The key to client retention is simple: great service. And since we’re currently looking for more account handlers to join our digital client service team, I’ve put together five tips to help anyone wanting to work with a really great agency, get the most out of the role:

1.    Get on the road

Yep, sometimes it’s just easier to send an email. You can type, retype and amend until it reads like an A-grade dissertation, but let’s face it, who ever read their dissertation back?! Nobody wants a lengthy essay in their inbox, it’s far more beneficial (and can often be less formal) to visit the client and chat in person. Don’t just save client visits for when things go wrong - make it a regular occurrence and get to know them when everything is going right. That way, they won’t associate face-to-face meetings with negativity.

Spending time with clients is invaluable for building that relationship. It’s very much like any personal friendship in that if it lies dormant for a while, sooner or later the person feeling neglected will start to look for new friends…

2.    Computer says no

The word ‘no’ has been erased from our vocabulary as account handlers. Yes, some client requests can often seem outrageous and unmanageable in terms of timings/deliverables, but instead of creating a barrier that can ultimately have an effect on all of the hard work we have put into growing the relationship and the account, it’s up to us to offer alternatives that still meet the client’s needs.

3.    Don’t talk Dalek

As digital account handlers, our client contacts are not always from technical SEO backgrounds. It is often marketing managers, and marketing execs dealing with the online AND offline agencies, especially in smaller companies. Although clients are often really keen to know the technical detail, this information needs to be distilled to a level of understanding that everybody can digest. Speaking THEIR language is the key to growing the relationship and instilling the client’s trust and appreciation in your approach to management, the agency and the work you’re doing.

4.    Exceed expectations

Effective account management is always striving to go the extra mile in terms of service and delivery. So many digital agencies out there do what the clients request and no more. As account handlers, we should be questioning the brief and offering value through alternative and enhanced solutions - generally being so much more than just a ‘go-between’ for the client and the technical team. Which leads me nicely on to the final point…

5.    BE the client

Within any agency, the account handlers are the clients. We are an extension of their marketing team, we represent them internally and we must always have their best interests (and of course, business objectives) at heart.

We get to know the brand, understand the objectives and advise accordingly. The advice may be taken on board and sometimes it may not – but it’s better to have spoken up in the first place than to be the one always nodding in agreement in the boardroom. At the end of the day, clients are paying for our expertise and if we think there’s a better way to drive results, it’s our job to question decisions. It will gain you respect in the long run; and respect strengthens relationships.

Branded3 win lots of new business due to our impressive portfolio and the amount of time and effort we all put into pitches, but it’s the relationship formed between the client and the account handler that helps to keep them. It’s like the circle of life – the great work we deliver as an agency keeps our clients happy. Great business is about great relationships. Great relationships are built on trust. And the trust between a client and an agency starts (and ends) with client service.

Magento includes an indexing script and you can find it in the shell folder.

From here, you have a number of commands at your disposal.

Checking for the status of all indexes


php indexer.php --status


Should give you output like this:

Product Attributes:            Pending
Product Prices:                Pending
Stock Status:                  Pending
Tag Aggregation Data:          Pending
Default Values:                Pending
Catalog URL Rewrites:          Pending
Product Flat Data:             Require Reindex
Category Flat Data:            Pending
Category Products:             Pending
Catalog Search Index:          Pending

Re-indexing a single index

Each index has its own index key that you can use to reference it when asking Magento to re-index. To get these keys, you can use the following command:

php indexer.php --info

Giving you:

catalog_product_attribute     Product Attributes
catalog_product_price         Product Prices
cataloginventory_stock        Stock Status
tag_summary                   Tag Aggregation Data
mana_db_replicator            Default Values
catalog_url                   Catalog URL Rewrites
catalog_product_flat          Product Flat Data
catalog_category_flat         Category Flat Data
catalog_category_product      Category Products
catalogsearch_fulltext        Catalog Search Index

To reindex a single index, run the following command.

php indexer.php --reindex [Index Option Code]

This can be comma delimited for multiple indices:

php indexer.php --reindex catalog_product_price,catalog_url,catalog_product_flat

Re-index all indices

The following code will loop through each index and re-index it.

php indexer.php --reindexall

The one thing that is becoming increasingly apparent as the industry matures and adapts to the latest Google challenges, is that the agency selection process is becoming more considered with clients spending a lot more time to select the right partner.

