I just came across Idea Paint and not only love the idea of the product, but admire how they are using social media platforms to build a community. For me, whiteboards always inspire creativity and brainstorming. They BEG to have great ideas written on them in rainbow colors. It was a pleasant surprise that the company is ‘online savvy’ as well.

We are going to take down a wallpaper mural in my son’s room sometime soon and a wall of Idea Paint would be perfect! Of course my daughter would want a wall in her room done too.  You can be sure that Idea Paint is at the very top of my list of products to bring into our home because I see that they are a company that ‘gets it‘.

Idea Paint has a unique product. That goes a long way on its own, but they didn’t just assume people would stumble across their paint cans on the shelf at the local home improvement store. What makes their online efforts work?

Don’t Sell, Show & Tell

LOOK how they are using things like their blog, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook & Flickr. They aren’t directly ‘selling’ their product but instead celebrating and publicizing the creativity of their ‘clients’. Yes, they cover the basics about their product, including very helpful videos and FAQs. They aren’t pushing out content on any of these social media platforms yelling “BUY THIS CLICK THIS” but instead let the product and their customers speak for them.

Get Involved & Stay Involved

Idea Paint seems very actively involved in communicating with their customers online. Too many times I’ve seen a ‘dump and run’ of content on social media platforms where companies regurgitate marketing or advertising (or worse yet, press releases) and never bother to check for responses or communicate. Idea Paint shows a genuine interest in being a part of the community of their customers. What does that mean? That means that they care about your outcome not just your purchase. Most companies stop caring after the sale is made, or only care again if there are customer service issues. Idea Paint demonstrates that they want your life or work to be continuously enriched by the use of the product.

It’s not about them, it’s about YOU

Idea Paint hosts a ‘makeover’ contest and utilizes social media platforms to attract applicants and get votes. They also promote pictures and videos taken by customers on the Idea Paint Facebook Page or tag them in Flickr (the ’15 minutes of fame’ trick). You can also browse around their blog and YouTube channel to see that they have interviewed customers and learned about their businesses, not just how they use the Idea Paint product.

Showcase Benefits Not Features

It is not enough to show or tell potential customers that your product comes in three colors and five sizes. What is important to showcase is how your customers life or work will be improved because of it. Shoes that sell comfort aren’t selling comfort, they are selling an experience. Idea Paint is selling an experience as well – the experience of productive brainstorming sessions at work with your team, creative playtime for your kids in their own living space, a retail space that allows you to customize an experience for your own customers. Are they selling paint? No.

Strategy vs. Organic

I only know of Idea Paint through what I can see or read online about them – both published by the company and their customers. I have no inside knowledge of their ‘social media strategy’ plan, assuming there is one. Some aspects of what Idea Paint does is absolutely structured, the Makeover contest for example. They didn’t fall into YouTube or Twitter either. But outside of creating accounts and filling out the profiles, there is strong evidence of an ‘organic’ feel and communication style to them. Here’s a ‘pro’ tip: you need both strategy/structure and an organic flow to what you do online. Creating accounts and either ‘winging it’ or ‘just see what happens’ are the quickest ways to fail. But if you plan and approve and edit every interaction you have online, you will also fail.

Now it’s your turn

How can you look at Idea Paint and tweak your online efforts? Does anything about their efforts resinate with you?

PS – Now I just need a free weekend and some friends over to help me strip down 11 year old wallpaper!!

This is exactly why my Social Media for Women in Business Coaching Program exists, to help you find the knowledge that applies to you and your business and stop wasting time on the information that does not put you ahead.

Over two decades of ‘in the trenches’ experience both as a corporate professional and as an independent business woman have provided me with an intense and focused understanding of what it means to be successful in today’s business environment. I want to help you realize and achieve the success that I have by learning to use social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google+ and others to grow your women-lead business. I can teach you how to grow your business with a minimal amount of time and money using social media.

I’ve been providing professional coaching to women as a part of my career for 22 years. It is what I do and what I believe in – and everything I live. Women want to lead fulfilling lives and run compassionate and profitable businesses. They turn to me to sort through massive amounts of knowledge and resources to find the right fit for their business.

Women don’t have one extra minute to spare to ‘play around’ with social media to find what works – and what does not work – for their specific and unique needs. They look to me to uncover the gems that will benefit them. Women put so much time and effort into every aspect of their business and only need a bit of encouragement, guidance, and coaching to reach – and exceed – their goals. Who are these women? They are…

WOMEN LIKE YOU.

For more information, please visit the Social Media Private Coaching Sessions page, thank you.

