Google Business Photos should be on the radar for hotels, retailers, restaurants, event rental companies and any other business that has a storefront.

Last year, I wrote on how to set up you business on Google Places, a critical step for being found in local searches. To enhance your listing, Google also introduced Google Business Photos. These are like Google Streetview for interiors. Google is working directly with local store owners across the US, Australia, UK, New Zealand and France to take complimentary professional interior photographs.

To find a Google-approved local photographer and get your Google Places set up with interior photos, visit Google’s Business Photos site.

We have a tendency to cling to what is familiar, even when it can have a detrimental impact on us and our businesses.

Most event planners I’ve talked to have been very hesitant to embrace Google Plus, Google’s social networking site. The key reason? It feels like Facebook, without your established network, a few unfamiliar tools thrown into the mix…and, let’s be honest, who needs yet another social network to worry about?

Well, Facebook has a pool of about 800 million users, but billions of people perform billions of searches every single day. And that’s precisely why it would be a mistake to ignore Google Plus.

The Tipping Point

2 weeks ago, Google announced ‘Search, Plus Your World‘ a controversial revolution in the world of search that will have a major impact on your brand’s online presence. As Google states on their website:

“Search has always brought you information from across the web. Now, search gets better by including photos, posts, and more from you and your friends. When signed in with Google+, you’ll find personal results and profiles of people you know or follow. You can even expand your world by discovering people related to your search.”

It looks a little like this:

The World of Search has Changed

Search was once a competition of keyword relevance. Brands would hire an SEO expert to optimize their sites and find other ‘relevant’ sites to link to theirs – all to have their site ranked higher than their competition.

Google aims to change this by making search socially relevant. In other words, when someone within your social circle shares something, Google believes this content is likely more contextually relevant to you.

What This Means for Your Business and Google Plus

If you google yourself or your brand right now, it’s very likely your Google Plus profile (if you have one) will be on the first page and, in many cases, the first result. That’s because Google is giving priority to content from their social network (just like Google gave priority to YouTube videos and pictures from Blogger blogs – two platforms they own).

Connect the dots and that means:

• the content you share on Google Plus can appear higher in search results than even your own website.
• the larger the pool of people exposed to your content in Google Plus the more likely it is to get shared.
• the more people sharing your content, the more probable it is that you will be discovered by someone performing a ‘search, plus your world’.
• it’s not hard to imagine how much more powerful it is to have an endorsement of your brand from people your prospects know than it is to get random results from a search engine.

There are now over 1 million business pages and 90 million users on Google+. Will you be one of them?

It launched in December of 2009, but many small businesses have just started hearing the buzz about Pinterest in the past few months. Still officially in Beta (and invitation-only), Pinterest has joined the weberatti, sitting alongside Facebook and LinkedIn, as one of the 10 most popular social networking sites. It now boasts over 5 million users and has been touted as the fastest growing social network in history. Have I piqued your interest?

Brides, wedding bloggers, fashionistas, graphic designers and artists have embraced the site. And more recently, I’ve seen real estate agents, television brands and teachers jumping on board. At a time when nary a person would say that they need another social networking site, Pinterest has flourished. Why?

The compelling features

In my opinion, they have the magic formula for an over-stimulated and time-starved internet user:

• Simple – It is immensely easy to use. Click to pin, put it in a category, add some keywords, et voila. A great user experience, clean design and devoid of ads, interacting with Pinterest is a breath of fresh air. And, as easy as it is to pin, it’s just as easy to repin. In one click and a matter of seconds, thousands of people can share something that’s been posted.
• Visual – We see well before we read. Pinterest is all about sharing visual images and ideas. No laborious reading here.
• Controllable – Unlike many other social networking tools, YOU choose what’s shared with you.
• Scannable – Pinterest is like window shopping. At a glance users can get inspired and see what’s hot. You don’t need to dedicate hours to Pinterest. In fact, you’ll find yourself scanning during lunch, before you put the kids to sleep, while you’re watching TV, etc.
• Serendipitous – Pinterest is about discovery. Log in and find all the things you love that you didn’t even know you were looking for.

Is Pinterest Right for Your Business?

What makes Pinterest so interesting are the users behind the tool. Grandmothers, stay-at-home Moms, husbands, students and everyone in between. The thread that binds is that they’re looking for visual inspiration or to inspire others visually. In fact, there’s very little discussion altogether, which makes this tool totally unique to any other social networking site.

