1. There is no brand verification in place currently. It is very important that you go and grab your brand now even if you don’t plan to use it. It would not be hard for someone else to hijack your brand without verification. Save yourself the hassle and get started today.
2. Currently it only supports 1 admin, though multiple admin support will be coming in the near future. If you aren’t the one that plans on updating the Google+ brand page, have the person that will be the ongoing admin create the page. You can add team members to a brand, though they can’t really do anything with it. If you are the admin of a page, Google has made it very easy for you to update a status for either your personal page or your brand page…more good news!
3. If you choose to follow other brands and people, their updates will show in your news stream, so choose wisely. If you as a brand add tons of people to your circles, your brand news stream will be cluttered. If you want to add 3000 people to your circles, do it from your personal accounts.

A couple of us at protocol 80 have joined a Movember team and hope to use social media to help our teams success.

The Background

Movember participants will start on 11/1 completely clean shaven. For me, this was odd. I have had a beard for more than 6 years. Now through the end of the month, we have committed to keeping, growing, and grooming only a mustache. In hopes to get my first donation, I will not post a photo of my clean shaven face until that first donation comes through. Throughout the month, the more donations I get the more pictures I will post. We will even take recommendations as to how to style our mos…but the donations have to come in. Official Movember rules can be found here.

Our Story

I wanted to start a team because there is certainly not enough attention given to men’s health in my opinion. This is a fun way to help and we hope that we can be successful raising awareness in our local community and as far as our social media reach can go.

The Use of Social

We know that social is a great way to build awareness for any subject. All of us on the team already have personal Facebook and Twitter accounts. We started recruiting for our Movember team through these outlets. So far we are a little short on the volume of team members we would like, but we will continue recruiting.

Secondly, I took 10 minutes to create a team Facebook page so that we can communicate with the community as a team, share progress, answer questions, etc. I don’t expect to create a specific Twitter account for the team, as I believe we will have better success promoting through our own personal accounts. We hope to have fun with it on the social outlets while creating conversations and ultimately bringing in the donations. Our goal for donations will be $200 per team member. We currently have 3 team members, so the team goal will be $600.

Additionally, I have created this blog post. Given the success or failure of our efforts, I would like to keep you updated with our thoughts on social media and it’s effectiveness. Hopefully non-profit organizations will be able to gather ideas from our experiences to use with their own causes.

Here are some links:

Our Team for donations

Join The BFD Movember Team

The BFD Facebook Page  – Like us!

About Movember from the official website…including data on where the money goes!

What are your thoughts on Facebook brands adding “rules of use” for their page?

 Personal Use

Of course there are reasons that your Klout matters on personal level…most people want to have some sort of influence. Also, the more influential you are, the more Klout Perks will be available to you. You can get Klout perks by achieving a certain score or by being influential about a specific topic. Though the idea behind the perks is pretty good, I have not found them to be all that interesting. Though I think Klout is interesting, in the long run it doesn’t really matter all that much on a personal level.

From a Business Perspective…

Klout definitely matters if you are a business owner…especially a brick and mortar business. Here’s why. People using social media are not scared to mention a brand. They will talk about their experiences, both good and bad, through social media. Influential people can have much more of an impact of what actually happens when they talk about it.

While you should treat all of your customers the same, you really want to treat your influential customers well. Wouldn’t you want to know when someone influential walks through your doors? With the power of Klout and check-in services, you will be able to do such a thing. Imagine your host/hostess getting a notification when someone with a Klout score of 65 checks in to your restaurant via foursquare…not only that, but they are influential about the topic of food. You can then take the next step based on your business to make sure that person is treated right…or at least not poorly. Understanding when influential people are arriving at your business is HUGE.

I have already read about a few start-ups tackling this type of application, and I can only imagine that we will see many more. Klout has already teamed up with Postling to notify an owner when someone influential is following them. Good information…but not nearly as powerful to a brick-and-mortar establishment. I like Klout and am quite interested to see how it progresses in the near future. Have you checked your Klout score?

