Is Google Plus the new Twitter?

With the launches of many platforms there is typically huge buzz!  The launch of Google Plus (G+) is no exception.  Some predict that G+ will die a quiet death similar to that of Google Buzz, while others believe it could spell the death of Facebook and/or Twitter.   From a small business perspective, should you spend time networking with potential customers on this new platform?  Yes, this well thought out strategic play between multiple Google properties will change social media forever!

Circles
There are quite a few reasons that so many people are raving about G+.  The first item that I feel is most important for business owners is the fine grained sharing control.  G+ has created the concept of circles that you can easily drag and drop customers into!  These circles give you the fine-grained ability to determine what gets shared with each group.

Can you imagine having a circle for each step in your sales funnel and sharing different content for each group?   Suppose for a moment that you were a local carpet installation company.  You now proceed to share a blog post titled “Should your carpet be professionally cleaned or replaced?” with all of your prospects.  A few moments later you send out a coupon for a discount on installation to all of your warm leads.  This type of control allows you to broadcast to specific groups very quickly and then follow-up 1 on 1.

Don’t forget that G+ allows you to share with other G+ users as well as with individuals via e-mail.  This means that the customers in the example above didn’t even need to be members of G+.  You simply add their email address to your G+ circle and voila you can share your blog or coupons with them too!

Sparks
The idea behind sparks are pretty simple: provide G+ users with interesting content for their interests.  You simply tell G+ which types of content you’re interested in and it will find content for you.  This functionality is useful for quickly finding useful content to share with your customers.  This means that you can share blogs and news items with your customers in 2 clicks.

I suspect that in the future Google will probably integrate this functionality right into your stream which means that it will require only 1 click to share!

Hangouts

There is a lot of new marketing ground to be broken using Google’s new concept of hangouts.  Hangouts are virtual rooms where up to 10 people can video chat simultaneously.  You simply choose which circles you’d like to allow into your hangout and they will all be notified that a hangout is available.  Because you want to be adding value to your network this could be a great opportunity to introduce members of your circles to each-other.  This is a perfect opportunity to learn more about your customers.  Additionally, by helping others connect you’ll be perceived as valuable and remain in the forefront of your customer’s minds.

Aside from the fact that I believe G+ will be a huge game changer, you need to ensure that it fits properly into your marketing strategy.  I suspect that all of the new capabilities G+ brings will allow it to fit into the strategies of many business owners, but not all.

read more

Business Lessons From Mexico – Make Time For Family

This is the third post in my Business Lessons from Mexico series.  If you haven’t already done so, please go back and read the first and second posts on “Do One Thing Well” and “Make Sure You’re Protected” for additional context.

One area I personally struggle with, and am always striving to do better with, is making time for family.  Because I enjoy my work, I often find that I’ll try to grab an extra hour here, an additional 15 minutes there, and before I realize it’s time for bed.

This last trip to Mexico, I was unable to get phone or internet service on the beach.  The most advanced technology we used was an iPod to jam out while playing sequence on the beach and playing fart games with unsuspecting visitors.

My wife had the incredible idea to buy a little remote-controlled whoopee cushion.  You take the portion with the speaker and hide it somewhere and then use a remote which looks like a car keychain remote.  Whenever the remote is pressed you get a random and realistic fart sound from the other end.  As juvenile as it sounds, eventually EVERYONE was playing with the little machine.

From little chuckles to long, loud barrel laughs, everyone loved it!  Eventually, once everyone in our little camp had been tricked into believing that the person sitting next to them had no respect for anyone, we had to move on to the neighbors.  They would come over to visit, be invited to the kitchen where grandma would proceed to test their patience.

I don’t think I’ve laughed so much or so hard in a very long time!  The impacts of this 4 day break in Mexico has had on me personally are pretty amazing.  I came back to the United States and have been  hard at work, but things are flowing so naturally.

I don’t find that I’m distracted by Twitter and Facebook as much as I was before I left.  I’m able to whip out blog posts at record speed and I feel I can focus on the things that are most important.  I was able to move a couple of my personal projects forward by leaps and bounds in a matter of days.

I owe this to my family as they have ensured that in spite of a long list of to-dos waiting I always set aside some time with family to be able to recharge and keep from burning out.

