Google+ for Business Part 12

11. Power Plays in Google+.

This chapter discusses some of the best moves for business professionals to build relationships and drive forward some of their interests and efforts. It's still the early days with this platform, but the goal of this book is to talk about the mindset behind the use of Google+ more than the specific b.u.t.tons you need to push to access the technology.

Google+ has power plays that can help you get a leg up in these early days. Heck, just being on Google+ means that you're ahead of the game. This chapter looks at the ideas of people who do interesting projects on Google+. Some of these ideas might be applicable to what you do with Google+ for your business.

John Herman: The Hangout Entertainer.

I've known and admired John Herman as an artist and creator since 2007. I met him through Steve Garfield when he was in and around the PodCamp scene, like a lot of the people I know. John uses Google+ to create live video hangouts about all kinds of topics, including game shows, creative jams, and more.

Following is a recent example from John: "Join me tonight in a zany Google+ Hangout: Can you draw, dance, juggle, or sing? What else can you do? I will be in +Matthew Carano's hangout tonight at 8:30 p.m. ET for the Google+ Hangouts Talent Show. It is a blast! Past winners of the GOLDEN GUITAR PIC have included a Theremin performer from New Hampshire and a balladeer from Wisconsin. Winners also get an original song composed and performed about them.

Please note: If you join, then you may be expected to perform for approximately two minutes. Others are selected as judges. I am hosting. I'll be the one in the tuxedo. See you tonight!"

Following is another example from John: "TONIGHT: Who wants to hangout surf with me (and win a bow tie)? In honor of National Bow Tie Day (yesterday), Smith Brand Bow Ties of San Francisco is providing tonight's Google+ Hangouts Game Show winner with a custom made bow tie by +Ian Smith himself. We are playing sometime after 8 p.m. (hint, hint). The first nine to jump into the hangout compete for the bow tie by answering trivia questions and completing physical challenges. I'll be hosting in a tuxedo. After the game show, I am jumping right over to +Matthew Carano's Cover of the Week hangout, where he will be teaching In the Aeroplane over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel. Double fun!"

Notice how John actually has sponsors already. In a month of doing Hangouts, which by their nature can host only around eight people live, John draws enough attention to get prize sponsors for his events. The power move is realizing that people appreciate entertainment and that you can use Google+ as a channel to entertain your prospects and partners through the use of Hangouts, video, text, photos, and even just commenting on posts.

If you sell a not-exactly-interesting product, what kind of "show" could you develop to make it more interesting to get that product in front of other people? Or who else is hosting an interesting show that you can find a way to partner with to distribute your products as gifts? There are many ways to think about this one, obviously, but why not start with such a creative idea? Be a huge fan of "why not?" as a business decision-parsing question.

Michael Dell: The Wide Open CEO.

I've written about Michael Dell quite a few times in this book. Michael is perhaps the most active large-company CEO who has embraced Google+, so he is an interesting example. Michael uses Google+ in many ways, including bringing the company's storyline directly to the people. He's active in pointing out corporate news day in and day out, which isn't typically my recommendation, but in Michael's case, he gets a "pa.s.s" because he's so pa.s.sionate. Dell is his life, or a significant part of it.

The power moves you can learn from Michael Dell are twofold: He uses Hangouts and uses conversations in and around his corporate news.

In a recent Hangout, Michael Dell lured Google co-founder Sergey Brin into a conversation. Imagine the power of this for a moment. If you're at all interested in business and technology, you suddenly have live video access to two huge company leaders, and you can ask whatever questions you want. (They might not answer, but the opportunity to seek a response from a top CEO is there.) In other Hangouts, Michael has answered questions about his position relative to HP's news about potentially moving out of the personal computing world.

