Google Plus: Lack of Quality

Unfortunately it didn’t last. The quality of content has declined, the newness has worn off and to be honest the innovations promised by Google have failed to appear. Hangouts on Air, the ability to record and then save a Hangout to Youtube was rolled out to a select few users and it has been indicated that this feature will be eventually rolled out to all users but that hasn’t happened yet – instead Google added animal masks – as a sop to those who wanted something new to happen in the video hangouts.

Google Plus: The Mobile Version that isn’t

The mobile version of Google Plus is at best a hindrance, forcing users back to the web based version because of its lack of features.

While I accept that the common rule is that you are in control of your own stream and therefore if you find your stream boring you must be circling the wrong people – with approx 5,000 people in my circles you would expect to find a higher signal to noise ratio but that isn’t the case. The quality has dropped off, a lot of the content is cross-posted from other sites and to be honest, while I might have originally circled someone because of their content, when that degrades I can’t be bothered to move them to another circle.

I stopped using Google Plus a week ago and I have to say I haven’t missed it. It never did that much for me to be honest in terms of traffic generation, Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest send more visitors to my blog than Google Plus ever did and while I did find some interesting people there, they are also on other networks I use.

I’m now using Chime.in, which I wrote about months ago as my alternative to Facebook and Twitter though my use of both of those platforms has increased and subsequently my engagement on them has increased.

Google Plus:Meh

So it’s ok if you say “meh” when people mention Google Plus, you aren’t missing the point, you aren’t missing out on some wonderful collaboration network that will change how you think about social media, in fact I would have preferred to see Google develop Youtube Plus and bring the benefits of Hangouts etc to Youtube directly and just get rid of the rest of their attempt at Social Networks. Honestly the guys at Mountain View need to understand that Mathlethes aren’t best placed to run the prom. While it is cool to currently believe that the Nerds are taking over the world, at the end of the day they are still nerds and the only world they are taking over is Silicon Valley – to which they are most definitely welcome.

As for me I’m going back to my old haunts of Facebook, Twitter, Chime.In and Pinterest as well as looking for newer, smaller, interest based networks that provide me the ability to really fine tune my information stream.

What about you – do you Like G+?

image from Spreadshirt

Being Creative

My friend, mentor and inspiration Chris Brogan describes himself as a “typist” – which I have always thought as a wonderfully humorous way of describing what he does. I can only imagine the looks he has received over the years from people who aren’t familiar with his work.  I have referred to myself as a speaker who types fast, a digital strategist, a writer, an author, and various combinations of them all. What it really comes down to is that I am a creative.

Recently I started two new projects that are not connected with what I do on a daily basis. I’m writing my first novel called Past Life and created a Kickstarter project to help get it off the ground as I intend to self-publish it. I’ve also opened an Etsy store with my girlfriend to showcase clothing accessories that we are making. So why would I do this? Why take on things that apparently divert my attention and energy from the daily tasks of running an agency, writing business books and pitching for new speaking gigs?

Creativity Needs Release

Being creative isn’t something you can turn on and off like a light switch and like any other ability it is something that needs training and use. If you were to do the same exercise every day you would maintain a level of fitness but you would most likely hit a plateau, you would stop seeing improvements. Doing the same things, even in a creative way you are likely to maintain your creativity but you won’t see improvements. That is something I wasn’t prepared to accept.

Writing a novel is a different way of thinking than writing a business book, switching between the two makes me shift gears and think differently, use different voices and different sources of inspiration. Making things with my hands also demands a different way of thinking (I refinish furniture, paint in watercolor and build models as well). Instead of using a computer as a tool, using hand tools makes my body and my brain work differently together.

Being More Creative

In addition to these reasons, building a Kickstarter project and an Etsy store allows me to see platforms from the inside. To get a better understanding of how they work. Etsy allows me create, sell and market something different, but it also allows me to see how a platform like Pinterest fits into the process. Kickstarter allows me to see how simple workflows can aid non-technical people in creating projects as well as how crowdfunding really operates.

These lessons are then things that I can feed back into what I do on a daily basis. Lessons I can share with clients, audiences and readers. So the whole process becomes cyclic. I get smarter, I get to express my creativity in other ways and I get to educate those who care to learn from my experiences.