In order to be able to devote the time, resources, and attention each of my coaching clients, I only take a very limited number of clients on my calendar at one time. This ensures that each woman is given the attention, training, and resources that she needs to rapidly progress. Right now I have booked 40% 60% of my availability for 2012 Q1, so please contact me to secure your spot.

Google+ has been the hot topic of discussion for a few months now as a possible competitor or replacement for other platforms such as Facebook or Twitter.  Some sources say that Google+ is skyrocketing with over 40 million users,others say traffic to the site has declined so drastically the end is near. We think Google+ is the most promising social networking platform for businesses and individuals to date.

Purple Stripe is putting together an overview (not a case study, it’s too early for that) of businesses using Google+ that have seen promising gains in their business goals. We know that numbers and traffic don’t mean as much as real results from real people and companies. We have been working with businesses and professionals that already see major gains using Google+ and I’m interested in finding more success stories.

If you are interested in participating, please complete the survey. Thanks everyone!

The SocialMediaPlus Summit is designed to be like no other – they have put together seminars that are relevant to four major job functions within your company, including Marketing & Public Relations, Sales & Business Development, Human Resources & Recruiting, and Executive & Business Owners.

The schedule contains hand-picked 20+ seminars that address core issues that you’re thinking about every day:

• How do I implement social media to earn revenue?
• How can I improve my customer experience using social media tools?
• How can I support the technical needs of my marketing team in their social media efforts?
• How do I use social media tools to build my brand and increase awareness for my company?
• How do I reduce my cost-per-hire using Social Media?
• How can I harvest sales leads from Social Media tools?

Social Media Plus is offering a 15% discount on registration with the code LY15. Please visit the Social Media Plus Summit registration site to attend.

Social Media Internships

Seeking an energetic and creative individual 12-16 hours weekly to create and curate content for the Women of Google+ website and community. The ideal candidate can write clean and engaging copy; use desktop publishing, Internet and social media tools with ease; juggle multiple deadlines; work well independently. Be prepared to show us how you communicate in a multi-media environment. This is an on-site internship in Trenton New Jersey. Internship is unpaid.

Have What It Takes?

For more details about each position and how to apply, see the documents below:

• Social Media Communications / Journalism Internship
• Social Media Public Relations Internship

About the Women of Google+ Project

Women of Google+ is a destination for women to learn, share and explore what it takes to thrive on social networking platforms both personally and professionally. Thousands upon thousands of women (and even some men!) have found value from Women of Google+ profiles, videos, tutorials, chats, articles and events. It is our goal to transform this site into a community where you can participate in no matter what your reason for being on Google+ or other social networking sites.

The Google+ Content & Strategy Webinar will provide tips and tricks that you can use to make the most of Google+ features such as Profiles, Hangouts, Circles and Sparks. The Google+ Content & Strategy Webinar will primarily focus on content generation, social media strategy and tactics, and show ways you can interact with others and provide value without alienating your followers.

Click the GOOGLE+ Training link in the menu above!

Please leave a comment in this post if you are currently in the beta program for Google Plus with your thoughts (or a link to your own post about it) or if you are curious on what the big deal is.

Initial Thoughts

This is not Facebook. It is not supposed to be Facebook or function anything like it. No walls, no pokes. There is a +1 feature behaves like a Like button and I’m glad there is a function for it. Any social network platform will become cookie-cutter if YOU let the content you allow into your space to be the same. For me, I’m going to limit the people I ‘follow’ to folks I have met in real life and consider to be friends in some capacity. In the beginning I will keep it social and not overly ‘business’ because it’s important to see how I can use this platform differently than I use Facebook.  By figuring out what you want this to BE will determine what it IS – to you.

User Experience

It seems that Google has learned a thing or two about user experience from epic failures like Google Wave and moderate flops like Google Buzz.  The main people-grouping feature called ‘Circles’ has a nice visual drag and drop interface that lets you click on the photo avatar of someone you want to put in a circle and just drop them in to include.  You can use a tab/checkbox format also, but I like the visual hand/eye movement of putting people in buckets.

My initial reaction was that Google Plus works better with how people want conversations laid out on a screen, but after doing a bit more of a deep-dive, I’m seeing where improvements need to be made.