So, if you’re products or services aren’t visually compelling, this likely isn’t the site for you.

That said, as this tool quickly becomes the place to collect and bookmark things we love, we may see the way it is used shift over time.

20 Ideas for using Pinterest for Your Business

For the inventory-rich business

• Promote your products / inventory – Add a ‘Pin It’ button on each product page to allow customers and prospects to share and catalogue your images.
• Product popularity – Track which products/ideas from your site have elicited the most shares.
• Product ideas – Rather than simply show a photo of your product (like a chair, for example), create Boards by theme (i.e. Winter Wonderland) and show the chairs in different thematic environments. Showcase your knowledge of trends and catalogue products by trend types (i.e. color blocking, stripes, metallics, etc).
• R&D – Test new product ideas by pinning them on Pinterest. Ask customers to vote on the ones they like most by repinning them, liking them or commenting.
• Create an e-commerce board – With Pinterest, you can not only showcase your individual products, you can also attach a price to the item (by putting a dollar figure before the price). When you do this, your products are automatically added under the “Gifts” tab, which allow users to browse products by price.
• Crowdsourced photos – Ask customers to pin photos of themselves using your products and tag them with your company name or a hashtag.
• Weekly offer / sale – Deal of the day sites begone. Why not host your own flash sale site by creating an ‘On Sale’ board and posting sale items. Or create a weekly offer that you promote on Pinterest only.

For the event planner

Create an account for your event:

• Tell a story about the event – Imagine you’re planning a fundraising event. You could create a board of pictures from your events, a board on inspirational quotes, a board showing who you’re helping, a preview of products you’re auctioning, etc.
• Speaker videos – Ask speakers to create a video promoting their session, upload them to YouTube and then pin them on Pinterest. Don’t forget to add annotations to your videos about your event.
• Crowdsourced photos – Ask attendees to pin their photos to Pinterest and have them tag photos with your event name or a hashtag.
• Invitations – Create an invitation image for Pinterest and include the event details in the Details.
• Portfolio – Show transformations & before and afters. As I reported in my last blog post on How to Get PR for your Event Business, editors are scanning social media sites to find events and ideas to feature in their publications.

For all

• Find fans – Find out who has pinned content from your site. Simply type http://pinterest.com/source/yoursite.com into the address bar in your web browser and it will show you who has shared your website’s information and what they shared. Click on their profiles to learn about them and their interests. Consider commenting on their pin, providing more information, answering questions, etc.
• Humanize – Tell a story about your company by way of your pins and boards. For example, an event planning company could have boards for their favorite design books, office photos, style trends, quotes, employee photos, work samples, other interests (like favorite foods / recipes), other inspiration (like favorite decor ideas)
• Insights – Spend time looking into your followers to understand who wants to stay on top of what you’re pinning. Follow them back and track what their interests are. This can give you deeper insight into who they are.
• Contests – Hold a contest asking customers / attendees to pin photos – the one with the most repins, likes or comments win a prize. I.e. Event organizers, hold a contest asking attendees to pin their favorite moments from your event.
• SEO - Currently, when someone attributes a pin to your website (by including a link), this actually counts for SEO value.
• Research – Follow influencers and find out what they think is hot, important and interesting. A bonus is that a user is notified when someone begins following them. So, this can be like a tap on the back to let influencers know you’re there. You’d be surprised how many people research who’s following them.
• Seasonality – Match your boards with your business’ seasonalities. For example, a caterer might create a Valentine’s board to showcase great food ideas for Valentine’s day. A planner might create wedding boards during wedding planning season. A rental company might create a holiday wish list board to showcase products relevant to the holiday season.
• Think keywords – Many users take advantage of the search function on Pinterest, so ensure you’re thinking keywords when you enter your image/video description.

A Few Words of Caution

• Self-promotion – Every social networking site has its own etiquette. Pinterest is no exception. They discourage users from using the network as purely promotional. That’s just common sense.
• High quality photography needed – If you’re going to participate, recognize that if you want to be repinned, your images / videos need to be high quality and attractive.
• Open window into your thoughts, ideas & organization – Pinterest does not have the ability to make your pins private for now, although they have identified this is something they’re considering working on. So, be cautious about what you share. For example, you might not want to post ideas for projects you’re working on – for confidentiality and privacy reasons.
• Rules of conduct – As with any social networking site, there are specific (and legal) rules of conduct. Ensure you follow Pinterest’s Copyright, Privacy and Terms of Use Policies. The site is stirring up a lot of controversy over their copyright terms, so it’s important to read them carefully and ensure you understand and are comfortable with them.

