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How To Use Google Plus the Guy Kawasaki Way

Google Plus Book

Guy Kawasaki sent me his new Google Plus book called What the Plus! Google Plus for the Rest of Us and here is my review and some of the main takeaways.

Roughly what I had to say:

Challenge to find right people to follow on Google Plus, I now know that you can simply look at the circles that other users have recommended and add those people to a circle of your own. This of course saves a lot of legwork. Just search for “shared a circle with you” in the search bar. This will show circles that have been shared recently as well as the most popular ones. I followed a few PR people that Scobleizer recommended.
There are also compilation sites like Find People on Plus, GGPL, GGLPLS, Plus Friend Finder and Recommended Users.
On the search impact, the author produces a number of screenshots where his post and/or profile come up in generic Google searches for ‘venture capital’. I did notice that he was himself logged in to Google in the examples, so I tried it as well see none of Guy Kawasaki’s mentions or even Google Plus. So not sure about the precise impact on search yet.
Use of hashtags on Google Plus, I didn’t realise this. So instead of searching for ‘bacon’ posts, try ‘#bacon’ next time.
Very quick read, 138 pages and probably a screenshot or picture of each page. I didn’t even attempt to read this ebook on my Kindle, did it on my Mac screen instead. I suppose it will work well on an iPad or Kindle Fire.
Some people speculate that Rober Scoble and Chris Brogan were paid to move over to Google Plus. I don’t know about that but there is plenty of Google loving in this book, every product from Chrome to Picasa gets a recommendation and link. So wouldn’t be surprised if Guy Kawasaki at least gets some better Google search ranking out of this book.
What is unclear and not mentioned in this book is if anyone has ever had any marketing or sales success from Google Plus. Unlike the other 3 big networks, I haven’t seen and case studies yet.
A chapter is devoted to how to get more followers. The author writes: “There are two kinds of people on social networks: those who want more followers and those who are lying”. I’ll agree with that. Some of the tips include perfecting your profile, sharing good shiitake, sharing in public, helping people, mentioning others and responding to comments.
One final tip I picked up on was the to compile a circle of people in a particular category. Include yourself in the category and then share the circle, people will then add the whole circle to their collection and you’ll get more followers as a result.

Filed Under: Book, Google, Review Tagged With: Book, Books, Google

10 Personal Branding Ideas for Google Plus

Unless you have lived in a cave for a while, you cannot have missed the launch of Google Plus. This new social network managed to sign up 20 million users inside two weeks, influencers like Chris Brogan are already reporting to get most of their blog traffic from Google Plus. I for one was impressed with the interface and innovative features of this new network. The question is…

Is it useful for personal branding?

Google Plus is definitely useful for personal branding, to me it combines the best of Twitter and LinkedIn and possibly even Facebook. You are able to be picked up in Google searches, to show off a public profile full with information about what you do, content shared and even links to your site, blog and other places.

As always, personal branding works best online when you are selling yourself in some capacity. This could be your expertise, your training, your inspiration or creativity. The type of business person that relies on referrals for new customers will definitely benefit from using Google Plus (and other social networks). I can think of professions such as accountants, lawyers, designers, consultants and even health practitioners.

Here are 10 ideas to help you brand yourself on Google Plus:

1. Do up that profile of yours

The most logical place to start is your profile on Google Plus. If you are a heavy Google user you probably already had a Google Profile linked to your username. This profile has now become Google Plus and even more powerful. The main benefit of the old Profile was the fact that you ranked well for your name on Google the search engine (hope this isn’t getting too confusing).

On your Google Plus profile, make sure you upload an image, write up a nice headline (just like LinkedIn) and a paste in your professional bio which you can add hyperlinks to. Be sure to link up your profile to your blog or website and any other outposts you have such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube etc.

2. Get your head around the privacy settings

Google Plus is very useful in that it’s both private and public. You can choose what part of your profile is visible to a random search on Google and what is visible to your nearest and dearest. You are able to share posts publicly on your profile, these will appear in searches on Google. Just click on Privacy Settings and it's all self-explanatory.

You can also choose to download all your information provided to Google in an instant using what they call Data Liberation. They let you save a backup of your images, profile information, contacts, circles, stream posts and other stuff to your computer. It seems they take your privacy very seriously, the big G obviously learned it the hard way after the Google Buzz debacle.

My approach to privacy is that I’m not bothered about it, everything I publish on Google Plus is in the open – I just make sure that my posts are safe for the office as it were.

3. Categorize your network in Circles

One of the key features of Google Plus is what they call Circles. It’s a very straightforward way of categorizing your contacts, just like circles of friends in real life. Google’s Circles are similar to Facebook or Twitter lists, even LinkedIn tags but they are much simpler to administrate. The first thing you want to do is import your contacts to Google Plus from webmail services such as Yahoo or Hotmail, contact files from Outlook and LinkedIn.

