Tag: Business

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Google+

6 Ways a Formatted Google+ Post Will Increase Engagement and Interest

6 Ways a Formatted Google+ Post Will Increase Engagement and Interest

Your formatted Google+ posts help!

Mike Allton, Social Media Manager at TheSocialMediaHat, provides these great tips to increase interest and engagement on a platform that even a lot of experienced social media mavens find less than intuitive.

English: Google+ wordmark formatted
English: Google+ wordmark (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

1. Title Your Post – Place asterisks at the beginning and end of your first sentence of text to make it bold, treating it like a blog post title.

2. Introduce Your Post – Offer a short précis of the subject, as if you were writing a newspaper article.

3. Ask Questions – Encourage engagement by asking questions, either in the body of the piece or at its end.

4. Include an Image – If you’ve got great images, share them as full images.

6 Ways a Formatted Google+ Post Will Increase Engagement and Interest
Image is from “How to format text on Google+” by Gplus expertise and is for educational purposes only.

5. Mention Influencers – When appropriate, mention key influencers in your post. For example, I mentioned Allton as he is the original author of the work and deserves full and proper credit.

6. Include 2 – 3 Hashtags – Google+ will add two or three hashtags, but it will copy the ones you provide, so give the program the right hashtags.

Extras

Plus three extras –

7. Share to your Blog Notification Circle – So this is not for you to spam everyone and anyone. Instead, as Allton recommends, set up a Blog Notification circle where you specifically ask people if they want to be notified of your new posts, and then only add them to that circle if they respond that they are opting in.

8. Respond to Comments – Also, once you’ve shared your post, take the time to respond to people who take the time to comment and engage you. Show appreciation, answer questions, and demonstrate your expertise.

BONUS: Include a Pin It Link – Because great synergy can come from having a strong Pinterest presence alongside Google+.

Want more tips on how to use Google+? Go straight to the source!

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Career changing LinkedIn SEO Twitter

The Top 10 Positives About Job Seeking

The Top 10 Positives About Job Seeking

Job Seeking. Sigh.

Adventures in Career Changing means job applications.

Job Seeking
Success

Beyond networking, education and research, there are just sometimes some forms to fill out. I have filled out – I have no idea how many. And while there are problems with many of these forms, there is also some good out there, along with other aspects of looking for a job these days.

#10 – Following Twitter to Find Jobs

There are all sorts of Twitter streams which showcase any number of openings. Company streams, in particular, can be a good source of leads. Make sure to watch for perhaps a week or so in order to determine whether the content is being updated frequently.

#9 – LinkedIn, Land of Opportunity

For power users of LinkedIn, there are numerous ways to look for work. One good way is to check their job listings, and apply through the site. Some openings allow you to apply directly via your LinkedIn profile. Others send you to a company’s website. But make no mistake; companies (or at least they should) check the traffic sources for the job applications they receive. And so by going to a job application directly from LinkedIn, you show that, at least in some small way, the biggest online networking site in the world matters.

#8 – LinkedIn Skills and Endorsements

If you’ve got an account on LinkedIn, surely you have seen these by now. So fill in your skills profile! And make sure to endorse other people as well, and a lot of them will reciprocate.

#7 – Scannable Resumes

Gone are the days when most resumes were eyeballed, at least to start. Because your resume is far more likely to be read by a machine before a human. So get your resume loaded up with keywords! Why? Because you’ll make the first cut, that’s why.

#6 – Personal Websites

The good, the bad and the ugly are out there. My own, for instance. Because the site is completely functional. And it comes up quickly, plus you can readily find everything on it. Finally, Google ranks it fairly well.

#5 – Clarity

Job descriptions can become very precise these days, as employers can (in part, in some instances) select software and versions from drop-downs to better communicate their needs to the job seeking public.

#4 – LinkedIn Recommendations

Unlike endorsements, these require a bit of prose. But they can be rather powerful. At the very least, you don’t want to be a job seeker who doesn’t have any. So ask! And not just your boss or former boss – ask your coworkers as well, and offer to reciprocate.