Update

What are your favorite ideas? How are you using Pinterest for your business?

Google+ has recently released a slew of new features – but one of them outshines the rest. Google Ripples allows you to see how a public post gets shared throughout the social network.

What does Google+ Ripples mean for small business?

Visualized data - We understand what we see well before what we read. This is part of what makes Ripples so powerful – a way to very quickly visualize complex data.

Potential Influencers – With this visual tool, you can quickly identify users who have compelled other people to share your information (one indicator of potential influence). Arrows within Ripples show the direction of resharing and circles within circles represent the resharing sequence, so large circles indicate heavy resharing.

Post shelf-life – Ripples can help you understand the lifespan of a post’s shares. Does your post die out after a day? Or does it have shares spread over a few days? These types of insights could indicate whether your content is time- or event-sensitive, novel or sustainable. Note: Ripples only shows data for the previous 53 days.

View tipping points and long tails of a post's lifespan

Time-lapsed insights – By clicking on the play button, you can view how often the post was shared and by whom, sequentially, over time.

Simply click play to see how a post is shared over time

Niche communities – Not only can you identify potential influencers based on the size of circles, but you can begin to identify how people are related to one another. Are they connected, purposefully or not, based on shared likes, interests and beliefs? Uncovering these insights can lead you to niche communities that exist within and (potentially) outside of Google+.

Experimentation – The power of understanding these analytics is the ability to experiment, like test posting factors such as time of day, day of week, titles, visuals, etc to understand how they impact shares.

How to view Ripples

To witness a Ripple, simply click on the right arrow on the top right of a public post and select “view ripples”. See below for a demonstration of the feature.

An important note: as Google states on their support site, “While Ripples displays a lot of cool information, you’re not actually seeing all the action that’s taken place. For starters, Ripples only uses public shares, so there may be a discrepancy between the number of shares that you see on a post in the stream and the number of shares that Ripples displays.”

And, Google has been very clear that Ripples is categorized as an experiment – meaning that they may evolve or dismantle the tool over time.

Is this really a game changer for small business?

The short answer is only if you’re using Google+ as a part of your communications strategy (and most are not). That said, new ideas in the technology space are rapidly replicated. Although Facebook already has their own visualization tool called Touchgraph, it pales in comparison – if Ripples is a success, I wouldn’t be surprised to see something similar in other social media sites.

The second key issue is that, based on privacy rules, we will only ever be able to track public posts and shares. This significantly affects the intent behind sharing content and, ultimately, true data collection.

So, what do you think – is Ripples an exciting advancement in analytics? Will you be using this tool?

What is influence?

There are many different schools of thought on the topic, but the best definition I’ve seen pertaining to social media influence is by Brian Solis:

Influence is the ability to cause desirable and measurable actions and outcomes.

What is Klout?

Klout is an online tool that claims to measure social influence by defining it in the form of an influence score. They use a host of algorithms and it’s a recent change to those algorithms that has caused many to see a drop in Klout scores. The result is a lot of disgruntled Klout users.

Are you really less influential?

The short answer is no. But the better question is ‘were you really that influential to begin with?’

There is no single tool that will tell you who holds influence within a certain community – so even if you had a high score to begin with you might not have been that influential after all. Influence is social behaviour and can’t be defined by algorithms. Tools like Klout can measure data like the size of your social graph, the number of RTs you get, who RTs you, etc. But they can’t understand the intent behind these actions: how others feel about you and what motivated them to share your content.

Rather than focus on a score, think CREST:

• CREDIBILITY – How credible are you within the community.
• REACH – What is the size of your direct & indirect social graph: 1) The number of connections you have + 2) The number of connections your connections have + 3) The number of connections your connection’s connections have.
• EXPERTISE – Have you demonstrated subject matter expertise.
• STRENGTH – What is the strength of your connections. Remember, there are plenty of people with large social graphs that don’t invest on building relationships. These people are popular, but may not be influential.
• TRUST – How trusted are you within the community.

