In this 30‑minute Biznology webinar, host Frank Reed introduces speaker Chris Abraham, a public‑relations expert, who walks attendees through using Google+ as a business tool. Abraham begins by emphasizing the need for a Gmail/Google profile and advises fully populating it despite privacy concerns, because a rich profile fuels Google Search relevance. He then demonstrates how to create Google+ Brand Pages, choose appropriate categories, add images, taglines, and set up admin roles, noting that once a page is created its category is hard to change. The talk covers circle management—keeping circles under 5,000 members, avoiding a single “Following” circle, and actively adding contacts to grow influence. Abraham stresses that all posts should be public, include compelling titles, images, and long‑form content, and be shared by both the brand page and individual employees to boost +1s, comments, and organic search visibility. He explains how Google+ content feeds into real‑time search results, enhancing SEO, and advises integrating Google+ +1 buttons across web properties. The webinar concludes with a Q&A on cross‑platform strategy, where Abraham recommends not abandoning existing Twitter or Facebook efforts but cross‑pollinating audiences, and clarifies that Google+ serves a different niche—early adopters and influencers—while still complementing other social networks. The session ends with logistical notes about the recording and upcoming webinars.
Chapters
Hi everybody, and welcome to today's Biznology digital marketing webinar. My name is Frank Reed. I'm one of the bloggers here at Biznology. I'm also the managing editor for the Marketing Pilgrim blog. We're currently number 18 on the Ad Age Power 150. I also work with companies and individuals to provide education and training services regarding internet and social media marketing. But enough about me. Today you'll be hearing from Chris Abraham, another of our Biznology bloggers, who will present how to use Google+ for business. But before we go, I would love to recognize our sponsors. Our first sponsor is Abraham Harrison LLC, the true experts in online public relations. We have Brick Marketing, full-service SEO solutions company that increases website visitors. And finally, Marketing Pilgrim, the internet and social media marketing news blog. We cut through the bull so you don't have to. So as we wait for a few more attendees to join, let me review the format of our webinars here. Our Biznology webinars last just 30 minutes, so you can easily fit them into your busy schedule. We record each webinar and we'll email you that link later this week. During Chris's presentation, you can use your GoToWebinar controls to ask questions. The orange arrow opens and closes your webinar controls. If you have a question, simply type it into the box labeled Questions at any time during the event and press the Send button. I'll select a few questions at the end of the webinar and pose them to Chris. All right, so while we're waiting for these last few attendees to join, I'd like to remind you that Biznology newsletter and blog are available for free at biznology.com. So if you're not already a subscriber, we hope that you'll sign up now. Thanks again for all of you for spending the next 30 minutes with us. We know how valuable your time is, so let's introduce today's speaker. Chris Abraham is a leading expert in online public relations with a focus on blogger outreach, blogger engagement, and internet reputation management. Chris was recently named one of the top 50 social media power influencers on Forbes and one of the top 10 social media influencers of 2011 by Market Wire. If you've ever struggled with how to start using Google+ for your business, This is the webinar for you. So Chris, take it away.
Hey, thank you very much. I really appreciate that, Frank. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to put up a poll to see if we can find out how many people have already started exploring Google+. So please, would you please take the poll? And I'll give you the information right away after the poll is Finished.
Excellent.