So what do I call myself – I’m a creative.

What do you call yourself?

image used under CC License by Lorises

Lytro

I’ve been following the Lytro story for quite some time. Finally I got hands on with one of their cameras and I can definitely say it was not a disappointment. Lytro is a light-field camera and it was explained to me that this means it captures not just the usual information that a regular camera captures but also the direction of the light. Which means you can adjust the focus of the image after you have taken the picture, yes that’s right after the picture is taken. Which makes for a whole new creative experience. Play around by clicking on different parts of the image below of me holding one of the Lytro cameras.

ISIS

Mobile payment systems are here and they are going to be one of the biggest changes that mobile brings to our world. Google has its Wallet, but as we saw last year when the Galaxy Nexus was launched, the carriers decide whether or not you can access that feature. The reason for that is the carriers have created their own mobile payment system – ISIS. Expect it to be on your phone very soon. ISIS, like other NFC based systems doesn’t just focus on payments though and provides merchants with the ability to embed marketing collateral and offers into their existing communication pieces. For example see the picture below of an example of how it can be used in Out Of Home advertising.

Vidit

Of all the things I saw at SXSW this was not only the one that wowed me the most it was also the most serendipitous of meetings. I was actually meeting the team from Blue – I’m a user and fan of their mics, when the guys from Vidit happened by to demo their product.

This is the future of crowdsourced video. Quite simply their dashboard allows you to grab multiple videos from Youtube and using the familiar timeline functionality of quality video editing software piece together a new video. The possibilities for this are endless. I’ll be doing an interview with the guys from Vidit later this week which I will post next week.

Bonus item that wowed me at SXSW – Google’s bad marketing.

Yes the guys from the big G totally blew their opportunity to make an impression at SXSW this year. They shut down a street in Austin, and in their infinite wisdom made access to it only available to people with a SXSW badge – this included the residents of the street! A friend of mine actually had to produce ID to get into his own street because he didn’t have a SXSW badge.

I am sure that they paid a fortune to the City of Austin to be allowed to shut down a residential street, but and here is the point, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. Google could have made a much better impact on the city and the attendees of SXSW if they had used some of that innovation that they are supposed to be famous for.

What wowed you at SXSW?

image used under CC license by Tetsumo

Measuring Online Influence: It’s A Small World

Love them or hate them, sites like Klout and PeerIndex have had a significant impact on the social media world. Marketers have been persuaded that they are the way to triage their outreach programs, individuals building personal brands have been convinced that the score matters.

However, in the next twelve to eighteen months all indications are that the backbone of the algorithm these sites use is going to change dramatically. Online influence is primarily a function of two factors, the size of the network a user has and their ability to affect change within that network. Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project reports that an increasing number of online users of social networks are changing their habits. In 2011 63% of users “unfriended” connections, up from 56%, 44% deleted comments and 37% untagged themselves from photos. Add to that the number of users who are now setting their privacy settings to the most restrictive provided and you have a landscape that is becoming increasingly more private in nature.

How Do You Measure Online Influence In A Private Network?

Sites like Klout and PeerIndex require users to be active and open on social networks to be able to produce their numbers. Both systems offer marketers the ability to reach out to users with offers, often referred to as “perks”, these perks are awarded based on scores. The sites need a critical mass of online users in their database, in the same way market researchers need large sample databases, because otherwise they have nothing to leverage.

If users continue to follow this trend and become more selective about who they connect with and what they share with those connections then the task of identifying significant numbers of users with online influence is going to get much harder. Marketers need to start now in their efforts to identify alternative methods for identifying the customers and potential customers that they want to connect with based on something other than an arbitrary score.

Measuring Online Influence: Invite Only

Women are especially likely to increasingly exercise more control over their privacy settings on social networks than men and younger users are more likely to “unfriend” than older users. Until very recently Women were consider the easy mark by brands on sites as they were more open to sharing the brands they “liked”.

However, if, as the trend data shows, we are moving to an environment where the users are focusing more on real relationships and less on numbers and power networks then brands may well lose their invite to the party. Facebook currently estimates that the average user has 130 connections in their network. If that shrinks to a much smaller number then are brands going to be able to afford the expense of trying to get their message out through, what will become, an increasing number of users?