This is a good thing for the industry but it also brings about challenges when the pitch process is not well-organised. Below are some of my tips for clients looking to choose an agency via a formal RFP process.

Shortlisting agencies

This is fairly straightforward, but there are a few rules that will make the whole process a lot more effective. The goal of the agency shortlisting process is to make sure that you have the best set of proposals and pitches so that it’s a tough choice to pick a winner – if you choose too many useless agencies then you might end up with a winner that isn’t actually a deserving winner and, more importantly, will not deliver the results that are required.

For most major brand clients, selecting six to eight agencies to send the RFP out to and then four agencies to take forward to the actual pitch would be a reasonable figure. It’s rare for a well-known brand to approach fewer than five agencies these days but for smaller businesses, often if can be appropriate to only approach a few select partners.

There are loads of good and bad criteria for choosing a shortlist and I’ve listed a few below with some of my comments:

• Client profile: You should try to pick an agency that works with brands of a similar size to you. If you are a big brand, then working with a business used to servicing small brands isn’t going to work and vice versa.
• Track record in your market: Some people believe that it’s good to hire an agency that has worked (and maybe still is working) with a direct competitor because they understand the market. The logic might be sound, but it’s not usually a good idea to work with an agency who is happy to provide services to two direct competitors.
• Geography: This can be a point to consider if the agency is more than a few hours drive away, unless the agency already has other clients in your area and can combine meetings. Watch out for agencies that have offices around the country as they are often sales offices with no actual client facing staff, we have a client facing team in London but some just have sales teams in their satellite offices.
• Focus: Agencies have different strengths and you should pick based on your requirements. For example, if you have lots of technical issues, then a more technical agency would be better than one focused more on digital PR. Larger agencies will likely have all of the elements in place though so this is more targeted to the smaller agencies.
• Rankings: This should go without saying but choosing an agency based on where they rank is not a good strategy. Looking at the results for a search such as “seo company” will reinforce this point.

Creating the RFP

The key to getting great proposals is to craft a good RFP document. There are various templates available including a good one from Econsultancy but the best thing is to keep it simple and articulate your goals, challenges and current performance while leaving the agency to choose the right strategy.

We’ve all seen examples of terrible RFP documents (my favourite example is a client who cut and pasted but forgot to change some details – he was apparently wanting an ecommerce site to rank for “holidays”) so you really need to think carefully about this aspect.

The key things an agency wants to see are:

• Company overview
• Online marketing team overview
• Brief history of SEO within your organisation
• Current performance (with access to analytics)
• Targets and goals
• Competitors
• Any challenges you face
• Why you are choosing a new agency
• Timescales
• Key contacts
• Rough budget

The last item is a controversial one and many clients say things like “we’re happy to invest based on the likely returns” or “there is no fixed budget” which is understandable, but as an agency we need to know what ballpark to propose. If we come back with a £30k/month proposal when you were expecting £3k/month that doesn’t help either party.

Being open about budgets saves a lot of time on both sides and gives the client a much better chance of getting as many feasible proposals back as possible rather than getting five to 10 back that are not viable and having to either invite more suppliers or choose the one that fits the budget.

The important thing about RFP documents is that you should not include too much detail on exactly what you are looking for from an agency in terms of their tactics – let them show you how they will meet the goals you have set. The broad strategy is fine but we’ve seen RFP documents asking for link from PR4+ pages and all sorts of strange requirements.

The pitch process

Some agencies pride themselves in not pitching for business but at Branded3, we really enjoy pitches. The whole experience and challenge of researching a business and being able to go and talk to them about SEO is great to be involved in.

There are a few key things that make pitches run smoothly for all involved:

• Allow plenty of time: Pitches can take two to three hours so you need to make sure that you are not keeping people waiting. We had one recently where the client had allowed 30 minutes and the agency in before us took over an hour, leaving us waiting outside. Seeing any more than three full pitches in a day isn’t the way to select an agency. We pitched recently to another client who saw 11 agencies in two days with each allowed 30 minutes to present. How can you decide on an agency after only 30 minutes with them? (Nevermind the nonsensical seeing of 11 agencies in the first place!)
• Location: Whilst we enjoy visiting clients, I do believe that a client needs to visit the agency to see how they work and meet the wider team at some point during the selection process. This might not be at the pitch but this is a really good way to get to know the agency better.
• Attendees: The most important thing with pitches is to get the right people round the table. The team in the pitch should contain the key people who will work on a day-to-day basis with the agency as well as any senior decision makers in the business. It’s always frustrating when somebody involved in making the decision isn’t present in the actual pitch.

