Google+ for Business: Exploring the opportunities

Google+ now offers a social networking service for brands prompting  thousands of businesses to set up profiles. However, to optimise brand exposure, businesses need to understand what differentiates Google+ from its competitors and tap into its full potential.

Although it looks quite similar to Facebook, there are some features which really set Google+ apart. One of the greatest advantages of the new social networking service is its integration with Google Search. Google Search provides brands with exposure to a search base allowing access to reportedly 50% of global websites. Furthermore Google+ enables brands to streamline social media content easily across multiple platforms including Android, Google Chrome and YouTube. This could offer exciting opportunities to businesses to improve audience engagement and explore innovative ways to create and distribute marketing content.

To make its service more appealing to brands, Google+ launched its Direct Connect feature, which makes it simple for users to find and follow brands on Google+ by just typing a “+” sign in front of the name of the brand on Google Search. Another step towards strengthening the integration with Google’s search engine is the brand verification procedure at the initial registration stage. As Google+ permits the registration of multiple users with one brand name, it allows organisations to appear at the top of the search results by verifying their brand identity and linking their profiles to the company website.

As Google+ is looking to further integrate with the rest of Google’s products, the appearance of the website and its features are going to change. At the CrushIQ conference this week, Google’s spokespeople announced that they were planning to integrate Google+ with AdWords and enable multiple administrators to handle the brand pages on the website.

A further integration with products like Google Shopping and Places could open exciting opportunities for brands and advertisers to deliver micro targeted campaigns based on users’ interests, location and shopping habits. This has huge potential for brands. Furthermore they will be able to tap into Google+ features such as Circles and Hangouts to segment their Google+ followers and create targeted campaigns for engagement.

However, as social networking websites emerge almost on daily basis, a question is beckoning of how many social media profiles users can tolerate? With 40 million users worldwide Google+ is still far behind Facebook and Twitter in terms of popularity among brands and consumers.

To expand its reach, Google+ have to differentiate itself from its competitors and get the most of its integration with Google’s products to create an innovative, intelligent and pervasive social media product.

An Infographic Is Worth a Million Words

One of the biggest challenges faced by both B2B journalist and PROs alike is making a story visually compelling. It’s relatively easy for consumer products, you often have a plethora of choices, ranging from lifestyle shots, to celebrity endorsements to something a little more artistic. However with B2B products, regardless how cool the technology or service is, you often only have access to pictures of either a big black box, a screen shot or of course your resident spokesperson.

If you take a minute right now and look through a traditional trade publication I am confident that you’ll see that in 99% of cases this is true. There might be some pictures that break this mould, perhaps someone sat at a computer or people huddled around a desk, but in most of the cases the image adds little ‘value’ to the article and was probably courtesy of Getty images rather than the company itself.

So what can we do? Do we start asking celebrities to lay across aforementioned black boxes to add some additional appeal?

Or do we start doing things differently and providing images that not only add value to the journalist but also to our clients?

Infographics are graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge. They allow “viewers” to quickly consume and understand complex information, and apart from that they are damn cool as well. They also have media appeal for both print and online publications, as well as being highly shareable via social media, and so they are quickly becoming an essential part of our PR tool kit.

However, one of the biggest challenges remains educating both PROs and their clients on how best to visually represent this information. So, here are top 5 tips from our experience:

• Think about the big picture. Just like any other PR activity, think about what you want to communicate and the action you want the “viewer” to take.
• Tell a story. Create a storyboard which outlines the story and messages you want to communicate and then start thinking about how you want to visualise this.
• Fit for Purpose. Just like lifestyle shots it’s important to consider how you want your Infographic to be used and how much branding you should allow. It’s better to be subtle and suitable for purpose, than overt and sat on the company’s website.
• Think like ‘Mad Men’. Pithy text that add value to the images and quickly communicate the point are essential to creating a good Infographic. Remember it’s a graphic visualisation and not a short story with pictures.
• Don’t just tag it on. Think about how your Infographic fits into the overall campaign and ties in with the story that the press release and other supporting materials communicate. The Infographic should support the story – not tell a completely different one.