Are you unfriending this year?

The rise of the connected shopper is changing the way brick and mortar stores do business. An increasing number of smartphone users are pulling out their phones while instore to do comparison shopping.

The Death of the Shopping Mall

Here is the scenario that stores are facing. A potential customer comes into the store, they look at a product, they engage with the sales staff, they are provided with information, maybe taking up anywhere between five and fifteen minutes of that staff members time and then just before the purchase they take out their smartphone and do an online search for the same product to compare prices, worse still they simply scan the barcode and services like Google will show them the comparable prices online and at other physical stores nearby.

This is great for the consumer and horrifying for the retailer. The retailer is now faced with two choices, they can compete on price – eating into their margins, or they can lose the sale. Those are very tough choices. This practice is not only on the rise but is actively being encouraged by online retailers like Amazon.

The new Shopping Mall

So what does the future shopping mall look like? Many retailers will start to realize that if their stores are becoming little more than product display areas then why do they need to use expensive in town mall properties, when they could build smaller stores in lower cost areas. After all if they don’t need stock in the store then they only need display space which greatly reduces the square footage needed, it also reduces the number of staff needed to operate the store.

Purchases can be made by customers who simply scan their own product and fulfillment can be carried out by regional distribution centers in even lower cost areas. After all if the customer wants to save money and shop online they are already giving up taking the product with them, so having it delivered from the physical store the next day is not a burden.

Smartphones kill the Shopping Mall

Currently one in five smartphone users in the US scan barcodes in store to compare prices (according to a 2011 study by comScore). That number will rise proportionately with the increase in smartphone adoption. As users start to discover that the smartphone that cost them so much can actually be used to save them money, it becomes a device that pays for itself.

So your trips to the mall of the future may be more of a browsing experience and less of a buying experience than it is today. Think more like museums with products artfully displayed than the stack ‘em high sell ‘em cheap of the big box stores of today.

Do you use your smartphone to comparison shop?

 image used under CC license by jeffcapeshop’s

I want to dispel that fear for you. Here is how you can achieve good content curation in just ten minutes a day.

Content Curation – Finding the Content

Of course the first component in a Content Curation strategy is deciding where the content is going. Are you curating for a blog, for Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, Pinterest, Chime.In? Knowing where your content is going is part of the battle.  Twitter for example lends itself more to headlines than images. Pinterest is totally visual. Facebook and Google Plus work better with images but can cope without them.

How do you go about finding the content? There are several ways of doing this, but I am going to cut to the easiest and quickest, use a tool. There are so many different content tools available now that it seems ridiculous to me that more people aren’t using them.

• Pulse
• Taptu
• Google Currents
• Feedly
• Alltop

These are all great sources of content for your audience. I personally use all of these on a regular basis.

Content Curation – Get Organized

So now you have found some content how do you keep track of it and organize it for publishing? Again the simple answer is tools. You can use anything from the bookmarks button on your browser to online tools that allow you to access the content from anywhere you can access the web. The latter is my preference. Some of the tools that allow you to do this are:

• Instapaper
• Evernote
• Readitlater

Of course there are a lot more of these and other “Social” bookmarking sites.

Content Curation – The Workflow

Now we have our content, we have somewhere to save the content to for later, how does it all fit together in a ten minute activity?

The setup as with most activities is what will take the longest – this is a one off activity (though it is good to fine tune as you go along). Firstly decide on your favorite content sources, but avoid the big producers. For example if you are curating Social Media content don’t use Mashable – nothing against Mashable I read their content most days, however so does everyone else. Resharing their content just adds to the noise. Find more original sources. Also don’t be afraid to step outside your comfort zone and use different sources.

Remember the content you are curating is not just for your consumption its for your audience. I have 22 boards on Pinterest that all need content if people are to keep following them, they are all on different topics so I am constantly refining the sources I use for them.

Use your content aggregation tool everyday, select your stories and save them to your bookmark tool. Then decide which platform the content pieces are best suited to and publish them.

With a little practice and persistance I promise you can achieve content curation that produces a steady flow of interesting content that will not only entertain your existing network but help you build a bigger one in just ten minutes a day.

