Great idea (and partnership with Facebook) by print-on-demand service Moo.com, using the new Timeline view to create business cards.
Using your Cover Photo, Timeline layout and typography, Moo’s application can turn your Timeline into a pack of business card with your primary details using Facebook’s API. On the back, you can add your own quotation or sentence about yourself.
To make your own Facebook cards just go to your http://www.facebook.com/yourfacebookusername/info and hover on the business card on your contact info – the first 50000 ones get printed for free
I’ve been trying to pitch a Google Street View interactive campaign for a while, so it’s with mixed feelings — happy for the great use of technology, sad that i wasn’t hunca life convincing enough to make it real before – that i’m sharing this playful approach of Google Shoot View by Dutch agency Pool (who previously did Muppets Voices for TomTom).
As you can see from the teaser trailer, it all boils down to using your assault rifle on Google’s Street View scenery.
Not sure if the PG18+ is against Google’s terms of service (which got shorter), but from Columbine to the Tower of London, there’s plenty to choose from.
If you’re in the Netherlands and use Twitter, tomorrow you’ll have a chance to win a brand new Citroën DS5.
Euro RSCG Amsterdam and Perfect Fools claim to have created the world’s first Twitter Race for Citroën, with users tweeting the driver into where to go next.
Now that Google+ Pages have been live for over a week and there’s a lot less noise amongst the digerati, it’s time for a short guide for businesses.
Google+ Pages: an overview
After a couple of months with Google+ ope only for individuals, last Monday Google+ Pages were introduced for businesses and brands, helping them to connect with their customers and fans, whether recommending a page with a +1 button or using the concept of circles for targeted messages for groups of customers.
Google+ is now available to all brands with Pages that can share publicly and connect with more than 40 million users (Source: Google Q3 Earnings call).
What’s new in Google+?
One of the more immediate and distinct features for businesses are Hangouts (here’s an funny one with the Muppets), a realtime video chat that was previously available only to individual users, and promises to be a great tool for customer service.
Direct Connect (video above) is another feature that shows how serious Google is about Google+, allowing a brand with a Page to take advantage of Google Search distribution, by quickly navigating from search results to a brand’s Page using the + prefix, prompting autocompletion.
Currently Direct Connect is assumed algorithmically, by picking up authenticity signals, but a brand can speed up the process by placing a Google+ badge, icon or rich snippet on the brand’s website and making sure the brand’s URL is on the Google+ Page profile.
If you’re a local business, there’s a couple of additional fields that will help your company to be found, integrating with Google Places and Google Maps.
From small and medium businesses to bands, media companies or global brands, the new Google+ service is going beyond the traditional social network, extending the Google experience, making tribute to their name Google+.
Are my customers on Google+?
With over 500 million people using Google’s services, if they’re not, they will. Despite all the naysayers that expect one more big social fail by Google, this is a platform play. Again: it’s more than a social network, it Google PLUS. The Google experience evolved. You can no longer escape from noticing the dark grey bar on all Google’s verticals, and reaching a critical mass is around around the corner (expect 100 million users before the year ends).
What you probably should be concerned is: how can my brand be meaningful in Google+?
You can start by educating your newly found Google+ customers, something that the Official Google+ Page for business is doing right on their photostrip.
If you pay close attention to the area highlighted in red above, that’s a Google+ page with a designated administrator (multiple admins are coming in the near future), so you can also start thinking about who will you add as public spokesperson for the page. I for once would welcome the transparency of, unlike Facebook pages, actually knowing who is behind the brand presence.
Start experiment with Google+ features and find out what works best with your fans, something that seasoned Facebook community managers do often. The discussion generated by regular Google+ users is more insightful and rewarding for community managers than what’s to be found on Facebook, mostly due to the early adopter fan base that the service has now.
One rather interesting feature of Google+ Pages is that you can actually add people to Page Circles once people mention you Page or add it to their circles. This is a great way to target your updates, form sub-groups or even do multivariate testing. The only problem is to actually build your circles from the start, as big audiences will become a nightmare to segment and circles are limited currently to 5000 people. Take care of being to pushy, as when someone uncircles your page, they’re also removed from your Page created circles.
You should at least secure the presence and establish a coherent branding with other channels (namely Facebook). I spoke recently about brandjacking for the BBC , as misappropriation of brand pages by cybersquatters can happen quite frequently. Reserving the presence and reassuring your fans that it is an official presence should be a preemptive measure while you figure out what to do next.
When deciding to advance to a more structured and continuous presence, you should evaluate this new channel according to your overall business strategy. Lead generation is probably the most affected metric, considering how Direct Connect and +1 buttons will influence SERPs. Make no mistake about it: if you have a substantial traffic coming from search, buckle up as the new search algorithm changes kick in. Google has always been about collective intelligence, and having vibrant communities on Google+ Pages will only do good for leading brands by attracting even more organic traffic. With Google Search Side Ads disappearing, the space is prone to be filled or influenced by +1 signals.
What about branding and creative?
Hold your horses,as Google+ Pages are quite limited, design wise.
The top photostrip is currently the main spotlight for brands trying to make themselves noted, with a few ones worth checking out:
Creating the images for the scrapbook is rather easy, you just need to slice 5 consecutive images of 125×125 pizels.
The square profile picture can also be explored, considering it alternates between the two most recent profile photos. Try uploading 2 profile pictures and click on them afterwards, to see what happens. Here’s the +Page for this blog, and me peckabooing on the backside .
On the right sidebar you can also add recommended links, but I wouldn’t mess around too much with those, as it might confuse your users. But having a comprehensive list of your main web presences won’t hurt you.