The creation of an Infographic is obviously much easier when you have research to support it, but it can also be used to support product launches and thought leadership in my opinion. For instance, a new hardware product that is 100 times faster than the previous model could be graphically represented by a sports car vs. a rocket ship…..well you get the idea.

If you are interested in learning more about Infographics, I would definitely suggest checking out Mashable.com who are a great resource of innovative takes on the medium.

How hot is your grammar?

I recently discovered this 10-point comma quiz on PR Daily. It’s a test to see how good your grammar is and an opportunity to see if you could ever cut it as a Sub-editor.

As PRs we’re sticklers for correct spelling and grammar. Everybody makes mistakes now and again, hence the need for proof reading. However, writing and proofing press materials day in day out, you can’t help but exercise the skill out of the office. For example, whilst enjoying a blog post or online article, I find grammatical anomalies jumping out at me.

The worst offenders tend to be incorrect use of punctuation and abbreviations, with some of the classic confusions being:

your / you’re

it’s  / its

there / they’re / their

of / have (as in ‘should of’, ‘would of’ or ‘could of’)

affect / effect

DVD’s / DVDs

Naturally when writing a personal blog, it’s understandable to use an informal writing style. Additionally, there are some sentences that read better when inaccurately punctuated, suggesting that rules are meant to be broken.

Take the quiz to see for yourself.

Indie 2.0: Inspiring a Generation of Artists

As you may recall, in a previous post I talked about how filmmaker Kevin Smith announced he planned to market his next movie, Red State, using just social media and entirely without studio support. He has since not only made back the cost of the movie, something several recent summer blockbusters have failed to do, but also launched an internet radio station, filmed a pilot for a new TV talk show and started work on his final film, Hit Somebody.

The story of Kevin Smith is enthralling, but what’s more exciting is that it is far from unique. As far back as 2004, the British director Franny Armstrong made the eco-documentary The Age of Stupid, pioneering “crowd-funding”, a method whereby the financing (£450,000) was raised by selling shares to individuals and organisations, who all received a pro-rata share of the profits.

Now with the decline of the printed book and the rise of the eBook, supported by recent announcements by both Borders and Penguin books publisher Pearson, many authors are self-publishing and promoting their latest page turners.

For example, Toronto writer Blake Northcott decided to launch a Kindle version of Vs. Reality, a “comic book-inspired urban fantasy novel” on Amazon.com. During the nine months she spent writing the comic and movie blog, she amassed a 16,000 strong Twitter following, more than 1,700 personal Facebook friends and 4,500 page views providing real-time feedback on her work. To put that into perspective, it’s more than Image Comics, the world’s largest independent comic book artist publisher.

Even those authors that still have the financial and marketing support of their publishers are realising the opportunity around social media in promoting their work.

John Green’s latest book, The Fault in our Stars, recently landed the number-one spots on Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com. This isn’t particularly strange – expect the book won’t be published until 2012. Using a variety of social media tools, including Twitter, Tumblr, community forums and YouTube, he has created a community around his work and unprecedented pre-orders have followed.

This presents a conundrum for any artist. Consider the extra blood, sweat and tears that self-distribution requires; engaging with followers via social media instead of getting that final chapter done, which is surely self-defeating, but also becoming an intrinsic part of the marketing mix which was traditionally handled by the publisher.

Thanks to social media however, artists across the globe are writing their own rules about branding and fan engagement.

Communications today is about relevance say Brodeur

A great blog from Andy Colville and our friends at Brodeur on the changing world of communications and how ‘relevance‘ now sits at the core of their agency’s mission. Brodeur is committed to helping clients become—and remain—relevant in an increasingly noisy and turbulent environment. Relevance moves people from passive to involved and actually gets them to act. As we know, simply shouting louder does not make you relevant. For communications to succeed in today’s rapidly changing communications world – campaigns have to be ‘relevant’. Here in Europe, onechocolate is doing something similar – listening to each client’s particular communications challenges and then delivering campaigns that have them joining the important conversations and getting them talked about in all the right places. Like the blog Andy and good luck with the new vision, it’s very exciting.