Make sure you set aside time to recharge!

read more

Business Lessons From Mexico – Make Sure You’re Protected

This is the second post in my Business Lessons from Mexico series.  If you haven’t already done so, please go back and read the first post title “Do One Thing Well” for more context.

Every business owner needs to ensure that they are properly protected.  From insurance to contracts there are a LOT of different ways to protect yourself from litigation in the United States.  It’s a little funny that I’m writing about this with relation to things in Mexico where there really is no litigation to speak of.    The most extreme example I saw on this trip was a truck full of police officers, armed with M-16s, driving 70+ miles per hour down the freeway.  As we approached I saw that at least 4 of them had a least 1 leg over the side of the truck.  If one of them had fallen it would have been their own fault and no police chief would have been sued.  (Getting down off my soap-box now)….

The last time we were down at Medano Blanco  for Easter, my step-daughter and I were eaten alive by the JeJenes (a small mosquito-like bug).  They really seem to like the white people.   This time my wife came prepared with multiple types of bug spray, sun block and allergy medicine just in case.  We were fortunate and made it out of Mexico with no more than 2 bites and a mild sun-burn.

This translates perfectly for every business owner.  It only takes a few extra dollars to have someone review your personal and business dealings to ensure that you’re not likely to get bitten by any Jejenes that are looking for a quick and easy free lunch.  The way that I’ve begun to address this personally is to hire a financial advisor.   For a very reasonable fee he has reviewed my entire financial picture and has already recommended small changes for me to make.

Some examples of things that he has recommended are: putting an umbrella insurance policy in place, creating proper wills / powers of attorney, life insurance policies, etc.  I don’t really want to go into a lot of detail here, but I must say that the piece of mind these things provide are definitely worth the money.

In my next post I’ll share with you what I found happened as a result of Making Time for Family.

 

read more

Business Lessons From Mexico – Do One Thing Well

For Easter I took a very short and relaxing trip with my wife and step-daughter to Bahia del Perihuete which is known as  Medano Blanco (White Sand Dune) to all of the people in Angostura, Sinaloa, Mexico.  My wife’s parents have a 30 year tradition of spending “Semana Santa” (Easter) on the beach with any family members that can make it.

They set up a fairly large camp right in the bay.  Outfitted with electricity, shower room and toilet.  It’s not quite “roughing it”, but it’s certainly more rough than a hotel.

If there is one thing to take away from Mexico, It’s “Do One Thing Well”.  The best example of this is from a small taco shop in Hermosillo called “Taqueria El Chino”.  When I last stopped there about 3 years ago they had about 5 tables, restrooms, a nice prep area and a small beverage service area.  They are well known for their tacos made from pretty much every part of the cow’s head; Cabeza (a mix of the following items), Cachete (cheek), Lingua (tongue)  and even Ojo (eye).

On this visit I was impressed to find that they how now tripled the number of tables, designed a nice logo, outfitted all of their employees with spiffy new uniforms and built a nice clear menu so visitors like me would know what to choose from.  The largest improvement was a massive new awning that protected all of the customers as well as their vehicles.

In spite of all of this growth, their menu was pretty much the same as it had been 4 years prior.  The only exception was a new “Torta” (sandwich) which we decided to order as a to-go item.  As usual their tacos were awesome!  We left extremely happy.

A few hours later when I got hungry I took a big bite of the Torta and it was terrible.  I’d be curious to find out if this was an experiment that they were running or something they had on the menu for very long.  In either case I’m hoping for their sake that someone lets them know that they should take it off the menu and just continue with what they already do well.

I saw more examples of this lesson all over the place.  From places called “Tortas y Tortas” (sandwiches and sandwiches) to every town having at least one Llantera (tire shop) prominently placed right next to the highway.  They are extremely specialized and able to support their families successfully by staying this way.

In my next post I will discuss making sure you’re protected…

read more

How I’m Utilizing Lean Startup For Garious

So it’s been just over 2 months since I went to Lean Startup Machine San Francisco and I thought it would be a good idea to document how I’m putting what I learned into practice. (Un)fortunately I learned pretty quick after launching http://www.Garious.com that it is a great tool that small businesses aren’t willing to pay for. I had found a pain in need of aspirin rather than morphine. Additionally, most of the people I was talking to were requiring education about social media beforehand which would have increased support requests and made the business fail.