The selection process

Actually choosing an agency these days is becoming more of a challenge because lots are now saying very much the same thing about integrated SEO, content strategy and natural links. A really useful method for selection is to create a standard scorecard to benchmark all agencies against – this often helps to take any subjectivity out of the process and makes those involved in selection process think about all the agencies in the same way and against the same criteria. Typical scorecard criteria includes understanding of the business and objectives; SEO strategy; creativity; ROI; value for money; team fit.

In most cases like this where the strategy, budgets and scores are similar, it will come down to ‘chemistry’ more than anything else. The only good way to choose an agency based on chemistry is to spend more time with them during the selection process rather than just relying on the two-hour pitch meeting.

Clients should be visiting the agencies’ offices and meeting not just the primary team who will be working on the account; but the wider team of people around the business who will be working on the campaign, building links writing content etc. Chemistry is more than just having a good relationship with the account handler, it’s about how the agency fits in as an extension of the clients team.

One other critical point – don’t just take the easiest option – unfortunately, the industry still suffers with companies who will tell clients what they want to hear rather what is actually a true, realistic picture of firstly a brands current SEO performance and then, secondly, what is achievable and by when. We always give 100% honest opinions, no matter how unpalatable – and we have lost pitches because of this, only for the client to contact us six months later when the results they were promised have not materialised.

The right choice is hardly ever the easy choice.

Finally, it’s always a very good idea to take up references when choosing an SEO agency and you should aim to speak to at least a couple of clients. This can be very revealing and will allow you to understand how the agency handles accounts and in particular, how they have handled any difficult situations that might have arisen.

• Ability to include four Sitecore Server instances in a solution (previous limit was three)
• Up to 15 concurrent users on the authoring server (previously 10)
• Additional legal entities can be added to the license
• Unlimited domains

The ability to include four servers in a solution means that customers can now create a system with fail-over support and separate UAT environment all under one solution, this normally requires the uplift to Enterprise edition however now we can look to set up:

• Load Balanced Delivery server
• Production CEP Management Server
• UAT CEP Management Server

Overall, the savings to the license fee can be upwards of £50,000 which is a fantastic saving for a great platform.

As a Sitecore partner, we’re really looking forward to what to what other treats Sitecore will be offering in 2014 along with new versions of the latest Sitecore version 7 platform.

It seems that Google has got a lot stricter recently when it comes to deciding whether to transfer trust and authority to a new domain. Unless you execute the migration perfectly (which big brands dealing with lots of issues and constraints often fail to do) you run the risk of having a disaster. Any issues that can affect trust and authority such as lingering unnatural link messages or duplicate content/page bloat all come into play during the migration and it seems that if you combine one or two of these issues with not redirecting every single page to the relevant new page, Google will not pass full authority through to the new site.

The charts below show (I won’t say who these brands are as that’s not the point of this post) how big an issue this can be to a brand that has good SEO performance.

When changing domains, the best way to approach the project is to assume that you will lose all SEO traffic unless you get every single part of the migration perfect. If you are working for a brand about to do this then it is critical that you get this right otherwise you could say goodbye to a lot of revenue.

Changing design/structure/IP address/content etc.

This is a simple one, if you change too many things at once then Google won’t pass over your authority. Changing your domain is a risky project so you should not change anything else at the same time. Just migrate your site in its current form to the new domain and maybe change the logo if you are re-branding. If you do have to change other things then you need to make sure you get your redirects absolutely perfect.

Redirects

The first rule here is that you have to redirect every single URL on your site to the exact same URL on the new domain. This is easy if you are just changing the domain but if you have to change structure as well it gets complicated. The best way to do this is not to get the development agency who is building the new site to do the redirects as they will normally not do a very good job. What we suggest is to keep the old domain live and put a redirect handler application on there (you will need to build it first) that looks at all the URLs being loaded for that domain, processes them according to certain rules and forwards the user onto the correct URL on the new domain. This is a far slicker system and you can put error handling and all sorts of fancy features on there without even touching the code on the new site. Usually, a developer would just need access to the old and new URL structures and product databases etc. to put this together.