Well, excellent. Good to know. I just wanted to go ahead and tell you a little bit about Google+. Google+ is the newest platform on— Google, which is associated with Gmail and all the other properties including search and so forth. But before we get into Google+ business pages and talking about the business use, we have to of course create a Gmail account or a Google profile. So for those of you who have yet to create a Gmail account, I think it behooves you. Also, for those of you who already use Google Apps for yourself or for your company, you're now eligible to create a Google+ account. And a Google+ account is the first thing that's required in order to create a Google+ brand page or business page. When setting up your new account, it's really important that you fill everything out. I know that most of you have heard about the recent issues of Google's privacy settings and so forth, and how all of the various and sundry platforms including Search and YouTube and everything have been connected under your login, and all sorts of data is being tracked. In our space which is marketing, that is a good thing. And it is a great opportunity here. So fight your desire to be sharing averse, and share as much as you can. Honestly and openly. Do you have a Gmail account? Please fill all of that information out. Have you populated your Google profile? The more information that you create, you need to go ahead and you need to try to add as much stuff as you can. So like I said before, if you already have a Google Apps Business account, that's great. You can use that. You can use your regular account. But you need to fully populate it. You need to populate it with images, your personal address book, your business address book. Everything is integrated now. So everything that you have in your address book on Gmail, it's an important way that you can find friends on Google+. It's an important way to connect with people. And now it's an important way of being able to make magic when it comes to organic search as a direct result of the viability of Google+. Now one thing that people don't talk about with regards to Google+ is that it was prematurely launched. And I'll talk about that in a few minutes. But there's a lot of benefits that you can have. So when you create these profiles, and this is separate from your Google Mail, Google Profiles which are at profiles.google.com also should be filled out completely. You need to add photos because they can recognize pictures. You should add taglines. You should show your location. You should put all of your previous employment information including your education and places you visited. There is a sundry of things that you can put in there. But what if they got it wrong? Because Google has been trying to fill out this information without your help for years now. So you can go to google.com/dashboard, and you can fill out any information that you have there. And you can check information to see that what they've been gleaning about you is or isn't correct. Feel free to check that out. And if you are averse to particular things, if you do have concerns about privacy, google.com/dashboard is a great place to go to be able to edit and curate that information. There are so many parts. You need to find the erroneous information of course. And then you need to try to make that stuff public. If you see it here after you fill everything out, you have an opportunity to share that information with the public. I'm going to be saying this again, and again, and again. Because of these privacy concerns on your iPhone, or on your Android, or whatever smartphone you have, Google, or even on regular Google+, Google will always try to ratchet down your ability to share publicly. And you need to ratchet it up if you intend to use Google as a way of promoting and helping your organic search. So here's the Google+. If you are in Google and you are signed in with your app, you— let me see here. Here's a screenshot of my Google right now. If you go on to where you are in terms of your Gmail, you'll have a bar at the top here. If I can connect. And you will see that there is a +Chris, for example. That is your indication that you have Google+ available. So if you click on that, or if you type plus.google.com, you will have an opportunity to start the setup procedure. So you need to make sure that you have everything set up so that you have everything publicly as default. If you are going to do it for a business punch and for business sense, keeping things private within your circles is not going to benefit you in any way. So when I started using Google+, I would share things in a limited way, because I wanted to go ahead and start developing small circles of friends that I would share unique things with. I already had Facebook where I was sharing everything with everyone. But I quickly realized that after Google Search was cut off from Twitter, When Twitter cut off Google Search from its Real-Time Web, in other words, Google was very literally serving search results in a real-time manner based on what it was gleaning off of Twitter. At some point, the marriage broke up, and Google did not have any fodder for its Real-Time Web. It wants to deliver content as fast as things happen. So it was sort of stuck out in the rain, if you will, and very needed to quickly put something together and launch it immediately so it could have the kind of information that it wants in order to develop things that are useful in a minute-by-minute way. So it developed Google+. And when it first came out, it was very poorly integrated. It was sloppy. They launched the Google+ pages even before They launched the Google+ Pages even before anybody could administrate it on a manager level, so that you could share the work over many people. Now