After a bit of soul searching and a lot of reading, I decided that I needed to pick a different target market and use Customer Development techniques to prove or disprove the new market. I immediately started documenting all of the assumptions and questions I had about social media marketers to get myself started. I was off to start booking meetings and learning. The only problem was that after looking at my LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter accounts I realized that I was only connected to about 2 social media marketers. How in the world was I going to learn from social media marketers when I didn’t have any to talk to?

I decided to give LinkedIn a shot for trying to make some new connections. I started by posting some of my initial questions directly into the Answers system. This turned out to be a GREAT way to get started. Within a few short hours I had a BUNCH of answers from social media marketers and was making some new connections. I replied back to the folks that fit my target market with more follow-up questions and in some cases was even able to get them on the phone. I was amazed at how helpful everyone was and how quickly I was able to start learning about my new target market.

I’m about 2 weeks in to the process and I’ve talked to about 30 social media marketers.  I thought it might be useful to others to share the answers to some of the questions I had.

1. What benefits to social media marketers receive from scheduling posts today?
   Time savings, expanded reach, increased visibility.
2. How much time do they spend scheduling messages today?
   Most tend to spend less than an hour per week scheduling messages.
3. What would they do if they had more time available?
   Handle / grow their own personal accounts (business getting in the way of business).
4. How do they measure success of their social media campaigns?
   This varies from campaign to campaign. Best is for the client to track this and share it with the marketer, but it typically does not happen. By putting a good social CRM system in place you can track leads just like any other marketing campaign.
5. What tools are they utilizing for scheduling today?
   Hootsuite & TweetDeck primarily.  A few using other more advanced tools, but most are happy with manual tools.

I have a few more interviews to do in the coming week where I plan to learn more about what tools they recommend to clients, affiliate network relationships and client acquisition.  In the meantime I have made some adjustments to the Garious home page to better reflect the benefits for social media marketers.  I’m considering launching a Google Adwords campaign to test it out a bit.

What do you think?

read more

The Lean Startup Machine – San Francisco

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending The Lean Startup Machine in San Francisco along with my friend Warner.  I’ve been reading a few books and watching quite a few videos on Lean Startup recently was very excited to get to go put it all into practice.

After a few awesome presentations on Lean Startup (Eric Ries), Customer Development (Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits) and business modeling (Dave McClure) we dove right into presenting our business ideas.

This is where I needed to first push myself outside my comfort zone and get in front of the group to present.  I decided to present an idea regarding creation of a gift registry for kids.  I thought it would be the perfect project to focus on for a weekend and to find customers in downtown San Francisco to interview.

It turned out my idea didn’t end up getting picked and I made my way over to one of the ideas I found very interesting which was the Social Change Log team.  The idea was to sell Twitter users a product which showed them a timeline view of their tweets, re-tweets and follows so they could correlate which actions were strengthening their community.

After an evening of debating where to start and getting comfortable with the team we decided to call it a night and hit things hard the following morning.  I went to bed really feeling like our team didn’t quite know which direction to head and was feeling that I should get up early and try to define our direction to get us on track.

That’s just what I ended up doing and where I began applying another skill I’m working on which is my leadership.  Considering I had only met my team members less than 12 hours prior I was a little apprehensive about taking charge.  Looking back, I feel I made the right decision.

We were off and conducting custdev interviews within a few hours and learning TONS about how many of the mentors were using Twitter to market their companies and personal brands.  We very quickly learned just how much we did not know about the market we were getting into.  We decided that the best way to get more data would be to put together an online survey and try to get feedback from people outside of the room.

This took up the remainder of the day and by the time we were ready to call it a night on Saturday we had about 35 responses to the survey and were ready to pivot.  We had learned that customers did not want to see the actual data or graphs, but wanted it as support to some sort of a specific recommendation.

Sunday, the final day of work before presenting what we learned was a little unnerving.  The team started to lose focus again and we decided to split into sub-teams to work on our final presentation while still trying to learn from customers.  Due to two of our members needing to catch a flight we volunteered to present our findings first.

We got up in front of all of the mentors and showed them what we had learned.  As a hook we thought it would be best to provide some specific lean-style recommendations for each of the mentors.   This hook ended up working great as we ran out of time with the presentation and the first follow-up question the mentors asked was “what are our recommendations?”.  We had obviously found something that struck a chord with the mentors!

More details soon…

read more