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.

Technology, Life and our addiction to smartphones

Last Saturday evening I had the misfortune (or luck) to place my low-battery mobile phone in a “safe place” at home (I think). Mid-way through the week and I still hadn’t managed to locate it but as a persistent and positive PR I refused to give in and report it lost.

Coincidentally, this also happened to be the week that RIM went into meltdown, leaving millions of Blackberry users without access to the internet so at least I wasn’t suffering alone. An Ofcom survey released this summer highlighted that a quarter of adults and nearly half of teenagers admitted to being highly addicted to their smartphones. We spend hours with them and rarely have them out of arm’s reach (even if we are in the bathroom). A Sheila’s Wheel’s survey found that partners love their phones more than their partners and on the average night out 48 minutes are spent on these techy toys. I, for one, admit to spending an unnecessary amount of time with my phone, whether it’s keeping up with the latest news, looking at Twitter, playing games and emailing not to mention normal calls, texts etc. Pre loss I was checking my phone for news in the bath, slept next to it, checked it in bed once the alarm went off in the morning, in the bus on the way to work, on the way home, at lunch with colleagues and the list goes on. This is not a unique situation and though colleagues say that checking my emails in the bath is a little on the extreme side, most admit to being unable to cope without their mobiles.

So what is it like not having a smartphone? I have to say, after the initial feeling of missing a limb wears off, it’s actually not that bad. I had to use landlines, traditional maps, be on time and started to read again. My tech hits were limited to laptops and my work PC, but I noticed a sense of freedom, better concentration and that my eyes weren’t as strained. I also talked to people without worrying about what my trusty little electronic pal was up to. I went to an event in Shoreditch called Slow Tech last month, which examined ways to detach from tech for a while. Whilst recognising that technology plays an important part in our lives, the event also looked at our inability to not check phones every few minutes. Interesting solutions included the Tamagochi style living plant which is looked after when your phone or iPad is plugged in and not touched, the innovative pulley system which lifts your phone out of reach until it’s fully charged and a tech blocking gizmo which blocks signals and apps – very handy when you’re having a dinner party. A friend and I had dinner the other night and I found myself increasingly irritated with his need to reply to texts and check his phone. Slow Tech speakers argued that no one’s going to die when you don’t look at your phone for a couple of hours – something that I agree wholeheartedly with. I may have caved in and finally ordered a replacement phone, but I certainly think it helped me realise our obsession with being constantly connected is unnecessary. I wonder how many Blackberry users feel the same?

English Rugby in Trouble?

We are now well into week three of ‘Rugbygate’ as stories of our boys and their antics continue to fill the tabloids and beyond.  Yet I find myself in a bit of a dichotomy.   Do I roll my eyes and think ‘they are Rugby boys: are you seriously surprised that they get drunk, are rude to women and do OTT things whilst out partying? That behaviour is as old as the hills.’  Or do I think ‘about time too’?  Perhaps the sport was relying too much on the former perception to see them through.

So when the media decided that now was the time to have their day with them the sport was unprepared.

On reflection you would think the RFU would have had a better plan.  It should have been forewarned by stories from the previous World Cup, plus the on-going scrutiny the media now puts other sports stars under.

The issues and crisis plans, if they are in place, are ineffective and must have been written from within their own rugby world.  A typical mistake.  We can but hope that this is the low point, that they will smarten up their act rapidly now and be able to bring attention back to the fact that the team has made the quarter finals.  They will have time after the World Cup to consider if and how attitudes and communications must change for the future.

The Value of a Public Relations Stunt

Back in 1903, the philosophy for any given newspaper was that it is not good enough to simply report the news, but to also help create the news being reported. With this in mind, Geo Lefevre, a journalist for L’Auto magazine in France, came up with the idea that a race around France on bikes would generate some interest in his publication as well as stir up some headline grabbing stories. Thus, Tour de France was born—a PR stunt that not only put L’Auto’s competitors out of business, but is also a tradition still very much alive today.
The PR Stunt—a way to drum up media and public interest in a strange or sensational way and create recognition for the brand or product with which the stunt is associated. Sometimes risky, as reaction (whether positive or negative) can never be guaranteed, but in these hard-going economic times, a public relations stunt may be exactly the kind of light-hearted campaign people will engage with.
In 2009, Tourism Queensland took an advert to recruit an “island caretaker” willing to spend six months exploring the land and waters around the Great Barrier Reef for £70,000. The post, billed as “the best job in the world” would involve the successful applicant moving to a rent-free three-bedroom villa, complete with pool, on Hamilton Island. This stunt was hailed as one of the most effective in recent PR history as it had the whole world talking about Queensland.
Of course not all clients are as glamorous as Queensland and not all stunts will result in the consumer winning “the best job in the world”. What this campaign does demonstrate though, as did the Tour de France over 100 years earlier, is that people like interaction. A product or brand becomes a whole lot more exciting when a sensation is attached to it; be that a holiday, a sporting event, or even just a man submerged in a glass tank filled with two million skittles.