that's been added, and it's slowly becoming better integrated. And with these new privacy settings, it's really important that you participate in Google+ and Google+ Brand Pages, because now as a result of being able to share your personal profile publicly, with your ability to share content and links, with your ability to share longer form information, more than 140 characters, and with your ability to build circles upwards of way more than you could theoretically when you were just using Facebook. There is a real opportunity here to become not only influential amongst a platform including your peers and your friends, to try to build brand recognition in your space. But it is also essential because Google+ directly feeds content onto their search and all connected search networks. So here is the Google+ account page. You can go there from plus.google.com/u/to/pages/create. Or if you just go here, you can create your pages. I think it's right down here. Down here at the right side of your Google+ page, you will see Google+ Pages. And you can create a page right from here. So what I said here is that you need to be as inclusive as possible. And you really need to think things through before you write up this information. Because you need to choose a category carefully. You need to fill out all of your information carefully. You need to measure twice, cut once. Because once you create your page, it's difficult to recreate it, or it's difficult to change it and change a different type of category type. So if you'll see here, it's pretty easy to create a page. For example, product or brand. Company institution, arts, others. Pretty interesting. You can just add a page name and a website. If you are a local business, you can create an international business. Or just in terms of a general brand or so forth. For example, Breitling or whatnot. If you don't want to define it as a company, you want to define it as a brand or a product, there are various ways that Google uses these categories. Because Google cares about architecture. I'm sure any of you who have web blogs or websites realize how important it is for Google to use your architecture to promote you in a way it understands. And then after you create the business page— let me go to a business page. I'm not on the Abraham Harrison page at the moment, but I can show you an unpopulated one. Here is the manager page. This is really important to look at because this is new. Up until just last week or 2 weeks ago, I was having to be the only person who was doing the Abraham Harrison brand page. It was a pain in my butt. But now I have the ability to invite people, and share people, give them ownership roles, if I leave, and give them the ability to engage as the brand. Google, like all social networks, prioritizes search results on the size of their importance on social graph. You've heard all this language from Facebook, but on Google it really matters. So when you create your page, it is important to create content that is compelling, and not just a place for you to dump links or to write copy. You need to organize circles with care, like I said, because in each circle you cannot have more than 5,000 people. So you can't just pile everybody into a circle called Following. And then you need to select individuals in your organization to have admin privileges, like I said. That is important, because honestly, many hands make light work, even though probably one person is going to do most of the brunt of the work. If you get into the habit of just dropping links, it's not going to help. You need to go ahead and you need to frame the post with as much commentary as you like. So you need to be explicit. You need to use everything that you've learned from organic SEO copywriting. You need to use all of the questions that you I mean, all the keyword, explicit keyword terms that you used in the past. Google cannot guess what you're talking about. And then if you drop links in your blog, you need to make sure that there are pretty photos that are implemented in that blog post. So you need to be concerned, because text isn't enough in a modern blogosphere. Tools like Digg, and Reddit, and Facebook pages, and Google+ look for an illustrative image. So you need to include that. Unlike Facebook posts though, you can't edit the title. So you had better make sure that your title is complete, describes what the article is about, because that is a lot of what is going to be indexed. And then you can of course include more than 140 characters. I've noticed that a lot of people tend to write short form. With Google+, you can do long-form articles. And then you have to be sure to share every post that you make. So you need to log out or leave your profile as the the administrator of your page and go back to being yourself. Then go back to your Abraham Harrison page or your brand page, and then share it as you, and have all of your employees or all of your colleagues sharing it too. Because when you start, the value, the mojo behind that article, behind that particular post, is completely dependent upon— The engagement. Engagement, eyeballs, +1s, comments, and other shares. So be careful though, because you are— after you move over to the Abraham Harrison or whatever your page is page, you are speaking as your brand. So if you are going to go back and start posting as yourself, be sure that you transfer yourself back to just Chris as opposed to— so here, because the medium is the message, is my blog site page. And so it says here, you are now using Google+ as this page. Your posts and comments and notifications will be from this page. So in order to go back to be you, you need to go ahead and change that back. So now I can write as myself. All right, let me see if there is any important—
cool.