There's a power to Michael Dell using video as well as text. On one level, when he's writing in text, there's a little worry that you're not getting the real Michael but a functionary or PR professional. (I believe that it's Michael himself, but not everyone feels that or believes that. It just is.) When there's just text, and when you know so many entertainment professionals outsource their keyboard efforts to other people, the perception is given. Because of that, you get an even bigger kick out of seeing Michael Dell just answering business questions live in video.

You might not (yet) be as big as Michael Dell or Sergey Brin. That's not the big point. The big opportunity for a power move here is that you can be accessible as a business leader and that matters. Is there a huge return on investment to putting yourself in front of the community? It might be hard to trace it to a number on a spreadsheet, but you'd be hard pressed to find a PR agency that wouldn't advocate for this.

Muhammad Yunus: Changing the World.

Reading Professor Muhammad Yunus's job occupation as it's listed on Google+ might give you pause: "Creating a world without poverty." That's what occupies him. As the founder of the Grameen Bank, Professor Yunus spends a good deal of time showing through example how his work in teaching people how to lend money to the poor rural citizens of Bangladesh (as of May 2011, Grameen Bank has 8.4 million borrowers, 97% of which are women, with a nearly 100% payback rate) might help others change the world.

None of this has anything to do with Google+. Professor Yunus did this work the old-fashioned way: in person, on huge stages, and with handshakes from world leaders all over the world. But what has come back to Google+ is a new and powerful stage from which Professor Yunus can share his travels, his efforts, and the ongoing story of the work of empowering the poor to build better lives. If you read his posts, each one is a blend of education and an opportunity for others to partic.i.p.ate in some way (not even necessarily his own projects, but ideas that seed other projects).

By sharing his day-to-day life in pictures, text, and videos, Professor Yunus shows that these victories are made up of several components. That's the power move. If you're working on slow-moving projects, on projects that maybe don't always draw the sustained attention of the mainstream, Google+ becomes a media center where you can build information that others will opt into and find inspiring. Instead of simply sharing this information on his website, Professor Yunus brings this out to the outpost where everyone can read a stream of interesting posts from others so that people can remember to think of the larger story in the frenzy of their days.

Mark Horvath: Handing Out Pizza, Socks, and Hope.

I've known Mark Horvath, founder of InvisiblePeople.tv and WeAreVisible.com, since 2008. We met in the hallways of Gnomedex, after I saw his presentation about how he films the stories of everyday homeless people to give them a voice and a face, and how he gives socks, pizza slices, and whatever else he can get his hands on to the homeless wherever he goes. Mark happens to be the only person working full time on Invisible People, so he's part president, part secretary, part worker bee, and part cameraman. Here's his take.

Mark has brought a lot of attention to the homeless through his videos, and he has brought attention to the project by being active on Twitter as @hardlynormal. (If you're a Twitter user, go follow him now.) He's brought this to Google+, where he can clearly and simply show the videos. The beauty of Mark's platform on Google+ is that he can now open up to conversations. You can leave comments on YouTube, but the general quality of comments on that platform isn't necessarily all that useful. Again, like Professor Muhammad Yunus, Mark can now slot his stories about the homeless into the stream we're partic.i.p.ating in already.

What you can learn from Mark is that telling a story is always more impactful than simply asking for something. Secondly, you can learn that simple small bites are just as important as the big bites. Professor Yunus works on larger scale changing the world, and Mark puts socks in the hands of people who need them. Do we argue about which is more important to the poor person who needs help in the moment? We don't. We need Mark every bit as much as we need Muhammad Yunus. That both gentlemen are bringing their pa.s.sionate work to Google+ where we can interact with it shows you how they value the platform.

I asked Mark Horvath what he thought about Google+ as a channel. His response might be something you feel when thinking about whether Google+ is the place for you.

"Google+ started. I had not yet jumped into the pond because they had yet to make it available for people with Google Apps accounts (as an NPO, Google allows me to use its Apps service free). My primary email address runs on its servers. That's the account I want to use, but it has not yet invited Google Apps users to Google+ yet, and I just didn't want to have a new place that 'sucks' my time away. As someone with AAADHD (I have a triple A personality), anything 'new' is a distraction. I saw the obvious potential but was scared that once I stuck my toe in the water, I'd have to jump into the pond.