If you’ve been keeping up with our blog there’s a good chance you’ve had a chance to use either Amazon.com or Netflix.com – two websites that are very well optimized to provide a personalized user experience.  When you first visit either of those websites your experience is fairly bland.  Let’s take Netflix for example, this is what you see the first time you visit:

It’s a fairly boring user experience. You see what the Netflix service is, how it works and they have a great call to action to get visitors signed up for a free trial. Other than that though, the website offers no input as to how they recommend using their service – they’re leaving that bit up to you. What’s cool about Netflix is that it learns over time and adapts to your tastes in movies, so that once you’ve been using the service for a while your user experience changes to something like this instead:

As you can see Netflix shows me my most-recently watched content as well as similar content that I might also enjoy, and they’ve even lined up some recommendations in one of my favorite genres so I never have to hunt for new stuff to watch.  They do this by watching my habits over time and building a personalized profile for me that makes using their product a heck of a lot more fun and a whole lot easier.  I never get to the point where I feel like I’ve run out of things to watch on Netflix because they’re constantly honing my customer profile to show me more of what I like!  Amazon.com works in much the same way.  Over time they keep track of the products you like to browse and purchase and will show you recommendations for different products to try.  Essentially they’re just making it a lot easier to continue using their service so they ensure you stick around to give them repeat business.

Facebook Connect

Another cool way to add personalization into a website in my opinion is by using Facebook Connect.  Facebook Connect is an API that lets developers utilize a Facebook user’s account info to make a more personalized web experience for them.  What that means is that a web developer can build your website such that visitors can use their Facebook login to access your website also (or, let’s be honest, get logged in automatically since most people are accessing Facebook all day anyways).  After that it’s incredibly easy to pull in “like” data and other information to make it easier for people to share your products and content with their Facebook friends.  Check out some of the cool things Spotify, a new on-demand music streaming service is doing with Facebook Connect to make sharing playlists with Facebook users a breeze.

Spotify is Seriously Facebook Friendly

So that’s my main takeaway from #IMS11 – personalization! I can’t wait to start creating more personalized customer experiences moving forward that help keep visitors coming back for more.

Enter BufferApp.com

Scheduling tweets isn’t a new idea.  Hootsuite has been doing it for quite some time.  However, what caught my eye about Buffer is its simplicity.  All you have to do is create an account which takes a second, link your Twitter account which will take up second #2, and then type in your tweets.  That’s it.  You don’t even have to worry about scheduling them, that’s all done by Buffer from the get-go, so they’ll figure out when to randomly post your tweets (though you can go back and modify their initial settings to your own preference).  With Buffer you can finally set aside a time to plan out your Twitter updates for the day or even week, just by adding tweets to your Buffer.

Buffer Goodies

Buffer for Google Chrome

There are also some cool features with Buffer that makes tweeting a lot easier, including web browser plugins that can let you add a tweet from any web page you come across during the day.  This happens to me all of the time – I’m at work researching things for a project and I come across something cool that I don’t have time to post to Twitter at that instance.  I try to make a mental note to revisit the news story or article later, but 9 times out of 10 I forget.  With a browser plugin like Buffer for Chrome you’re just a click away from adding a tweet to your Buffer with the current page’s web address packed into a neat short URL.

The folks behind Buffer have also created mobile applications for iOS and Android so you can build your buffer on the go, and even a badge you can place on your blog or website so visitors can quickly tweet your content by adding it to their own buffers.  All of these features are designed well and simply, so unlike the Hootsuite dashboard which can be quite intimidating if you’re not sure what you’re doing, you’ll be finding your way around Buffer in no time.

Perfect for Twitter Newbies

There is one final feature that I really like that will make Twitter very easy to use if you’re just starting out, whether you’re posting to your personal Twitter account or the account you created for your small business, and it’s called Suggest A Tweet.  When you’re just starting off with Twitter a lot of times folks aren’t really sure what to post, or maybe they don’t have any content to post or anything significant to say, but they don’t want their Twitter feed to be stagnant.  If you ever run into that issue with Buffer, you can use their Suggest A Tweet feature that will automatically come up with a new tweet for you to post all on its own!  You can of course modify the tweet before sending it to your buffer if you so choose, but it’s a perfect way to overcome Twitter writer’s block.  Try out Buffer right now by heading over to bufferapp.com, and let me know what you think in the comments!