Also of notice is the fact that Pages can share animated GIFs on their timeline (check the Burrberry scrapbook). If individuals users had their share of memes before businesses entering Google+, it’s about time the brands do their share of +culture now
Adapting some Facebook tactics such as posting images, open questions or asking people to +1 should work fine with brands also.
A few things missing
Google+ Page currently doesn’t provide pretty permalinks / vanity URLs, with Google using only canonical permalinks, with the format https://plus.google.com/[yourpageID] – find out [yourpageID] by clicking on the Get Started button on the left menu.
Moderation features are limited, with single administrator (no roles), the ability to remove comments and no word filters.
Also, the metrics available are quite limited, with only a few analytics picked up with Webmaster Tools or integrating Social on Google Analytics. And you know it sucks changing tools instead of showing data in context (hint: Facebook per post insights). Hopefully this will change in the coming weeks, along with better API integration.
What’s next?
From sharing your new presence on Google+ Pages on your other channels, to adjusting editorial calendars (please, don’t just syndicate), it’s still early to find definitive best practices. Having a record for great social media practices will help you set apart in these first few weeks, so make the most of it while you can. As user base grows, it will become increasingly harder to get noticed.
If you want fo find out more about Google+ for businesses, there’s a webminar tomorrow or watch to AdTech’s talk by Christian Oestlien if you’re in a hurry.
If you know any more tips to add here, drop a note in the comments.
Google is on a roll this week, after finally launching Google+ Pages for brands (more on this from me this week) they’re now releasing the new resource rich Think Insights on their marketing focused platform, Think With Google.
It’s one trove of stats, case studies, featured reports, marketing insights and quick shortcuts for brands working in interactive marketing. Not less impressive, is their renewed concern on aesthetics, arranging all this information on a well designed website and attention to detail. You should know better that eye-candy still matters to marketeers, and keeping with their mission statement, information is not only universally accessible and useful, but also beautiful.
For planners out there, have a look at the Real-Time Insights Finder. The only thing to regret is that many of the studies and research are pre-2011. As much as it hurts me to say, they should step up their game regarding Facebook, that is becoming more agressive with marketing bootcamps offering up to $125 in Facebook Coupons or awarding campaigns on Facebook Studio. Let the fight for attention (and ad budgets) continue.
If you’re still not convinced with the Facebook fans fallacy, perhaps a quote from the source will enligthen you:
We’re still seeing the fans and followers arms race — businesses trying to gather as many fans as possible. But I think that’s fundamentally wrong. It’s more important to focus on quality, not quantity, of connections.
For example, many brands run competitions on social media platforms. You have to “Like” or “Follow” that business to enter. So the question is whether they are making connections with advocates of their brand, or with people who simply love competitions. If it’s the latter, then they’re filling their social media interactions and data with noise.
As I mentioned earlier, people are often most influenced by their closest friends. So only make connections with true advocates of your brand, and market to the friends of those fans.
— Paul Adams, Global Brand Experience Manager at Facebook
The best young scientists from 13 to 18 years old can now enter the competition and submit their creative projects, with dozen of prizes going from a National Geographic Expedition or a $50,000 scolarship to a personalised LEGO color mosaic or a Google Chrome Notebook.
Google also provides several resources and materials to help with the projects, showcasing their collaborative web services, and even get teachers involved.
For those who’ve been around before the dot-com crash, you’ve probably remember those first days, with portals, vortals and the whole remediation of mass media to the web was dominant. Brochureware (brochures repurposed as websites) and directories were abundant and brands began a gold race to a different medium, expecting the masses would follow along.
That didn’t work, as McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” was mostly fit for a broadcast age. Enter the Cluetrain Manifesto, Tim O’Reilly’s web 2.0 and a new conversation age: from mass media to social media.
With this new communication paradigm, people shape the medium: from Twitter lingo to collaborative platforms, media became social, with many online citizens entering the conversation.
Paper.li, The Daily, Flipboard or even your regular iGoogle are the first wave of personal media, with users and algorithms adjusting the media stream. These new personal media platforms draw upon mass media and social media (our social graph to be more precise) and combine them to create personal dashboards with our own set of preferred media.
We’ve come a long way, from blogs to new forms of publishing such as Storify. To truly become the media, both producing and curating our own content, a new kind of service that adjusts the output to our media habits should appear. Update: it’s rather telling than one of the few ways of making something go viral is to make it personalized. From Elf Yourself to Uniqlo’s UTweet, there’s plenty to choose from.
The question these days is: will it come from Facebook or from Google? Considering that we’ve been crossing the media the past decade, I for one would appreciate that publishers took the lead. Both the Guardian and the New York Times have been brave enough to experiment, but considering the mass media potential for online video and the upcoming TV platforms, i wouldn’t be surprised if some major network decides to take a radical leap for the next decade. If they don’t, Google will disrupt as usual.
Personal media and the platforms to aggregate/create it are worthy of more attention than the social media echo chamber. Yes, we’re social beings. But we’re also individuals, searching for better ways to cope with our desires, interests and yes, media. And as we cross our media, we atomize it: more personal, smaller but always part of a bigger system. So, where’s my media microscope?
Started last year by Jeremiah Owyang, every 4th Monday of January “celebrates the efforts community managers do around the world to improve customer experiences”.
Community Managers don’t always get the credit they deserve, doing a silent, hard work, with the credits going to whoever is the public figure for the brand. We should recognize their role more often, beyond the usual pat in the back, but for a start, a Community Manager Appreciation Day it’s a good idea (Twitter hasthag is #CMAD).
The sheer amount of pressure and personal involvment is hard, not to mention the regular trolls they have to put up with. On this day, i recognize some of my friends and co-workers in Portugal that are doing a great job managing their communities:
