William Fernandez :: Internet Entrepreneur

Using Google+ Circles

Online social platforms attempt to force us to map our ever-changing social graph. Google+ uses “circles”, which makes dragging and dropping our connections into animated buckets – dare I say – fun.

Here are some reasons why and how you should use Google+ Circles:

PRIVACY is a key use of putting people in custom circles with appropriate settings to avoid viewing by outsiders. If you are like me, you’re only comfortable with certain people seeing what you’re talking about and sharing. (Now if I can only get my connections to understand that sonograms of the unborn embryos inside them is a private, family topic)

Similar to those thoughts on privacy, RELEVANCY is important if you want to maintain your online connections.  I’m sure that my mother doesn’t care to know that email open rates are dropping year over year, but my online marketing geek friends do. Consider what kind of content you put out and ensure that posts are visible to those circles.

Taking relevancy a step further, some communications require LOCAL CONTEXT and shouldn’t be pushed to the masses.  Consider a “Locals” circle for posts like “Has anyone tried the new restaurant on Main Street?”

An important thing to note is that these tips aren’t only for Google+ users. While it isn’t highly visible, Facebook also has a “lists” feature that does basically the same thing as circles. Unfortunately it is buried in your privacy settings and not many people use this valuable feature.

I’m just getting familiar with Google+ myself, so expect more observations and tips as I dig in.

How should my business use social media?

I recently responded to a broad question “how should businesses use social media” in a forum and thought it was worthwhile to repost my brief response here.

As a digital marketing consultant for many business types, I’ve seen a lot of attempts at incorporating social media into the marketing mix.

A common pitfall of “using social media” is that it is “free” and therefore non-specific tactics like “being on facebook” or “having a twitter account” become widespread.

I equate this to having a booth at a conference, but no one staffing it.

In order to effectively “use” social media, businesses need to start with two things, in my experience:

• resources to engage with others (most of this time this isn’t your VP of Marketing, who doesn’t have the time to get fully engaged with consumers)
• a plan for how to engage with the right people and be relevant to them, while focusing on an underlying business goal.

While this isn’t the only “use of social media”, many companies like RackSpace, a top web host provider, use platforms like Twitter to field customer questions that are both directly asked of them, as well as those taking place without them by using search tools. This level of pro-active customer service (Fanatical Support, as they call it) makes people feel like the company really cares (loyalty) and also nips negativity in the bud (reputation management).

How I drove 1000+ fans to a new Facebook page in 1 week

Concept: My Fat Pet (facebook.com/myfatpet)
Time period: April 26-May 3 (1 week)
Hours invested: 4.5
Media budget invested: $36.56
Fans recruited: 1,000+
Page Views: 7,280
Page interactions: 84 (comments, fan posts)
Supporting Platforms

• Twitter (@myfatpet)
• Tumblr (myfatpet.tumblr.com)
• Wordpress (myfatpet.com)

While I consult companies and brands on social media marketing, the layers of bureaucracy within their organizations usually prevents them from being as successful as they could be. The internet in general is a fast moving, ever changing environment, so if things are taking weeks or even days to get approval, truly engaging people through social media becomes nearly impossible.

The other thing that I find holds companies and brands back from truly engaging in social media is the hesitation to dedicate resources to the channel. Having an over-worked brand manager engaging with people online is not only a bad use of their time, but usually a doomed project since they can’t truly get their head into the dozens of conversations happening at any given moment. True engagement takes a semi-dedicated resource or an agency with the tools and people to deal with the day to day tasks.

I regularly experiment on my own in order to take down these barriers and gain a better understanding of the levers that I have at my disposal. Here are a few tips that came from this social media experiment. For the purposes of this write up, I am focusing on Facebook, although other integrated tactics were used on other social platforms. Also, I need to point out that “getting fans” was not the primary goal of this exercise, it is simply a byproduct engagement with people on a relevant topic that compelled them to participate.

1. I used an intriguing concept, but was sure to have depth and an underlying, positive message. In this case, fat animal photos can be funny, but pet obesity is a real issue that deserves awareness.
2. I provided an immediate payoff in the form of funny fat pet photos within the filmstrip of the Facebook page.
3. I provided additional resources for people that want to go beyond the “lol” in the form of pet diet and exercise articles.
4. I requested sharing by using messaging with positive connotations, such as “Share this with other caring dog owners” or “If you care about healthy cats…”
5. I manually posted the most relevant and compelling items on other platforms - as opposed to simply tying in all of the platforms to auto-echo one another.
6. I encouraged submissions by immediately re-posting the photos submitted to the Tumblr blog and then commenting back a short link to the photo in the gallery. This not only shows others what you want from them, but also pushes up the story in everyone’s feed (including the friends of the original submitter) since there is more activity on that thread.
7. I toggled between my personal and page account to create even more activity on posted items and push up the story in my own personal activity feed, which is seen by my friends.
8. I used Facebook “social” ads to propel social stories in front of the friends of people posting or liking the page. I did this after I reached ~200 fans so there was enough inventory (200 x # of friends) available to use minimal per-click bidding and still hit my $10/day budget. Cost per fan was about $.18 through this channel.

Over the next week I’ll be experimenting with alternate sharing messages, further repurposing submitted content and attempting to increase interaction time + frequency.

If you’d like to know more about my tinkering with My Fat Pet or other interactive experiments, feel free to reach out via Twitter or good old email (tinkering@williamfernandez.com)

3 Google Labs experimental services worth checking out

Google Fast Flip

Get quick snapshots of controversial, recent and popular articles from top news websites. One click - or one swipe - and the next content piece is served up in an instant. Customize what you want to see within their very minimalistic design. Great for researchers and writers and anyone who is concerned about what’s happening in the world.

Google Scribe

Google Scribe auto-suggests words and phrases that are compatible with your sentence structure. It is a great tool to help speed up the writing process and plow through writers block.

Google Shared Spaces

I haven’t used this service yet, but it looks interesting. Shared Spaces basically brings people together to collaborate on projects. It seems easy to use and has lots of gadgets (or widgets) to choose from- like polls to mind maps.