When doing redirects, you need to set aside a few days of development time after the site’s ‘go live’ date to fix any redirects that have broken or been missed. Then you need somebody to go through 404 errors and Google Webmaster Tools errors to find these redirects and get them fixed ASAP. Google is fine if you have errors for a couple of days but if you leave errors for too long then you run the risk of losing authority.

Let me know in the comments if you have seen any migration issues this year.

Patrick and Joe spoke to a crowd of marketing professionals about the latest mobile SEO strategy advice and tips, equipping the audience with all they need to know about how to create a future-proof and user-friendly mobile presence.

Patrick’s talk - Creating a future-proof mobile SEO strategy - on Tuesday covered detail on how Google is developing mobile search constantly to offer the best possible user experience, and how brands can take advantage of this. Check out his slides are below:

Joe’s session - Discovering & optimising mobile opportunities - took place in the mobile theatre yesterday, with advice on best practices for capitalising on mobile opportunities and how to optimise your mobile presence.

Take a look at his advice in his slides below:

If you’ve got any questions for our team on the above slides, simply leave us a comment below and we’ll get back to you.

Said wonderful features include:

• Custom Audiences
• Lookalike Audiences
• Star Rating
• Pages to Watch
• Post Scheduling
• Activity Log

If you’ve used any of them, then good for you, they’re great – and if you haven’t, then prepare to learn some fantastically useful stuff.

1. Custom Audiences

Now, you may or may not have already used Facebook’s advertising platform. As it is, its extensive targeting options make it pretty great – but we won’t go into all that in this post. Instead, check it out for yourself – it’s definitely worth delving into if you want to achieve specific things like Fan acquisition, app installs, site registration, off-Facebook purchases, coupon claims, brand awareness etc.

However – even better, Facebook’s Custom audiences feature allows Page owners to actually upload their email database to Facebook, and then advertise to it.

Not sure why this is absolutely awesome?

Well, the people in your email database have already shown enough interest in your business to hand over their email address to you – whether that’s because they’ve signed up to a newsletter or they’ve actually gone ahead and made a purchase.

So. They may be interested in what you offer, but haven’t yet thought to come to Facebook and Like your Page.  So if an advert for or post from your Page appears to them, they’re far more likely to be interested and engage with what they’ve have bought into than people you’re advertising. They’re much, much warmer to your brand than those who have never heard of or interacted with it before.

How does it work? Well, all you need to do is upload a spreadsheet of your email database;  Facebook will then search its entire user database for any matches to the email addresses associated with its users’ profiles and create a target list for you to advertise to. According to Facebook, match rates for these Custom lists range from 50-95%, so it’s likely that a large portion of your database will also be active Facebook users.

If you’re worried about data protection (which one of my clients has already said they are), then there’s no need to be. Facebook assures us that it never actually gets to see the email addresses, because they never actually leave your server. Instead, the Power Editor scrambles the email addresses and produces unique codes for each one. Here’s what Facebook itself says about Custom and Lookalike Audiences. The subheadings you’ll be most interested in with regards to privacy/data protection are What are the terms of use for custom audiences? And What is hashing? How is hashing different than encryption?

How to create a Custom Audience

1. Log into Facebook and install Power Editor (this is a free browser plugin created by Facebook that lets Page owners bulk-edit their ads);

2. As the personal profile you’re managing your Facebook Page with, click on the cog (top left) > Manage Adverts:

3. Click on Power editor (left-hand navigation);

4. Click on Audiences > Create Audience > Custom Audience. A box will pop up, and it’s here you’ll be able to upload your email database (make sure it’s just a list of email addresses – no column headers or other columns).

Make sure you assign a clear name and description, because you’ll probably love this feature so much that you’ll create lots of Custom Audiences for different ad campaigns in the future.

(N.B. If you’ve got a massive email database, just upload it in 5k chunks – you could even use this to your advantage and split it up based on some criteria that’s common to each group, e.g. gender, or the kind of purchase they’ve made in the past – whatever you feel is most appropriate and might be useful when targeting in the future.)