About a month ago I logged in and noticed someone had posted one of the InvisiblePeople.tv videos, and it had 48 comments. That's huge! For what I do, the conversation is gold. The videos are only the catalyst to start the conversations.

It's only through interactive communication that InvisiblePeople.tv is able to shift paradigms to help save lives by ending homelessness. Really the end goal of InvisiblePeople.tv is to fix a broken system by empowering homeless people to tell their own stories. Homeless services rarely listen to the people we serve. Brands would be out of business if they didn't listen to their customers. In contrast, not one homeless person has suggested, 'Throw me in a room with 100 other men, giving us mats to sleep on the floor and one bathroom to share. Then, kick me out every day at 5 a.m., even in the winter. That will heal my mental illness and drug addiction!' Yet, that's exactly what we have done for the last 100 years. We have warehoused homeless people.

Anyway, without going into all that, InvisiblePeople.tv's main purpose is to change the system to save lives and taxpayer dollars. It works. Housing programs have started. Countries, state governments, cities, and NPOs have even invited me to travel and help them find solutions.

So, I did start adding new videos to Google+, but I wasn't spending much time there. Now, thanks to you giving me a kick in the b.u.t.t, I have to just jump right into a new media channel. But we make time for what's important, and the conversation on Google+ is very important."

Mark's point, that this is yet another technology channel, that this is yet another place to have to distribute media and then respond, is valid. We are all overtaxed. There are too many things on our lists already. And yet, people are taking action and spending time learning how these tools can help them.

Robert Scoble and Racks.p.a.ce.

Robert Scoble is a long-time tech visionary and media maker, with a lengthy career as someone always out there looking for game-changing, bleeding-edge items of note. He's thoroughly pa.s.sionate about finding out how interesting technology can change people's worlds for the better. He currently works with Racks.p.a.ce, a technology company out of Texas.

Following are Robert's thoughts about what's going on to change the game inside of Google+: "Social enterprises move and respond to customers and partners in real time. Google+ enables that. How? You can see a customer request coming through your feed. You can start a video hangout with that customer, or team of customers. Then you can get your co-workers in another circle where they can help you answer questions in real time and you can go at it.

What are Racks.p.a.ce's Google+ power moves?

* Building circles of industry thought leaders that can inform my daily conversation. I have 5,000 people inbound separated into circles of investors, journalists, a.n.a.lysts, other social media representatives, executives, entrepreneurs, and co-workers.

* Working on setting up a reciprocal system. I help them by +1'ing their posts, commenting on them, sharing their best posts, telling my audience to follow them, and so on.

* Developing a story. In Racks.p.a.ce's case, our story that we want the world to know is 'those folks are up to date on the latest cloud technology and they have the best support.' So, how do we develop that story? At Red Bull, the story will be one of extreme sports. Every brand will have a different story, and it needs to be developed over time with every post, every photo, every video.

All of this is aimed at driving relationships that bring us thought leadership points, but also that turn into real business."

Robert has demonstrated a lot of different ways to use his influence to learn, to find stories that tell the larger story of his business, and to build an actionable community, instead of simply following people w.i.l.l.y-nilly without a plan. In his power plays are all kinds of ways for you to consider how your own business might implement some of these ideas.

My Power Plays.

In summing this up, I want to share some of what I've been experimenting with over the last several months so that you might consider which of these are useful to your business. I often experiment with several ideas and angles so that I can report back on what I discover, but you wouldn't want to mimic all that I'm doing because I'm making steps forward and backward to see what results I can observe from those experiences. Therefore, some of what I do has a negative impact. Plan accordingly. Following is a list of my moves: * To get more people to add you to circles: If you want a somewhat broad and untargeted following on Google+, the best way to get people to circle you is to find information from outside of Google+ (versus resharing what's going around) that is at once interesting, entertaining, and useful. The more times you do that, the more the number of people who circle you will jump.