Once they are imported you can choose who you want to put in what circle. This is when it’s time to be smart about what you do. I would suggest having a family circle, a friends circle, a business circle and any other circles relevant to your personal branding objectives. Let’s say you want to go on a dentistry speaking tour of South America, I would then add influential people in that industry from Argentina and Brazil – they will be notified that you have added them and hopefully interested to add you back. Once they do, you can go on sharing content and engaging properly. Before you know it you’ll be on that plane to Rio. Note that other users will never know which circles you put them into.

Personally, I have four circles just to keep things simple. It’s family, friends, acquaintances and following. Family and friends are what they say on the tin. Acquaintances is where I put most of my online buddies that I have actually engaged with, following is for people who probably don’t know who I am. I might do circles for more specific purposes as and when the need arises.

4. Search for great content with Sparks

Another nifty feature of Google Plus is Sparks, basically a Google Alert set up for whatever keyword you are interested in. So you tap in ‘politics’ and up comes news articles, blog posts and other stories related to politics from the last days. If you want to be more specific, just add another keyword like ‘Canadian’ or ‘local’ to narrow down the search results.

With Sparks you’ll never be lost for content to share on Google Plus. One thing that annoys me slightly about Sparks is the fact that you can only share stories on Google Plus, I guess a Twitter integration wouldn’t make much commercial sense but I would have appreciated it.

So yes Sparks is very useful but nothing revolutionary that you couldn’t do with Google Reader, Google News and Google Alerts (just to underline the complete Google dominance of the web by the way). Just bear in mind that others will easily find exactly the same content in Sparks so you might have to think a bit outside the box to stay original.

5. Share that great content selectively (if you have the time)

Once you have found content in Sparks, go ahead and share it on your profile. Google Plus make it very simple for you to click ‘Share’ and it will go into the streams you choose. Be sure to only share relevant content to relevant circles. If you’re sharing something about Argentinian dentistry, you’ll want to keep that to your South American dentistry circle and not friend and family. Likewise, the dentists of Bueons Aires will not take a huge interest in your holiday snaps from Blackpool.

I share all my posts with everyone, just like I do it on Twitter which seems to work well. To share things selectively you will need to dedicate a lot of time and effort to Google Plus, not sure if it’s worth it at this point.

6. Use Hangouts for group video chats

Remember the old chat-rooms from the 90s? Here they are again but this time they come with audio and video. Hangouts is a much talked about feature of Google Plus allowing you to have a conversation with a group of people in your circles. You could of course use this for business purposes, perhaps by giving a free webinar or offering free consultations with prospective customers. Not long after this feature was announced by Google did Facebook present their Skype integration, no coincidence there.

7. That engagement thing

The trouble with Twitter is that it’s difficult to see who commented on what, there is no stickiness of posts at all. Facebook does this much better but it’s in a very closed environment and only friends can join in the discussion.

Google Plus has made it very easy to engage with fellow members. Anything you post will come up in the homefeed of people who have put you in their circles, they can click Share, Comment or +1 (the Like equivalent on Google Plus). You will be notified who has done what and you can follow up and get a discussion going. The engineers at Google HQ must have worked long and hard at this as everyone I have spoken to think they have cracked it.

If you use Gmail you'll notice constant notifications in the top righ hand corner of your browser whenever something happens on Google Plus – I dare you to ignore the notifications for a whole day (we both know it ain't gonna happen).

8. Get your vanity URL

Right, this one isn’t compulsory but most people like to get a shorter URL than the one that Google issues us with by default. Check out GPlus.to for an unofficial vanity URL for now. Google will bring out the ‘real’ one soon.

9. Invite others to circle you in

If you want people to add you on Google Plus you’ll have to start telling the world you are actually on there. You can add your URL on your email signature, stick an icon on your blog or just mention it in a blog post like this: “Hey look at me, I’m now on Google Plus – circle me right here”.

10. Use Google Plus in moderation

The jury is still out on Google Plus. Yes it’s looking very promising and it has attracted lots of followers in a short space of time, but it has a long way to go until it catches up with Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. The early adopters are there but the long tail haven’t got there yet, meaning your target audience might not be present. If Google Plus becomes a serious contender they will get there but it will take 6-12 months I would say. So for now, explore Google Plus but only treat it as another really useful tool when you can see some results from it.

Hope these 10 ideas are of use to you, please let me know how you get on with Google Plus as I am not sure myself of how useful it is – but will keep you posted of course!

You might want to check out 10 Ways to Brand Yourself on Facebook as well by the way.