My friend, Jessica Levin, challenged her readers to think about better ways to measure success in social media and I echo her sentiment. Spend less time worrying about how a flawed system scores your influence and more time thinking about how you want to be known and how you’ll measure success. 

What do you think?

(Photo via Gipsy Art)

social media and events report 2011

For the second year I’ve been approached by Amiando to preview their Social Media & Events report (last year’s report was How to Make the Most Out of Twitter). Before I share my insights on the findings, I felt it necessary to provide some context not included in the report on who was polled and how. Each of these factors contribute to the quality of the data and its relevance to you and your business  (see my previous post for event planners on the importance of understanding the information behind statistics and data).

There are a few very important considerations to keep in mind when reviewing the findings. Namely:

• Approximately 92% of all respondents reside outside of the US. This is important because there may be key cultural differences that affect a) technology adoption, b) the tools preferred, c) how the tools are used, etc. (Although my blog is read globally, the majority of my readers live & work in North America).
  
• Respondents were Amiando customers and newsletter subscribers. This is important as our brand affiliations are usually a reflection of business demographics (i.e. size, revenues, location, etc) and psychographics (beliefs, values, etc). Amiando customers and subscribers may not be a representation of the industry as a whole.
• Less than 1 out of 3 respondents identified “event planner” was their main occupation. Given that Amiando is a freemium model event ticketing and registration provider, my assumption is that the other 70+% of respondents likely include people who either hold events on their own time outside of their primary occupation or plan events for their business as a part of their overall job responsibilities.

Click to access the Social Media & Events Report 2011

For more detail on the answers to my report questions, please read on…

Social Media & Events Report 2011 . The Background Details

• The poll was distributed online
• According to Amiando, the only other questions asked that were not in the report were demographic information (Note: I actually think this information would have been valuable for cross tabulating results)
• The respondents were anonymous, however had the chance to provide their email address if they were interested in receiving the report
• 60% of respondents took the German survey (the breakdown of these respondents were that 80% were from Germany, 10% from Switzerland and 7% from Austria), 40% took the English survey (21% were from the US, 19% from the UK, 7% from Greece, 6% from Germany, 5% from Romania, 5% from Switzerland, 2% from Denmark and rest from various countries around the world) 
• Respondents were a mix of Amiando customers, newsletter subscribers and readers of event industry related websites/magazines 
• My question to Amiando was: “Do you have information on what role these respondents have within the industry (i.e. owners, administrators, C-level).” Their response was, “Not exactly, however we know that event planner is the main occupation of 27% of participants.”
• My next question was: “What segment of the events industry were respondents in (i.e. meetings, weddings/social, conference, special events, etc).” According to Amiando, “70% mainly organize business events (conferences, seminars, networking events etc.), 30% organize entertainment events (concerts, parties, sport events, etc.)”. (Note: I assume this breakdown refers to the 27% that identified themselves as an Event Planner)

In part 2 of my report, I will break down some of the findings as well as some insights for event planners using or thinking of using social media.

They’re everywhere. On transit shelters, in newspapers, on real estate signs, store front windows, at trade show booths, and even on your case of Heineken. QR codes are spreading like butter on warm toast.

I’m what is aptly referred to as a Digital Native. I am technologically savvy, I write and speak around the world on digital trends, I have a smart phone, an iPad, and close to 80 apps…and yet, there have been but a small handful of times over the past few years that I have scanned a QR code. I have never scanned a transit shelter, a newspaper, a real estate sign, store front window, trade show booth or even a case of Heineken. Why? Because there wasn’t a compelling enough reason.

The other day, I wrote on the importance of the idea behind the tool. QR codes, although au courant, are simply pixelated barcodes. The problem with racing to create a bunch for your business is that I’ve never heard anyone say, “If only I could scan a pixelated barcode…I’d finally have someone to give my business to.”

QR codes themselves are not bad. It’s usually the ideas behind them that are. Ideas are the spark that have made some who implement them into their marketing successful. Specifically, ideas that are rooted in relevance, meaning and usefulness.

The most important question to ask yourself is will QR codes add value to my business and customers or am I running to keep up with the hype?

More reading on QR Codes:

QR Codes for Events – Case Studies & Ideas

What are QR Codes & How to Use Them