* To get more people to add you to circles, fill out your profile in detail, but not overly so (a few paragraphs will suffice). Use the links. Make it easy for people to contact you.

* To get more people to engage with you, comment much more often on other people's posts. Circle 100 or so people you think are interesting, important, or helpful, and comment frequently on their material with something thoughtful (or sometimes funny) to say.

* To have people click your links more often, provide interesting context before the link, and try to make the links not be simply promotional for your own business. The most action people take on links I post in Google+ are when I've written the information before the link such that the person realizes that what I'm offering will be helpful to them. This is the magic formula.

* Posting too much waters down people's responses to you. Posting too rarely means that your information flows past in the stream and gets lots. I'm not yet sure the perfect posting timing or volume (if there even is such a thing), but an abundance of posts means a shortcoming in clicks or comments, and that posting a few thoughtful pieces (maybe no more than four a day) amounts to more activity all the way around.

* To mix Google+ into your business overall, think of it as part community engagement platform, part media sharing environment, part customer service handling, and part sales lead generation. Of these, I try to do those four items in that order of importance. You would think customer service comes first, but community is about more than the people who have issues.

* If you want your information to travel far, always post it to public and not to a limited group of circles. The more hoops you make people jump through to circle, the shorter the distance of the shares.

Your mileage may vary. In thinking through what kinds of power plays might be useful to you as a business, you might also want to see more about "How do I convert sales?" The thing is, that's what I've been teaching for this entire book, only I've been showing you the variation of "subtle" and "relationship-minded" versus hard and down marketing. Let's talk about that a bit more.

In coming to an understanding about how Google+ can help grow your business, the power plays in this chapter focus on those uses of Google+ that highlight a way to help buyers and prospects get a better connection to you and your company. The main reasoning behind this is that you buy from people you like. You buy from people you know. Using these tools enables people to get the sense that they know you and understand you a bit more. This is a way to introduce yourself to someone before you actually meet them.

To work through how these kinds of moves might work for your business is to accept that you feel your business is interested in your customers, and that you feel relationships ahead of sales can lead to a more loyal customer, who might offer repeat business at best, and barring that, might at least become the best source of referrals to you. This is the gold standard of how engaging in social networks such as Google+ can work for you. If you build relationships, these build the opportunity for more opt-in conversations, which build the chance to sell to people who feel they have an affinity for you, and which ultimately leads to customers who then offer better referrals than those who purchased in a more transactional manner.

As with all things, every one of these power plays take time. They're not built for quick-and-fast ways to get the most from Google+ and make millions tomorrow. I'm sure someone will post that book. I'm sure ebooks are out there that seek to sell you on super-fast ways to make millions with social networks such as Google+. I've never seen those tactics work. Instead, taking some time and building meaningful contact with people is always in style and always brings some level of response.

Are social networks for everyone? Not necessarily. I had breakfast recently at Rolly's Diner in Auburn, Maine. I sat beside a guy who did roofing for a living. In the s.p.a.ce of my meal, he had three different people approach him for an estimate for a job. Three prospects found this man sitting beside me at the counter at a diner and asked him to help them with their needs. I said to him that it's obvious his work is quality, based on all those referrals, and I asked him whether he advertised in any formal way. "I'm here for breakfast and supper almost every day. That's all the advertising I do."

On the other side of the equation, people are learning that the physical world isn't always the best way to get your business to grow. Dane Cook, the comedian, visited Google headquarters for a chat with Google employees, and during that visit, he mentioned that what drove him to use Mys.p.a.ce (then Twitter, now Google+) to build community and share his work, and ultimately become one of the biggest names in comedy currently performing, was the realization that the other way to do it was to wait all week for that sliver of time in the middle of the night at that one comedy club, where only a few dozen people might be watching. By using social networks, he had the power to create comedy wherever and whenever he wanted, and build community by letting people anywhere in the world watch it wherever and whenever they wanted.