All right, make sure that all your posts are public. This is where I share things with really ugly red marks. So first of all, you publicly +1 as as Chris Abraham. Feel free to +1 your own articles. You can do some pretty interesting things. You can include other people and other brands in your posts. So great to learn more about Arsh S. Thanks for writing this up, Jenna Levy. You can give shoutouts to people, and they'll see that on their stream, their wall, whatever. You have the ability— you do not have the ability to edit your title, but you do have the ability to delete the description. You have the ability to add more people into your circles. It is most important that you always make sure that things are shareable publicly. I have a bunch of others. I just pile them all in. And then you can also have the possibility of emailing 645 people not using Google+ yet. Those are people in your address book. Those are people that you've invited previously. That's up to you. I don't necessarily— I've tried that a couple times, and it can really blow back in other people's face. So you need to go ahead in order to make all of this work and to make sure that other people share, you need to make sure that you integrate with the rest of your properties. I'm sure most of you have integrated a Google+1 button on all of your properties, blogs, corporate sites, personal sites, et cetera. But you really need to do that so that you don't have to be the only person sharing your content. It's much more successful if you enable people as easily as possible to share your content for you. Take your time. This is not GTalk. This is not IRC. Read things twice. Check them, check them. Check for spelling. And then consider inviting your contacts to use Google+ as well, because your colleagues are your contacts. Your friends are your contacts. If you really want this to work, you have to err on the side of shamelessness. Finally, You need to engage. You need to add people to your circles. You need to spend the time to develop those relationships, because otherwise all you are doing is speaking in the woods, singing to yourself in the bathroom. Let me just do a couple more things before this is over. Let me show you what it is like to have circles. So here are my circles. I have been Relatively lazy.
Oops.
I have been relatively lazy. I have been doing everything I have said not to. When I started out, I put everybody into the following thing. That is the reason why I told you not to do it. See, I've got very small little friend circles here. This is important to make these connections. However, It is also important to remember that you have circles on your page as well. So you need to look up at these circles, and you need to make sure that you populate these circles. This is a pretty new page. For those of you who don't know, I've recently left Abraham Harrison, so I gave back all of my accessibility to them, gave them back the keys. But I wanted to continue for the sake of the webinar to go forward with a very well-branded, well-organized deck. So what you need to do is you need to make sure that everybody who is following you, you follow back. You need to increase the power and depth of your connections. And you need to also take some care in not being flip about the circles that you create. Now part of all of this, which is the really important part, is that all of this put together is going to benefit you in so many ways on Google organic search, in addition to simply benefiting you in terms of harvesting souls and prospecting new followers on Google+. The reason why, and this is very important, is that everything's integrated now. And even though your content is going to be put at the top of search in general, as it's timely, as it's happening now, now, now, now, now as part of their real-time web or their real-time search. It's also going to— there's this magic thing that happens when you are tacitly connected to other people through your address book, through your followers and being followed on Google+. You are also going to connect to them through their search. So Google is always going to serve up content as long as that person is or controversially isn't logged into Google Search, your search results are going to have a higher prob— your content is going to have a higher probability of showing up in their search results. I personally like single-speed bikes. And I've written all these blog posts about single-speed bikes. And my friends like single-speed bikes too. And this is way before Google+. But invariably, they always tell me that when they do a search for a a steamroller or whatnot, they always come up with my site. My blog isn't necessarily the most influential thing in the world, but everybody thinks it is because everybody that I know closely is in my address book on Google. They are using Google to search, and then they are finding me. So Google's only job is to try to deliver results that either give you what you need, or make you convinced that Google is magic. And by serving up the contents of people in your extended circles, in all of your circles who you deal with on a daily basis, even on a very tacit level, even people who follow you, they're going to start seeing magically— it's a kind of organic search results targeting, or retargeting if you will. No matter where anybody goes, they're going to find me if they're connected with me anywhere in the Google universe. I'm on YouTube. I'm on all the other spaces. So that's one of the magical things about really committing to this. But your content has to be good, because if the content is not good and if you don't take some time and all you do is link drop hoping that you'll get the benefit, you are not going to get the added benefit of the feedback, of the +1s, of the resharing, or of the commenting which we know from Facebook is essential. Anyway, any questions? And I hope I addressed everything. And if you have questions or want me to do some live Google+ page, I will. However, I feel under the gun because we only have half an hour. We can go a little bit long, but please apologize my quick talk, my quick speaking. Any questions?