Jason Falls is bringing his Explore experience to Dallas on Friday February 17th. The one day conference presents a dozen or more of the smartest people in Social Marketing all in one space. Whether you are a seasoned veteran or still trying to wrap your head around the priorities this is a conference you do not want to miss.

Explore Dallas- Fort Worth

Take a look at the topics -

• Developing an ROI framework for your business
• How to operationalize social media across the enterprise
• How research and data fuel more effective marketing campaigns
• Incorporating location-based marketing, email marketing, mobile marketing and video marketing into your strategies
• Content marketing to wow your audience
• How to turn mobile customers into passionate fans
• Digital marketing strategies for small and medium businesses
• Managing social content
• The one secret to driving action through social media

and many more.

So who is presenting? Here is the current list:

• Jason Falls – Social Media Explorer
• Brian Clark - Copyblogger.com
• Tom Webster of Edison Research
• Aaron Strout from WCG and co-author of Location-Based Marketing for Dummies
• Zena Weist of Edleman Digital
• Kevin Magee from Expion
• Arienne Holland from Raven Tools
• Tim Hayden of 44Doors
• Nichole Kelly from Full Frontal ROI
• Giovanni Gallucci – Live.Loud.Texas
• DJ Waldow from Waldow Social
• Mike Merrill from ReachLocal.com

Can you honestly tell me you don’t need this information? Exactly that is what I thought. So here is the deal. One lucky reader of this blog will win a pair of tickets to the conference worth a total of $800! You know what you get for that money, apart from all this magnificent content – you get breakfast, lunch, a cocktail reception, networking time and a one-month free trial of Social Media Explorer’s on-call consultancy and question-answer site, ExploringSocialMedia.com. All that for FREE!

How do you win that Pair of Tickets?

It’s really simple – leave a comment in the comments section below, make sure you leave your Full Name, Email  Address and simply tell me who you are going to bring and what the pair of you want to take away from the conference. I’ll select the winner on Monday Feb 13th.

There’s More

That’s great for the winner but what if you don’t win – don’t despair because Jason Falls has very kindly extended a discount to my readers. Yes you lucky individuals are getting not 10% off, not 20% not even 30% off. No you are getting 50% off the normal price for a ticket. That’s right basically its a “twofer” (two for the price of one).

Register on the Explore Dallas-Fort Worth site and in the check out enter INCSLINGERS where it says Enter Promotional Code.

Do me a favor and spread the word about this competition. I’ll see you at the event.

This week the post is by Dayna Steele, I first met Dayna a few years ago at a dinner organized by a friend we had in common during SXSW. I’ve seen Dayna speak and if ever there was a speaker who can command an audience, who can entertain and inform at the same time, Dayna is it. She is dynamic, charismatic and at the same time extremely professional and polished. Her audiences love her and leave her sessions well informed. Dayna is a serial entrepreneur, author and business speaker, Dayna Steele travels the world to improve performance, create strong teams, increase company sales and grow businesses with her Rock Star Principles of Success.  Dayna is the author of Rock to the Top: What I Learned about Success from the World’s Greatest Rock Stars and her forthcoming book is 101 Ways to Rock Your World: Everyday Activities for Success Every Day.

Houston, We Have a Speaker

What do you do when the fourth person to walk on the Moon calls you and says, “Love your book, love your website, hate your video, call me and I’ll tell you why.”

Well, first you stare at the phone and then listen to the message a few more times.

Then, you work up the nerve to call Alan Bean back and hear what he has to say.

Captain Alan Bean (US Navy, Ret.) is a former NASA astronaut. He took his first flight into space aboard Apollo 12 and became the fourth human to walk on the surface of the Moon.  Long retired from NASA and the space race, Bean is now a highly regarded artist and a sought after speaker.

Come to find out, Bean actually liked my video and was impressed with my comfort level on a stage.  What he did want to see me change was so simple, yet so brilliant.  In fact, it was what I have always said made me a more successful radio personality than most of my peers. Simply put…..

Always speak as if you are speaking to one person, your best friend.  Never speak in plurals or locations – such as ‘all of you’ and ‘up here’.  Use the word ‘you’ much more than you use the word ‘I’. Create a personal bond with each and every person in your audience.