A word of warning: When I uploaded to Custom Audiences for the first time, I got a weird error message that told me there was something wrong but didn’t specify what or even hint at how to fix it. Nice one Facebook.

After a bit of scouting around, I discovered that all I needed to do was turn off  AdBlock Plus in my Chrome extensions. Just click on your stack of orange lines on the far right of your browser > Tools > Extensions > Disable AdBlock Plus. Cheers Travis Brodeen, whoever you are:

Another word of warning: Make sure you click Upload, as above. If you don’t, you’ll lose all your lovely changes. Might sound really simple, but it’s really not clear that you have to do this. Why don’t they just have a save button where you’d expect to see it?

Once you’ve traversed Facebook’s slightly tricksy upload process, hopefully with the help of this post,  you just need to wait a short while for the status of your uploaded audience to change from ‘Waiting’ to ‘Ready’. This should take a matter of minutes.

2. Lookalike audiences

An extension of Custom Audiences, Lookalike Audiences allows Page owners to reach past  the people in their email database to Facebook users who have a similar demographic (hence ‘lookalike’) to the email database you’ve already uploaded as a Custom Audience.

So yes, correct, you need to have followed the previous steps to create a Custom Audience in order to then create a Lookalike Audience – but this is now way simpler. Click on Audiences > your newly uploaded Custom Audience > Create Similar Audience:

3.    Star Ratings

These were brought in just a couple of weeks ago, and to me, this is a really important move by Facebook – it’s their way of linking  what your customers think of you offline to what they think of you online – and putting it right in front of everyone else.

(^ Just a little nod there to my favourite place in Leeds – it should definitely have 5 stars though, for the record.)

Customer ratings are a massive trust signal anywhere on the web, and are by no means anything new (I never make an important purchase or book a restaurant/hotel without stalking review sites first – yep, I’m one of those).I’d highly recommend that all Page owners allow their Fans/customers to rate and recommend them on Facebook. Let your customers tell your other customers how great you are – it’s the modern way.

I also suggest that you actively encourage people to begin/continue rating your business on Facebook in an emailout and/or Facebook post, or even onsite. It’s always best to link up your marketing channels and use each to cross-pollinate the other.

How to get your Star Rating displayed

If your customers are able to rate and recommend you, then it should be appearing automatically.

If you can’t see the star rating directly below your Page name, then it’s because your Page hasn’t got the Reviews feature enabled… Which is simply because you haven’t added a street address to your info. Here’s how to add a street address:

1. Go to Admin Panel > Edit Page > Update Page Info;

2. In the Address field, enter a street address:

3. Check the Box to “Show this map on the Page”

And hey presto – just watch all those 5-star ratings roll in.

4. Pages to Watch

This is another relatively recent feature that Facebook has added, presumably to ramp up competition between  businesses… Page owners can now keep an eye on up to five competitor Pages, tracking how they fair against them in the audience acquisition stakes:

There’s no deeper insight available other than Page Likes for now, unfortunately – but I definitely expect this to change, and can confidently predict that Facebook will add KPIs like the Talking About figure and organic reach of the Page to this feature at some stage.

How to add competitors to your Pages to Watch list:

Your Pages to Watch module should appear in the admin panel, where your Page Insights module used to be:

5.   Post scheduling

Now this isn’t a new feature by any means, but I thought I’d throw it in because it makes managing a Facebook Page and its content strategy reeeeeeally easy. It’s great.

And Facebook has recently updated it, which makes its inclusion here even more legitimate: we no longer have to go through the rigmarole of picking the day, month and year from separate dropdowns – it now throws up a simple calendar. Hurrah, because that was a bit of a mission.

One thing to note, you can’t edit the copy or photo/video attachment once you’ve scheduled your post. If you need to make any changes, you’ll need to delete it and start from scratch, which is a bit annoying. Apart from that though, it’s a really great feature that all Facebook marketers should be utilising the socks off.

How to schedule a Facebook post:

Just click on the little clock icon circled below – situated at the bottom left of your status update box:

6.   Activity Log

Again, nothing new, but it’s important if you want to make use of the post scheduling feature, as the activity log goes hand in hand with it, enabling you to see all activity, past and future. And what’s more, you now have visibility on what posts are pending posting right from the admin panel, which is a new and welcome addition.