To me, the power of these power plays is that it gives you the chance to use Google+ as an outpost with a stage, and that you might now build the perfect blend of informative, entertaining, and useful information to drive value for prospects, buyers, and those you hope to encourage for a referral. In reviewing these moves, please seek to tie them to your larger business strategies because you want them to match with the rest of your goals and objectives. Social networking and social business performed out on an iceberg isn't useful to the larger business. You can experiment away from the main business for a while, but ultimately, you want your goals and strategies to all be in alignment with the business as a whole.

12. Setting Up Your Business Page.

The strangest part of talking with people about writing a book was that they often said, "How can you write a book about Google+ for business if they haven't even released the business pages yet?" That was the case when I started the book. Business pages hadn't been launched. But I felt then the same way I feel now: Business pages are useful, but they are not central to how one conducts business on Google+. In their early days, many people weren't all that happy with the lack of features.

The Look and Feel of the Business Pages.

A Google+ business page looks similar to a user profile page with a few exceptions for how the pages act and what's involved with them. They have a s.p.a.ce for a brand avatar (this seems to be the default for branded pages at this point; although, I tend to recommend brands that promote with human faces), an area at the top for five pictures, and an area for posts.

There is a b.u.t.ton to +1 the business page and a b.u.t.ton to share the business page to your own circles. There is also a way to connect your Google+ business page with your primary website via the +1 functionality. Further down, you also see a b.u.t.ton to create your own page should that appeal to you. There is likely to be more functionality added to that area of the page, over time.

At the time of launch, business pages enable only one administrator. This will no doubt change in future versions because leaving a single point-of-failure like that won't be advisable. This administrator is listed on the brand page so that people understand who has claimed ownership of the page. Business pages don't (yet) show authorship, so any post made by the business page will be marked as having been posted by the business page's t.i.tle and not an individual person's name.

Several rules in place are helpful to the Google+ community at large insofar as feeling comfortable with the actions and activities of a brand on this social network. Many of these rules have been made with the individual user in mind and do not favor the business. That is a selling point, I'm sure, for more business activity to take place on Google+ because users will understand that their best interests are kept in mind by Google in this implementation.

Rules for Business Pages.

Let's look at some of the rules of the business pages. A business page can't add people to circles until the individuals have circled that business page. Thus, if I'm representing Coca Cola, I can't go and circle Glenda Watson Hyatt and send her updates until Glenda circles me first. If you like c.o.ke, circle c.o.ke. If you don't want updates from that brand, don't circle it. You'll barely know they are around if you don't circle them.

Brand pages can't circle other brand pages. At the time of launch, if I'm Kodak, I can't circle Dell. This might change as time goes on because perhaps if I'm someone like Dell, I'd want Lat.i.tude to have a page, Inspiron to have a page, and for Dell to circle those two pages to keep track of all the larger brands. At launch, however, this isn't an option.

You as a user can circle whoever you want, so you can circle all the brands and businesses and organizations that you find useful. We'll talk about that more later. I just want to make the distinction between you the user and you the administrator of the business page.

Brand page users can't join other people's hangouts, but they can host hangouts. Thus, if you and your friends are hosting a "camera talk hangout," Kodak can't join that hangout via their brand page. However, if Kodak wants to host a hangout, users can join its hangout (if invited). Business pages can't yet join mobile hangouts, either.

Beyond this, some other features and details of brand pages are worth talking about.

A verification system is in the works at present. At the time I was writing this, it was still a bit "Wild West" how brands verified their accounts, and a few challenges had already arisen from enthusiasts rushing in to build brand pages for businesses and products and services they liked. This will naturally require some further consideration, and a process will be implemented to make this a lot simpler, and a lot less human-heavy, as most Google processes are automated.

Coming Soon (or Already Here).