It goes without saying that Facebook is the top dog in the social media game right now.  It has been for a while, and although there are challengers in the market like Google Plus it will retain the crown for quite a while, if for no other reason than the huge amount of people already signed up.  Did you know that Facebook is also the #1 photo-sharing site in the US?  With 51.5 million estimated users uploading and viewing video, plus millions more sharing photos now’s the perfect time to reach out to prospect customers with creative media campaigns.

The best part about Facebook’s rise in popularity from a content-creation point of view is that if you’re already using YouTube as a marketing avenue it’s very easy to get started on Facebook by reposting content.  Many video editing tools like Apple’s iMovie come with the ability to upload straight to Facebook (as well as YouTube), so you’re just a button click away from broadcasting to your Facebook audience from your business page.

It really doesn’t take a whole lot of time or money to get started with a video campaign that will engage your audience while at the same time promoting your small business.  If you have a modern smart phone with video capabilities or an inexpensive video camera like the Flip, you can record, edit and share your creation from the same device.  When creating your first video keep in mind that video length does matter, and in the web world shorter is better!  If you post videos that clock in around the 30 second mark there’s a much better chance that your viewer will stay tuned for the entire duration.

If you have questions about about the benefits of web video marketing feel free to get in touch with me and I’ll give you the rundown!

We Know Obama is Involved Online

From the beginning of the campaign for Obama to become president, you could tell that he would be somewhat of a game changer. Not only because of his ability to speak, but the new role that social media could play. He took advantage of social media and did it well. More recently however things may have taken a slight turn.

Has Obama Turned to Spamming?

To understand how this may be, you have to understand the basics Twitter. You can mention one person in particular by using an @ sign and their username. For example, if you wanted to mention me you could say @jcurcio, if you wanted to mention p80 you could say @protocol80 and so on. You can also use a topic in a tweet by using the hash tag (#) and the particular topic…in this case the hash tag was #Compromise.

To get some traction on the #compromise trend and help get the general public to contact the their state’s GOP lawmakers the @BarackObama account decided to post the twitter handles of all of them. Their hopes being the Twitterverse would contact their lawmakers through Twitter pushing them to pass the “#compromise” debt ceiling solution.

Did it Backfire?

Obama’s approach to getting users to contact the GOP party was seen as spam to many Twitter users. It is generally not acceptable to tweet 100 times in only 4 hours without anything to say. One of my favorite responses (as captured by @Mashable) is seen below:

You can see more screen captures from Mashable here.

The Aftermath

There is no hard evidence that the Tweets from the general public helped urge lawmakers to approve the deal. My personal opinion is that it may have slightly helped the lawmakers aware of the concern of social media users, but a plan would have been in place either way. There is however hard evidence that many followers of @BarackObama were not extremely pleased with the “spam”. According to Simply Measured the account lost 37k followers as of 7/29. Though he still as ~9,420,357 followers and a loss of 37k is only a drop in the bucket, it is the first time he has experienced a significant decline in 6 months.

I am interested to see how social media and politics play together for not only the next election, but as social media becomes more powerful and even more popular…yes, it’s possible. What are your thoughts on the situation?

There are a few different ways to try out Google Page Speed, but the easiest is to head on over to pagespeed.googlelabs.com.  Once you’re there just enter the web address of the website you’d like to analyze and Google will give you a brief report of what they think you can do to speed up your website.  Depending on how well your website has been optimized for speed already, the scan may take a few seconds so don’t be too worried if the report takes a while to load.

Once you have your report all of Google’s suggestions for speeding up your website are outlined for you, including high, medium and low priorities.  After testing the tool with a few different websites I’ve noticed that Google will pick up on things like whether your images are too large, whether you’re adhering to CSS best practices and whether any javascript elements on the page are poorly optimized.  You will also be assigned a score out of 100 as to how well your website performed – with the different websites I tried I had scores ranging from 90 for snappy websites and 55 for sites that crept along at a turtle’s pace.

whitehouse.gov's Google Page Speed rating

Another cool feature of Google Page Speed is that it has an option to check for how well your website is optimized for mobile browsers, such as the ones on smart phones and tablet devices.  It’s becoming increasingly important to have your website render quickly on both a desktop computer and mobile devices with the huge (and growing) popularity of devices using Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android operating system.  Google Page Speed is an excellent service if you’re a web novice looking to optimize your website.  If you’re not really sure where to start, be sure to discuss your Google Page Speed report with your web developer in order to develop a strategy for optimizing your website!