#3 – Blog

Just like this one, a candidate can use a blog to provide more information or get across personality without having to overload a resume. Savvy employers will look candidates up on social media. Why not give them something good to find?

#2 – LinkedIn Functionality

For jobs advertised on LinkedIn, for some of them, you can apply by connecting them directly to your profile. What could be easier?

#1 – Being Able to do this Online

Finally, of course, a lot of the job search still must happen in an old-fashioned manner. Interviews will, for the most part (except, perhaps, for quickie phone screens, particularly where relocation is at issue), be conducted in person. A lot of networking will still happen at events and not on LinkedIn. But a ton of it can happen in cyberspace. It makes the search far easier and faster than it ever has been.

Got any of your own gems you’d like to share?

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LinkedIn

InMaps – Visualize Your Network on LinkedIn

InMaps – Visualize Your Network on LinkedIn

InMaps were cool.

Let’s say you’ve got a nice, growing network on LinkedIn.

InMaps - Visualize Your Network on LinkedIn
Linkedin Chocolates (Photo credit: nan palmero)

Hurray! Now let’s say that it’s gotten large enough that you’re unsure of how it’s all trending. After all, what if your network is dominated by people who used to work at Fidelity but you want to get into Prudential instead? How can you see how things are shaking out? Or maybe you want to get a handle on job titles that you’re seeing – what if most of your network consists of tradespeople in your area, rather than people who might actually be able to find you something? If you’re an accountant, a network full of hairdressers and landscape contractors is lovely but it might not be really doing it for you, eh?

Here’s where InMaps came in.

What InMaps Does

Essentially, what LinkedIn was doing is, instead of geographically mapping your connections, they were mapping other meaningful relationships among all of those people. So instead you could see things like job titles that frequently come up, and other connections. These included who used to work where. If you’d worked in several places (like I have) you might have seen one former employer dominate, particularly if you’d just left a particular role.

After all, when Hachette Book Group and I parted ways, suddenly I connected to the other seventeen or so people who were being outsourced. There was a bit of urgency to getting connected, and we wanted to maintain friendships. I’d had to dig a bit in order to find former colleagues further back in my career. And, by the way, FYI, this does behoove one to try to make connections. These connections would be both during employment and to reach back to older connections. This is because the natural push to connect might not come about if you’re thinking about a job you held twenty years ago, long before LinkedIn existed.

InMaps Downside

It would take a while for LinkedIn to generate an InMap. Particularly if you’ve got a lot of connections. This was a feature that never really got out of Beta, so that was totally understandable.

But here was the InMap for a woman named Leslie Gotch Zarelli. So this should give something of an idea about how the overall pattern looked. Her InMap (I would have posted mine, but LinkedIn never generated one) was dominated by general areas like Legal. Plus she had probably a former employer or two, and what appeared to be some job duties.

More information was here. LinkedIn discontinued the service in 2015 and never really replaced it. So your contacts now are static. A pity, as it was a great idea. LinkedIn – people want this! Get mappin’!

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Social Media

Wattpad gets into the Digital Publishing Game

Wattpad gets into the Digital Publishing Game

GoodEReader reports in 2014 that Wattpad, the giant free stories platform, is entering the digital publishing business.

Wattpad gets into the Digital Publishing Game

In early May of 2014, it was reported that Wattpad had decided to e-publish two of its most famous stories. My Wattpad Love has over 19 million reads. A Proscriptive Relationship has over 30 million reads on Wattpad.

To provide some perspective, it should be noted that Stephen King has sold a total of 350 million books, but this is spread over 49 works, giving him an average of a little over 7 million sales apiece. Of course sales and free reads on a website aren’t the same thing, but these sheer numbers are still rather impressive.

But can free readers be converted to paying customers? Just as importantly, Wattpad is a social site. People click, visit, vote up and add stories to their virtual libraries. But how much of that is due to the quality of the prose? Is some of it due to the writer’s personality and following on the site?

Of course that is the case, but the question is, how much? Context, as Avinash Kaushik wrote, is queen. But how can context be accurately (at least as accurately as possible) determined here?