Security Considerations

Although I have always been comfortable with how the security settings in Facebook work, a lot of people were not happy with either how they functionally worked or the granularity of control. Let me just first say that nothing you put on the Internet should be of such high confidentially that you wouldn’t risk it being on a billboard on the Turnpike. (In my opinion, no data online is every 100% safe and secure 100% of the time.)  With that said, Google Plus appears to have learned from mistakes both with Facebook and Google Buzz. When you first ‘follow’ a person they are granted no access in return, making it function similar to Twitter in that relationships can exist one-way.  Facebook requires a mutual connection, but also leave loopholes to your data depending on your contacts security settings.  While it seems initially that there is more work to be done to put people in buckets and control who can see what type of information, THIS is exactly what users have been asking for.  Google seems to be delivering.

Conversation Flow

Google seems to finally have gotten how people want to talk to each other. The concept of ‘Circles’ allows you to group people (notice I didn’t say ‘followers’ or ‘friends’) When at an in-person party, you don’t talk to the entire room at the same time, you have conversations in circles.  Google Plus allows you to publish content to specific Circles of people (and in extension excluding others), so you are not creating noise for the rest.

Hangout (Video Chat)

Wow. Just wow. You can create a video chat room with up to 10 participants – TEN LIVE VIDEO PARTICIPANTS – as well as have a text chat.  Any people beyond the 10 person limit can still view the video feed. If they add screen sharing and moderation abilities, Skype and WebEx should both be wetting their pants in fear.

Sparks

This is supposed to be a keyword content curator (hey, they are Google after all, it’s their job to find content based on your preferences) but I’m not finding I use or like it much. Google Reader would be a much better fit in this space. Reader allows me an amazing level of content organization and tagging, and it would be a much better use of space to just integrate a strong pre-existing product here.

Brands and Businesses

On my third day in Google Plus I started seeing companies show up to the party (Ford Motor Company and Hubspot for example.) I can’t begrudge them for wanting to come in and experiment at all. What I will be on the lookout is to see if businesses regurgitate content from Facebook and fret over how many circles they are in (which would be the closest relation to a Fan Page count). Please, I’m *begging* you, do something different. Innovate. Create. Find the box and kick the snot out of it – but whatever you do, don’t go IN the box please.

Recommendations for Google Plus

• Make it customizable like iGoogle has the ability to be.  Let us move around widgets and change colors.  You know, all the things Facebook denies their users…
• Let me determine how I want to view order in my main stream of content – newest updated, FIFO, or possibly even have a VIP list that messages always bubble to the top from.
• Mute a conversation Sometimes you follow chatty people, or a particular thread catches fire, and I don’t always want it surfacing to the top of my stream all the time. — This was actually implemented last night due to requests submitted (PS – Google is taking suggestions and implementing changes at a lightening speed, their interest and response is refreshing.)

A word on the purpose of a closed beta program…

Note that Google Plus is highly beta and very closed right now. The invite system was shut down by Google due to the onslaught of invites sent by those of us that got in ‘first’ (guilty!)  Google Plus is a work in progress and will evolve and thrive when the current users inside the beta actively work to test the system, submit bug reports, test drive features, and submit constructive feedback. It’s not a place (yet) where people should worry about being left out of conversations or purchase invites on eBay. To be honest, the geeks need to be in there right now to stress the system and look at it with a critical eye. Wanting to be a part of Google Plus just for bragging rights is not a valid reason to be in a closed beta program.

After four and a half years on Twitter, my account is overdue for a purge. It’s bloated and is not as useful as it could be. For the first year or so on Twitter, there weren’t that many other people around, so we ALL followed EVERYONE.  I knew it was time to clean house because I was no longer reading my Twitter stream, but reading my Twitter lists or visiting people’s Twitter page directly. Part of me didn’t want to ‘offend’ anyone by un-following after I had already extended an olive branch. You know what? Chances are I’m not providing value, entertainment, knowledge, or a service to a good number of their accounts either. After finding TheTwitCleaner.com, I have started the process of the purge, and set a calendar entry for every six months to revisit the process. While I have no hard and fast rules for keeping a follower versus un-following, there are some general guidelines I have in my head as I visit each page TwitCleaner recommends to un-follow. Of course as they will state, these are suggestions, it’s up to you to visit each account and make your own judgment call.

I’m sharing my fast and loose guidelines for un-following a Twitter account here. Now you understand why I don’t follow you anymore — or why I still DO.