Filed Under: Google, Monthly, Personal Branding Tagged With: Google, Personal Branding

Gmail’s Killer App: Rapportive

Do you use Gmail? Do you ever get emails from random people who you don't know? Spammers pretending to be your long lost cousin in Nigeria? The ambassador of Syldavia enquiring about your bank details? Here's a little application that can help you find out who the person sending the email really is, and much more.

What on earth is Rapportive?

Rapportive is an add-on to Gmail that works alongside your webmail and looks up the people you are interacting with. It brings up a picture, links to social media profiles, their Twitter stream and more. It lets you add notes on every person almost like a simple CRM system. The application is completely free, very quick and easy to use. I have been using Rapportive for a few months now and every time I tell someone about it they get really excited, this leads me to believe that we need to get the word out there.

The company behind the extension (with the same name) was started in 2010 and is doing really well by all accounts. They are pumping 200 million lookups through their system to happy emailers every month. Gary Vaynerchuck and Paul Buchheit (the creator of Gmail) are both investors and methinks they are all hoping to be acquired by Google one day.

And why should one use it?

Let's say you have been emailing with John Smith for three weeks and John seems to have some good ideas for your blog. You decide to check out what John does on LinkedIn or Twitter but because of his name it's impossible to know which profile it might be. With Rapportive you no longer have to do any time consuming searches. If John has any online profiles registered against his email address, they will appear on your Gmail sidebar with direct links to the profiles.

Rapportive saves you time and effort when looking people up. It's sometimes very important to do this cross reference as there are sadly some less-than-legit folks out there on the Interwebs. Let's face it, if John doesn't have any profiles online we are likely to smell a rat, just like employers do when their applicants don't come up in searches.

On the right you can see what it would look like if you got an email from yours truly. Rapportive would bring up my avatar (probably from Gravatar) and check out the social networks to see where I have profiles. It presents the information with hyperlinked buttons to online profiles and you are able to write notes on the person at the bottom of the box.

How to use Rapportive

Rapportive is a Firefox, Chrome and Safari extension. It's very easy to set up, just go to the install page and it will be up and running in a few seconds.

Next time you open Gmail you will see Rapportive in the top right corner, you may have to log in to it the very first time.

When you hover over someone's email address, Rapportive will scan their database (I think that's what they do) and present results in the right hand sidebar as per the image above. The best way for you to learn this is really to play around a bit with it – if you don't like the extension just deleted it as quickly as you installed it.

Conclusion

Rapportive is a great time saver and invaluable tool for anyone who has the slightest interest in who the people behind emails are. I use it daily and think it's a nifty little tool – even worthy of a blog post…

Do you use Rapportive or a similar application?

If you are on the fence about Gmail, check out "How I Decluttered my Emails with Gmail".

Filed Under: Google, Monthly Tagged With: Google

How To Make Google Love Your Twitter Profile

I wrote a post the other week about How to Make Google Love Your LinkedIn Profile and this week the turn has cometh to Twitter. Although you have far less space to write about yourself on Twitter, there are a few tricks you should be aware of to optimize your profile for search engines.

Good news, your name already ranks well on Twitter

Do a search for your name on Google; I bet your Twitter profile will come up on the first page (as will your LinkedIn profile). This means Google already loves Twitter in terms of search engine rankings for your name.

This means that if someone is checking you out online (a potential customer or employer), they are very likely to find your Twitter profile along with your blog, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles.

Now let’s rank well for your keywords

When a potential customer or employer know what they are looking for but not who, they are likely to search using keywords. Let’s say you are looking for an SEO guru on Twitter, you are likely to search with keywords.

Using Twitter Search, Twellow or Twazzup you can enter “SEO consulant” and you’ll get a result for everyone doing this on Twitter. Now consider that people run these searches every day. From journalists to recruiters, searches are constantly being run online for individuals with your skills.

To get your ranking well for keywords you can add the keyword to your twitter user name; @YourName could be @YourNameSEO for instance. This will give you a significant boost as most people search for user names.

If you think this looks a bit spammy you can simply change the Twitter name, meaning the box just above the location where you fill your own name in. Change this to “Your Name KEYWORD” if you like.

The other obvious thing to do is adding keywords to your 160 character bio. The best way to do this is simply to list what you do, e.g. “SEO consultant helping companies being found on Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Jeeves and other search engines”. Anyone searching for any of these terms or a combination of these terms will get you on their radar.

As you can see I have put a few keywords on my own bio for this very reason. For more on bios, check out How to Breathe Life into Your Twitter Bio.

Let’s get you ranking well for location

And let’s face it – there will be lots of SEO experts on Twitter so the search will definitely use a location to narrow down the search results. So on top of punching in “SEO consultant” they will add a location like “Birmingham”. This will pull up all the SEO ninjas in Birmingham in a simple search.