Millions of clicks are difficult to ignore, but what is the best way to weed out sympathy clicks, friendly clicks, clicks made in error and the like? And that does not take into consideration whether any of these people will convert to a paying model. Why buy these cows, when the milk has been provided for free (and in an easy to digest package, too, I might add) for so long?

But even a one percent conversion rate will turn heads.

Move over traditional publishers. The shelf just got more crowded.

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Social Media

Avoiding Common Legal Mistakes in Social Media Contests and Sweepstakes

Avoiding Common Legal Mistakes in Social Media Contests and Sweepstakes

In Maximize Social Business, Kyle-Beth Hilfer has put together a thoughtful rundown of certain things that can just go wrong with online contests and other sweepstakes-style promotions.

We often can get caught up in the excitement of the moment and create a contest without truly thinking through the ramifications. Don’t simply grab your rules from someone else’s site (how do you know they’re vetted or enforceable at all?). Don’t do this cheaply. Don’t do it without forethought. Keep your head.

Seal of the United States Federal Trade Commis...
Seal of the United States Federal Trade Commission. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Remember, the Federal Trade Commission is watching.

Hilfer outlines eight mistakes that social media managers can and do make.

  1. Forgetting the Rules.  All contest creators should work directly with their company’s Legal Department to draft a vetted set of rules, and not simply lift them from other contests. In fact, involving the Legal Department from the very beginning is always a good idea.
  2. Running an illegal lottery.  When games or contests change from judging of skill, and instead become ruled and decided by chance, they can essentially be converted to lotteries. This was evidently one of the FTC’s biggest complaints in 2012 and so is at issue. Beyond lotteries, know where gambling is illegal. Even if it’s perfectly legal where your company is, you might still have trouble if the game can’t fly where your contestant lives (see #6, below).
  3. Trading “likes” or “tweets” for sweepstakes entries. As Hilfer writes, “(t)he FTC has made it clear that offering sweepstakes entries in exchange for mentions in social media creates a material connection between the promotion sponsor and the consumer. The onus falls on the brand, and to some extent its agencies, to ensure that consumer’s testimonials disclose that such a material connection exists.”
  4. Choosing winners without performing adequate (or any) background checks. Do YOU want the Westboro Baptist Church to claim your prize? And for the Twitterati to know that? I didn’t think so.
  5. Ignoring intellectual property and other third party rights.  Brands need to remember to obtain releases before posting photographs and videos. Those releases need to be obtained not only from the artist, but also from anybody in those videos and photos. Check licenses and permissions. Not all Creative Commons licenses are created equal.
  6. Ignoring global risk. You do realize that, even if your widget store is only in Vermont, that some of your contestants might be in Istanbul, right? Laws differ. Make sure you’re covered. The Legal Department is your best friend in this area. Remember them? Yes, keep them involved from start to finish and you can avoid some of these headaches. You can, potentially, avoid some of these issues by requiring that all contestants be American or from Vermont, etc. Even so, it pays to have the Legal Department look into it, at least to assure that your hypothetical Vermonter contestants really are from there.
  7. Attaching to a poorly managed charity or cause.  Brands may have an altruistic desire to help out after a disaster, and that is laudable. But regulators are watching, and caution is always advised, even before the dust settles. The NY Attorney General’s Office offers best practices. For example, in the case of the Boston Marathon bombing, a number of charities sprung up, seemingly overnight. Plus there were victims with Kickstarters and the like, who needed cash on hand to pay medical expenses. Mayor Thomas Menino‘s office had the foresight to create the One Fund, which was a place for funds to go. That charity took responsibility and that means it could (and probably is, potentially) a target for lawsuits. But better that than a fly by night operation where you can’t contact anyone to get your money back.
  8. Forgetting to clear trade promotions. Can your contestants come from inside your organization? What happens if they trash your reputation with their contest entry? Set clear and well-defined rules, as challenges to those rules can give you one massive headache.

One last thing – no contest! Follow Hilfer; she knows her stuff.

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Facebook

Responding to Facebook’s Organic Reach Decline

Responding to Facebook’s Organic Reach Decline

Responding to Facebook’s Organic Reach Decline – Facebook’s organic reach is going down. That is, fewer people are seeing your posts (unless you cough up some dough). What to do?