How to see your Facebook Page’s Activity Log:

There are three ways to access your Activity Log:

1. Right after Scheduling: Click View Activity Log in the box that pops up when you hit Schedule  on your status update:

2. From the Edit Page dropdown the Admin Panel: Click Edit Page > Use Activity Log:

3. From your Notifications in the Admin Panel: This is the handy new improvement to the Post scheduling/Activity log – we are now notified of posts that are scheduled for imminent posting, right from the admin panel.

Handy, because if you’re in the habit of scheduling way ahead, it’s easy to forget what’s coming up, and when. It’s nice to be reminded every time you log in:

And here’s a view of the Activity log, once you’re in: you’ll see all your upcoming posts at the top, and then all your previous posts and two-way interactions below that:

One thing to note though, if you’ve scheduled a load of posts and can’t see them all in your Activity log, and are bewildered and starting to panic about where in heck’s name they’ve gone, calm yourself.

I’ve tested it and found that no matter what’s in your scheduled posts, Facebook only displays four at a time (whether they include only copy or copy + rich media).

After the fourth, there’s a sneaky little Show More link – see the screen shot above. I’ve been caught out by that one before – pretty distressing if you’ve gone to the trouble of carefully crafting lots of lovely posts, only to think that they’ve disappeared into thin air. I’ll say it one more time, Facebook: nice one.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my round up of what I consider to be Facebook’s most powerful and useful features for Page owners.

If you’ve got any that you particularly like using that aren’t included here, then I’d love to hear about them, and why you think they’re so good. Sharing is caring..!

The seminar sold out weeks before the event, and offered an exclusive opportunity to gain expert insights and tips on search marketing as part of an intimate crowd.

Earlier this month, due to popular demand we ran the seminar again but this time in London, to another fantastic host of delegates, including marketers from Debenhams, Harrods and Saga.

You can now watch the videos of the presentations from the Leeds seminar below and to ensure you don’t miss our next event, sign up to our newsletter by entering your email address in the sidebar.

Tim Grice: You’ll never build links until you’re worth talking about

Businesses cannot ignore the changing Google landscape and the real need to add value. A website’s popularity can no longer be manipulated; you have to take an asset-led approach to link building that allows you to tap into online conversations. You will not be able to develop a natural link strategy until your business is worth talking about:

Branded3 Search Talks Seminar: You’ll never build a natural link until you’re worth talking about from Branded3 on Vimeo.

Andrew Machin: How a great creative strategy can boost your SEO

It’s no secret that a great idea with some great visual execution will engage users online. But how can we best harness this for SEO benefit? Discover how understanding your audience, a little creative thinking, and harnessing social media, can lead to natural, sustainable and effective SEO strategies:

Branded3 Search Talks Seminar: How a great creative strategy can boost your SEO from Branded3 on Vimeo.

Patrick Altoft: What Google really wants & how to future proof your SEO

SEO can no longer be treated as a stand-alone activity, with Google enforcing rules and changing its algorithm 300 times a year, the time has come for brands to stop thinking about short-term activities and start building a natural strategy that Google will love for years to come.

Branded3 Search Talks Seminar: What Google wants & how to future-proof your SEO from Branded3 on Vimeo.

With their freshly grown Movember moustaches keeping them warm in the November cold, our Managing Director, David Crawford, Account Manager, Tom Armenante, Head of Content, Scott Mason and Outreach Executive, Rob May all completed the 10k run in fantastic time!

The quickest time ran on the day was 29mins and 23secs by a North Yorks Moors Running Club member; check out the Branded3 boys’ times below – you weren’t too far off, lads!

David = 45mins 51secs

Scott = 49mins 11secs

Rob = 51mins 10secs

Tom = 52mins 58secs

We’re really proud of the boys’ efforts yesterday and the funds they’ve raised for Age UK, a well-deserved charity.

Better still, their home-grown ‘taches are enough to make even Tom Selleck shake in his boots, so show your support for the Branded3 Movember team by donating through our page here.

While video content marketing has been found to be one of the strongest, most useful means of reaching and engaging an audience, Helpouts goes even further to deliver dynamic, highly bespoke video content – and for me, this heralds a huge change in the way brands will go about content marketing from now on.

This is SEO and social media integration at its best, providing content that’s available only on Google’s own social network, which many believe has a big impact on SEO.