As Alan Bean put it, “As soon as I figured out how to make my Moon stories their Moon stories, the speech clicked and resonated with the audience.  And, in the end, they are the only ones who matter aren’t they?”

Yes sir Captain!

Buyosphere – Where the buyers are

A lesser known but arguably easier to grasp and more immediately usable platform for retailers especially is Buyosphere. Buyosphere is the brain child of Tara Hunt, who is well known to anyone in the digital space as MissRogue, author of the Whuffie Factor:Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business, along with co-founders Jerome Paradis and Cassandra Girard. Originally Buyosphere and Pinterest shared some commonality, however, Buyosphere recently pivoted slightly to become more of a Quora for shoppers.

This is a much easier concept for both users and marketers to grasp. As their tagline puts it Ask. Answer. Discover. What makes this site so attract to me and I would think other marketers is that the people using the site are in the funnel already. You know that they are looking to make a purchase, ok you don’t necessarily know their timeframe but you do at least know that they are looking and you know what they are looking for and how much they want to pay.

As you can see from this header image, the site is very easy to use. Simply type in what it is you are looking for. Doing so pops up a more detailed form for you to complete so that the community can help you find what it is you are looking for. As you can see from the image below it’s not hard to complete. Tell the community what you are looking for, add details about the thing you are looking for, e.g. sizes, colors etc. categorize the item, how much you want to pay and where it needs to be shipped to, add some meta tags to make it easy to search on and you are done.

Ok so if you are a marketer or retailer why on earth would you not be on this site? Here you are being handed a community of people looking to buy stuff and if you are someone who can provide that item or items why would you not recommend your stuff?

You can opt into categories and Buyosphere will send you a daily email of the questions and answers from that day – just how easy do you want this to get? So if you are finding it hard to wrap your head around Pinterest and how your retail organization could best use it might I suggest you are on the wrong site and that the site you are looking for is Buyosphere.

The Collapse of The Social Media Outpost

One of the major contributing factors to the fall of the Roman Empire was its size. It became too big to be sustainable. The Roman’s had outposts at every point of the known world. Communication became harder and harder, supply become harder and the trade that was supposed to flow back to Rome started to diminish. So focused on their outposts were they that they ignored what was going on in their own Capital. In the end the model collapsed. Roman was over-run by hoardes that didn’t rely on developing large empires but instead existed in small groups that were more sustainable.

So how does this affect Social Media? The truth is that the model that so many of us have been promoting is about to collapse. There are just too many outposts. Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Google Plus, Pinterest, Tumblr, WordPress, Forums, Email, and endless other places to establish an outpost, all with the same end to drive traffic back to our Capital.

Retreating From Your Social Media Outpost

Look at your own statistics, how many of the various sites that you have established as an outpost is actually generating significant traffic? Why are you still there? The low numbers tell you that the people interested in you aren’t there, you are either doing a poor job of maintaining your outpost or you just aren’t providing the locals with what they want. Either way you need to get out before it becomes obvious that you can’t sustain that outpost.   In a recent post Chris Brogan says:

2012 is the year where social media oversaturation hits hard. We will scale back on our participation in social networks, and we will most certainly scale back who we choose to follow as sources.

He is right (he usually is), and if that is the case then that scaling back by users means that your content is going to get even less eyeballs at your outposts. Your empire is about to be over-run by hit and run hoardes who are better able to leverage those particular outposts than you are. So why wait for that to happen?

Deciding Which Social Media Outpost To Keep

I am not suggesting you abandon all your outposts, but take a good long hard look at all those outposts you have established and see how often you are posting – not automatically cross-posting from other places, but actually generating original content targeted at that particular audience. If the answer is “not much” then that outpost probably needs to be abandoned.

Just because new sites appear doesn’t mean you should immediately establish an outpost – try instead to see if there is a real fit for your business. Currently lots of people are trying to shoe-horn Pinterest into their marketing mix – for some this will become another cross-posting, under-supplied outpost that will die off in a few months. For others it will become a major driver of traffic, allowing them to remove other outposts that are not performing as well. But simply building an outpost for the sake of it is not a strategy for success.

Which Social Media Outposts can you let go of?