much hope to increase our engagement with the corporate communications community.

Thank you for your interest in Carnegie Orr and we wish you all the best for the future.

Kind regards

Media Relations
Carnegie Orr”

I’m happy that they disagree with the tactic, I’m happy they responded, I’m happy that they plan on contacting all those that fell for their scheme. I wonder though: why did a communications company hire an outside vendor and for what? Did they hire someone outside the agency to get more Twitter followers? Remember, this is a company that, according to their SlideShare presentation, understands social media. So why would they need a supplier? If they did, as I’m dubious that this was done by an outside vendor, more likely an inhouse intern, was there no discussion of the tactics and strategy behind the initiative?

That is all.

Why Best Practices Are Not

I hear the terms “best practices” and “think-outside-the-box” quite a bit, from colleagues, to vendors, to clients. The problem is, even thought I hear them in the same sentence, they are exact opposites. “Best practices” is a set of standard to be applied to any scenario, in other words: a cookie cutter solution, or an off-the-rack suit. Outside-the-box thinking is a new solution not based on existing standards, a custom suit. While I often find that clients and vendors say “outside-the-box”, they don’t really mean it, they mean something clever that is still very much in-the-box. I get it. I don’t blame them, an economy like the current one isn’t exactly a fertile place for people to take risks.

“Best practices” is a bit more disturbing. The term is being used as a value proposition or a differentiator more and more. The problem is that the world has changed. Social media has changed it. I’m not talking about Twitter and Facebook, or any of the technological aspects of social media, I’m talking about users. How a consumer interacts with a brand or vendor has changed, not just online, but in every facet of their lives. Consumers want communications on their terms. Users won’t just watch your commercial and go to your stored to make their purchase. They’ll Google for reviews, they compare prices, they’ll tweet for feedback, they jump to another brand because they had a better mobile site or switch stores because they got a coupon in the mail that day. People understand the power of the Internet and understand that they can get personalized attention. That understanding has led them to be more critical of customer service not just online or by phone but in brick and mortar stores.

How do you stand by “best practices” when there is so much diversity in the abilities, needs, and desires of your audience? How do you do it when your brand is not like other brands? I read a recent blog on “best practices” that claimed the optimal screen size for a web site’s design should be 1024×768. Well, my mother’s computer would only support 800×600, my go to web browser is 320×356. So, which is  the standard? The fact is, none are. Lazy developers, designers, and marketers like to fall back on “best practices” so they don’t have to do the work of getting to know their audience, or to avoid developing multiple options for different audiences. This blog is set up for 1024×768 as well as 320×356. That’s because I know my audience has a fairly new computer (2-3 years old) or a mobile device.

This is just an example of the problem with “best practices” from a technical web design standpoint, now think about social media. Twitter has alot of trouble telling us how many active users they have. Some access Twitter via www.twitter.com, others through any number of third party sites, desktop and mobile apps, and some through SMS. If this creates a nightmare of technical issues, think about the millions that use Twitter, their interests, their lifestyle, their content, their intentions, their networks. Think about the idea of transparency. That’s a big buzz word among social media experts. It is claimed to be one of the tenants of social media best practices. I just had a lengthy discussion (lengthy for Twitter anyway) with another Boston social media strategist about content of social media. He claimed that venting publicly about your insecurities was a sure way to lose business. In that respect, transparency is not a best practice, clearly you should not be transparent about your insecurities. But as another user commented, this is hypocritical. The originator of the comment claimed that it was fine for Twitter but not for a corporate blog (though Senator McCain would probably disagree with transparency on Twitter being okay). Even just in this one opinion there are significant differences in what is considered best practices on Twitter and best practices on a blog. However, if you’ve found that being honest and open is actually goof for business, how does best practices apply? It doesn’t.

The fact is that everyone is becoming a marketer, if not for their business, then for themselves. And everyone is a consumer, even businesses. Each has to define it’s own strategy according to it’s audience, goals, mission statement, desires, etc. What works for some on Twitter doesn’t work for others on Twitter. Your Facebook widget isn’t going to work on QZone. What feels comfortable for some individuals and brands in social media, doesn’t sit well with others. A soft-sell marketing strategy works for some industries but not others.

So, take your “best practices” and put them back “in-the-box” where they belong because some times you DO have to reinvent the wheel.

Tweetdeck Goes Mobile

I‘ve been a big fan of the Tweetdeck desktop application for Mac for awhile now. It’s a RAM hog, but what power tool isn’t. It has become my default Twitter tool for personal and client accounts, for engagement, monitoring, and research. On iPhone I’ve been favoring Tweetie. I’ve long argued that a marriage if their functionality would be perfect. The key feature being multiple accounts. I’m currently managing a half dozen personal and client accounts.

The release of Tweetdeck for iPhone last night may change all that. From what I can see so far the app has all if the functionality if the desktop version, with a few proprietary iPhone features such as shake to change columns.

The app is free in the iTunes store at the moment. Here are some screenshots of the UI:

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