What exactly is Helpouts?

Launched last week, Helpouts is an extension of Google+’s unique Hangouts feature, and offers “Real help, from real people, in real time”.

Helpouts enables brands and individuals offer one-to-one tutorials/consultations over live video on Google+ – and they can charge users for their time. Google has divided Helpouts into categories, including Art & Music, Cooking, and Fashion & Beauty.

Until now, we’ve made use of Hangouts here at Branded3 to host group Q&A sessions (#B3Brunch) about topics we have real expertise in, so SEO, social media, content marketing, and web design/development. This has worked really well for us to drive engagement on our Google+ Business Page and really make a meaningful connection with our audience there, so we’re very excited about this latest update.

How does Helpouts work?

Hosts can either offer free Helpouts sessions, or they can charge a fee – if they choose to do the latter, then payments are handled through Google Wallet (in which case, Google takes a hefty 20% cut).

Sessions can be set up to enable to users to either connect instantly, request an appointment time, or select a pre-allotted timeslot. Each Helpout has its own dedicated page, wherein the host can post an introductory video and write a bit of blurb about themselves/their company and some specifics about the Helpout.

Users can choose who they get help from based on the host’s…

-          Qualifications

-          Availability

-          Fees

-          Ratings

-          Reviews

Currently, well-known brands such as Sephora, Weight Watchers, Redbeacon, a Home Depot company, and Rosetta Stone are using it. Take a look at what they’re offering in the way of expertise – it might give you some inspiration as to how your brands or individuals – could use this brilliant new Hangouts functionality…

How do I get started?

At the moment, if you want to host a Helpout, then you need to sign up to request an invite here (there’s a tiny link below the box you submit your invitation code to) – and even then, getting an invite isn’t guaranteed.

How big brands have been using Helpouts

1. Sephora

Sephora is a world-class cosmetics company, and it’s using Helpouts to host make up tutorials. Sephora’s Helpouts are free, and offer up make-up tutorials. This will be a brilliant way of connecting not only with regular beauty enthusiasts, but also fashion bloggers. We’ve already seen ASOS host a Hangout takeover with a fashion blogger, so why not invite fashion bloggers with their own styles to host takeover Helpouts for a day, a week or a season, and convey their take on the brand’s products?

1. This Helpout is free and has a pre-allotted time. However, it’s popular, so users can opt to join the queue or reschedule for later;
2. What items the viewer will need to participate;
3. This is a nice little introductory video to the Sephora brand and its series of Helpouts.

2. Weight Watchers

Weight Watchers is offering a limited but well-subscribed series of Helpouts – and not surprisingly, with the Christmas season now almost fully upon us, their Party-proof Your Weight Loss Hangout seems to have been the most popular session by far.

There’s massive scope for Weight Watchers to do a whole lot more to broaden its appeal using Helpouts –  by offering advice ranging from fashion and beauty tutorials to cooking and confidence-building sessions.

I’m sure that, in time, Weight Watchers will branch out and offer Helpouts on a range of lifestyle issues, and when they do, Helpouts might just be an amazing way for potential and existing customers to really connect with the brand and quickly become fervently loyal brand advocates.

1. Users have the option to connect with an expert there and then, or schedule an appointment for later;
2. This is the ratings and reviews section – this will be the decider as to whether people invest time in engaging in a Helpout, especially if they’re having to pay for the privilege.

3. Rosetta Stone

Unlike the other big brands that launched Helpouts, Rosetta Stone – the world’s leading language-learning software provider – is actually using them to drive direct sales as opposed to offering free advice/tutorials, charging $30 for 30 mins.

If you’re working for or with a brand that could potentially offer Helpouts at a premium, then keep an eye on Rosetta Stone to track the popularity of its paid service.

1. This is where the user can see how much the Helpout will cost, and they can choose to book an appointment for a later time/date;
2. A pop-up box detailing dates and time slots (un)available.

We’re going to be watching these and other brands closely on Google+ to see how they continue to use Google+ Helpouts, whether that’s simply to connect with customers and followers on a one-to-one level and convey their expertise, or to actually drive sales through it.

Either way, Helpouts is a huge opportunity for brands and freelancers alike, especially for those who take a leap of faith and position themselves as pioneers.