To ensure you get on a search for your location, you will want to fill in your location info properly. Before you do this, think about your target audience. Are you a global blogging persona? Probably best to put your nearest big city, let’s say New York.

If you are a property surveyor in a specific area, probably best to localize it as much as possible so go with Hoboken, you could even state South West Hoboken. The more specific your location, the more specific interest you will get from people on Twitter.

The localization is one of this tool’s greatest strengths. Twitter is a global tool with a fantastic reach but in my opinion, it’s best at creating local communities. Every town, borough, parish, arrondissement and quarter has its own Twitter feed nowadays and it brings local folks together – and now they will all find you.

I used to have “London, UK” as my location but recently changed to “Covent Garden, London, UK” and it has generated quite a lot of interest which is exactly what I intended. Reaching the world is great but there are seven million people in central London who I can start with

Your website link

If you want Google to love your Twitter profile, you’ll have to link it either to a site carrying your own name, your keywords or your location. If you don’t have your own blog, this might be a good time to set it up. In my case, I’m linking to my company site and in fact even to the company blog so that visitors will go straight to our content.

Whatever you do link your profile to, don’t use a link shortener here as the search engines won’t pick up on the original URL.

Google could even love your photo

As I mentioned in a previous post, renaming your profile picture with your name, keywords, location etc will also help your rankings. Search engines robots can’t actually see images but they do look at the image file names. So instead of using “myphoto.jpg”, try “john-smith-birmingham-seo.jpg”. It’s a mouthful I know but it won’t be visible to anyone but your new buddy Google.

Can you add any more Twitter SEO tips? Please share in the comments!

Filed Under: Google, Monthly, SEO, Twitter Tagged With: Bio, Google, SEO, Twitter

How I Decluttered My Email Accounts with Gmail

You have probably heard of books like Simply Your Life and blogs like Zen Habits and Minimalist. These resources are all about decluttering the stuff that surrounds you, and the aim is to free up your mind to focus on what’s important in your life. Decluttering is basically the art of getting rid of stuff you don’t need.

There are lots of thing one can declutter in life, most people will start with their bookshelf or perhaps their desk at work. I recently did a successful clean-up of my emails and thought I’d share my experience to anyone else that is lost in the email cluttersphere (just invented that word). Here we go…

Why declutter your email accounts?

If you are anything like me, you have amassed a few email accounts throughout the years. One of my first accounts was with Hotmail, then I used Gmail and then when I got into blogging I set up separate email accounts for my sites. In the end I found myself with five active email accounts (and lots more inactive) and just the process of checking all of these on a daily basis was putting grey hairs on my head. Not to mention trying to check them all on my BlackBerry!

What options are there?

One obvious thing you can do is close down all but one account. You would only keep the account that most people use when they email you, just be sure to tell everyone that you will be closing the other accounts within say 60 days. If that works for you, happy days!

In my case I simply can’t use one account, when running blogs you really should use an email address containing the domain you are blogging on. Furthermore, I have registered my Hotmail account with a good few online services, my Gmail account with lots others so it would be a project in itself just to change these settings.

My best option was to bring all accounts into one. I bet there are a few good ways of doing this but I was recommended using Gmail, as Google's email application is free and extremely flexible.

How Gmail can import all your email accounts

Where it lacks in style, Gmail certainly makes up for it with features. One of these is the ability to import other web-based email accounts (such as Hotmail) and any regular email accounts connected to your site or blog via the SMTP or POP server.

I shan’t get too technical and neither does Gmail to be honest, all you need to do is click on the Settings tab, then Accounts and Import and punch in your passwords.

When this is complete, you will have one inbox for all your email accounts, in my case this was five streams of emails coming into one inbox.

But what about sending emails from Hotmail/Yahoo in Gmail?

Once you have imported your email accounts, there may be situations where you still want to send or reply from a specific account and not the 'master' account. Whether it's sending an email from Hotmail/Yahoo or any other email provider, you can still do that in your new Gmail setup. When you create a new message, you get to choose which account to send it from, just like it would when you use Outlook (simply change the "from" field).

The result: email bliss

So I have gone from checking five separate email inboxes every day to merely checking my new aggregator service Gmail. And it works great on a BlackBerry and/or an iPhone as it’s all in one place.

It took me six months to get around to doing this but it only took a couple of hours of execution. If you are struggling with your emails, please heed my advice and simplify things now. If you have any questions on the process of decluttering your emails, just let me know in the comments section (or ping me an email to ANY of my accounts!).

How many email accounts do you have? And do you really need all of them?

Filed Under: Google, Monthly Tagged With: Google