Un-Follow Guidelines:

• You tweet in another language. It’s not you, it’s me. Sorry.
• You offer no original content. If your entire Twitter stream consists of ReTweets that tells me you have no original thoughts or opinions of your own. If you are a business on Twitter, I will make exceptions, but not many.
• Your Tweets are nothing but links back to your blog. Again, businesses I expect this from and are saved from the cut (@CNN this mean you) but as a HUMAN with a Twitter account, I want you to talk with me, not link-bait to your content. That’s what RSS is for.
• You don’t have anything interesting to say above the fold. That’s right, I’m lazy. While the scroll wheel works fine on my mouse, I choose not to scroll to find conversations of value. You’re only as interesting as your last 10 Tweets.
• You like to kill things. I am not joking here. Somehow I managed to follow a good number of hunters and fishermen. I’m not against hunting or fishing, but not a fan of shooting wolves from helicopters or details about breeding night crawlers let alone reading messages about it.  If your personal ethos or morals are in direct conflict with mine, you get un-followed.
• You are overtly pornographic. Trust me when I say I’m no prude, but honestly, I don’t care about YOUR *personal* life, I care about MINE. And mine is not on Twitter.
• You are pushing the ‘hard-sell’. Listen, we are all selling. All day, every day, we all are chasing coin. I am not interested in getting more Twitter followers, losing weight, getting whiter teeth, or higher rankings in Google. Well, actually, I am interested in all of those things, just not from YOU.  If all you talk about is your own product or company and providing no other value, I have no need to follow your account.
• Anyone trying to sell me what my company already does. Seriously, did you even READ my bio before you started spamming my DM? I work at a social marketing and technology firm. I really don’t need to hire you to teach me how to use Twitter to increase traffic to my website.  If you aren’t selling but providing value, entertainment, or resources then I will follow the account.  It is when they reach out or auto-Tweet pitching to me it all turns sour.

Follow Guidelines:

• You are a friend. A real life in the flesh friend that I would invite to my house for dinner. Even if you Tweet about your goldfish all day, I still love you and value the insane babbling you publish on Twitter.
• Rockstars in my profession. Yes, it’s the popular kids thing to do, but they wouldn’t be rockstars if they weren’t providing value. Chances are a lot of them are my friends as well.  This seems to conflict with my guideline for not following people in my own industry.  Think of this as ‘aspirational marketing’ rather than stealing or stalking.
• You provide a valuable community service. @RedCross and @InstantAmber are perfect examples. I will never drop an account where there is the possibility that just one message can save one life.
• You are a business that ‘gets’ IT and knows how to use social media / social marketing to build community. Trust me, I have private lists for those of you that don’t get IT, as well as some slides in the conference talks I do.
• You are a client or business industry I have my eye on. I’m a very good businesswoman. I know how to use the information that comes out of the magic box and onto a computer screen to work my business. By the time I walk in your front door, everything there is to know about your firm that’s in (digital) print has already been implanted on a chip in my brain.
• You are a person that behaves like a human. Sometimes I just like to follow people because I find them interesting, or know other people that would find them interesting or valuable. Being a connector is just as important as being connected. Expand your circle, your interests, and maybe you will grow with it.

For now, this is what will get you kicked out of my club or in the door with a handshake. Don’t take it personally, it’s my club, not yours. You have every right to un-follow ME. Of course if you think I’ve un-followed your account in error and you are about to Tweet the meaning of life or the next PowerBall winning numbers, feel free to @ me and get my attention. But DM the PowerBall numbers to me, don’t make it public, I really don’t want to split the prize. I need a vacation and could use the coin.

I am finding myself un-following a good number of people/businesses but categorizing them in lists instead.  This is a GOOD thing (for me anyhow).  Filling up my Twitter stream with pages of links to Etsy items or makeup tips is counterproductive to me.  By having you on a list, I can still consume your ideas/content/links but on a better schedule for me.  Don’t take it personally, instead, find a way to make your content and message relevant to ME – then I’ll pay attention and open my wallet.

(Edited and republished from an article written by Lynette in 2010.)

In this interview, Shel and Lynette chat about the origins of the Podcast Pavilion and what attendees at BlogWorld East can expect from the special podcasting venue that will be set up on the trade show floor.

FIR Interview: Lynette Young on BlogWorld’s Podcast Pavilion

It’s no surprise that mothers love technology, especially when it comes to making their family and lives easier to juggle.  According to a recent eMarketer article, smartphone ownership is much higher among moms (6.1 hours per day) than the general population (2.1 hours per day).  What is surprising to some is how moms use their devices.  They underindexed on accessing content like maps, productivity tools, and financial and business information, suggesting they’re sticking to activities to help—or help occupy—their families.  What moms do show to be interested in is location-based coupons and deals.  The article does not indicate if the mothers surveyed are exclusively stay-at-home moms or working moms.

This report comes as no surprise to us, moms have been harnessing the power of the social web for years now.  New first time mothers are notoriously active on social networking sites, and can now use smartphones to bring that community with them on the go wherever their family takes them!  As parents ourselves, we have to agree!