Well, no problem, Chris. First, before we get to questions, I just want to I just want to address a couple of quick things. It will just take a second. I'm sure our attendees now have a much stronger idea of how to use Google+. We have a few questions, which is great. If anybody else would like to add a question, it's not too late. You can go by typing in the question box, and you go to webinar controls. Before we get to that though, I'd like to thank our sponsors again, which is Abraham Harrison LLC, the true experts in online public relations. Brick Marketing, a full-service SEO solutions company that increases website visitors, and Marketing Pilgrim, the internet and social media marketing news blog. Now, on to a couple of questions. We have a few minutes. We may run over and would love to have people stick around. You're more than welcome to. First, we have a question that came in. How do you use Google+ if you've already put all your efforts into Twitter, or even if it's something else that you've How do you manage that?
Excellent question. You don't need to choose. I recommend because everything is so integrated and everything is related, and because Google Search does get secondary content about Twitter, it is important A, that you try to keep up with as many platforms as you can. You've put the time and energy. It is a continuum. In the same way that you would keep up your newsletter, your email newsletter, even though it might be a little long in the tooth, there's still value in it. But secondly, there's a high value in cross-pollination. You can take some of that energy, some of that gravity, some of that gravitas and reputation, and you can message people and invite them and share with them and encourage them to join your Google+ page. It's always important if you have a private Google+, if you have a private Facebook, if you have the value of your entire company to always try to cross-pollinate and bring people. Here's the thing. You need always to communicate people where they already live. If they live on Twitter already, they're not going to move to Google+. But if they sometimes live on Twitter but actually live in Google+, you are benefiting them by bringing them into Google+ and giving them access to your content where they live. Does that answer your question?
Yeah, fantastic. I've got another one in fact. We're talking obviously about social media and the 800-pound gorilla in that room is always Facebook. I have a question regarding timelines are coming to Facebook business pages by the end of the month. And people are— a couple of People are asking about, do you see Google+ as a competitor in this environment? Or is this something that's completely different? Is it going to play somewhere else? What's your view on that?
Completely different. I would say that in the same way that Buzz and other previous tools really appealed to the technorati, I'm finding that the people who have bailed Facebook and now spend time playing Hangouts on Google+ are sort of the early adopters and the high influencers. Like, I'm seeing just all the top Northern California geeks. I'm seeing Seattle geeks. I'm seeing Manhattan geeks on there. Some really important people are paying attention, are relaxed. It's not a highly competitive environment on Google+, and that can really be your benefit. But I see them as 2 distinct places. And I also see that since Facebook has a relationship with Bing and Microsoft. I believe that the real value of Plus is really with regards to influencing Google's very popular platform and influencing Google Search. Don't be afraid of cross-posting stuff. Don't be afraid of putting on your page the same content I wouldn't be pedantic about it, and I would definitely not use an Autobot to do it. But I would recommend that they are different platforms. They are generally going to be different people. And I would also recommend that you do need to keep in touch, and you need to work on engaging people in both of those spaces. And please, these are not continuities. I mean, these are not either ors. Look at Pinterest. Look at everything. But realize that even message boards and forums, and even old things that we have given up on like MySpace and not so much Friendster, but Digg and all these other things are still important places where thousands and thousands of people live. So do not choose one over the other. They are different enough.
Great. Well, thanks Chris. Really appreciate it. And we are a little bit past 11:30, and I think what we are going to do is, as we always do, we honor everybody's commitment of just 30 minutes. But we are going to wrap up today. I want to first thank Chris for all those great ideas. And thanks especially to our audience for your participation and your questions. If any of you had questions that we did not have time to answer, You can email your question to Eileen. It's eileen@mikemoranngroup.com, and she'll be sure to get them to Chris for an answer. Later this week, we'll send you a link to the recording of the webinar so you can listen again. And please share with others and share it on Google+. We appreciate that. We also invite you to mark your calendars for our next Biznology webinar, which is Global Search Marketing, and that is scheduled for 11 AM Eastern On April 3rd. So thank you very much, everybody. Thank you, Chris, for your great information. And thank you for everyone visiting. And we look forward to seeing you again in April. Take care.
Thank you.