Facebook logo Español: Logotipo de Facebook Fr...
Facebook logo Español: Logotipo de Facebook Français : Logo de Facebook Tiếng Việt: Logo Facebook (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Social Media Today’s Pam Dyer has the scoop on how to respond.

In 2012, Facebook restricted brand content reach to around 16%. In 2014, the figure plummeted to just about a dismal 6%.

According to Dyer, “No one really knows for sure how Facebook decides what appears in news feeds, but some elements are well known as weighting factors:

  • Post types that receive the most user interaction
  • Posts that users hide or report as spam
  • How a user interacts with Facebook ads
  • The device that is used to access Facebook and the speed of its connection”

EdgeRank has less importance than it had, but it’s not quite gone from the mix. It consists of –

  • “Affinity: The closeness of the relationship between the user and the content/source
  • Weight: The action that was taken on the content
  • Decay: The freshness of the content”

Dyer lays out four steps.

  1. Optimize Facebook content. Test what’s working, and what isn’t.  What are people clicking on? And are they clicking through to your site? Look at Google Analytics for your site, and determine which content is the source for your Facebook-generated traffic.
  2. Create incentives for sharing content. Whether that’s offers, contents, or just can-you-believe-this types of posts, create the kind of content that people want to spread to their peers.
  3. Work a multi-network campaign strategy. Use hashtags; they show up in all sorts of places, and not necessarily on Facebook.  Put your hashtag in all of your promotions, e. g. blogs, television commercials, literature, etc.
  4. Track data, and act on it accordingly! What’s happening with your links? Where is your audience coming from? Dovetailing with step #1, be the company that knows where your traffic is really coming from. Know where your audience is clicking.

Knowledge is power.

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Book Reviews SEO Site Development

Guerilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson, a Book Review

Guerilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson

Guerilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson is the concept of succeeding in a small business by essentially paying attention to details and doing many things yourself. Simple ideas, perhaps, but they often seem to be missed.

Some of this may be self-evident.

Adventures in Career Changing | Guerilla Marketing
Guerilla Marketing

After all, a small business, almost by definition, does not have a lot of capital just lying around. Often everything needs to be done by an impressively small cadre of workers. Yet we also live in a society where it seems more people than ever before just want to pay someone to take care of whatever needs to be done. Yet that is wrong-headed.

The Details

Levinson’s mantra is that it’s not necessary to invest a lot of money. That is, if you’re willing to instead invest time, energy, imagination and information. And, I might add, patience and attention. For a small business owner, this means having a passion about what you do. All too often, it seems, entrepreneurs get into a particular field because they cannot find a more traditional means of employment. After all, the economy has been rather sour for the past few years. Or they chucked a traditional job but without a vision or a plan. Neither method will work for long because the entrepreneur’s heart is not in it.

What the entrepreneur needs – beyond the details of how to work a crowd or give a talk – is enthusiasm and passion about what he or she is doing or selling. Going through the motions is simply not going to cut it. Since the entrepreneur is one of the only faces of the company (and, perhaps, its only face), the entrepreneur must be jazzed. This is for everything – presenting, talking, handing out business cards, performing demonstrations, writing copy, etc.

Upshot

If the entrepreneur is excited, the prospects can be as well. All in all, an interesting read, and good for the detailed tips, but a more current version would have been a better choice.

Rating

Review: 1/5 stars.

Categories
Career changing Personal Work

They used to call me Robot Girl

They used to call me Robot Girl

I haven’t blogged for a while. Yeah, I know.

I was uninspired, and didn’t want to just subject all two of my readers to my ramblings. Plus, I was looking for an actual day job.

Well, I found one. It’s a temping gig for a large financial services company which shall remain nameless. I am a Financial Analyst, preparing and running database reports. The job is rather similar to several other gigs I’ve held. And then I will be back in Social Media full time.

In the meantime, the Bot Boys are not forgotten, and I actually blog more for them that I had been. The need for Social Media exposure does not diminish just because I’ve got a new gig.

But I wanted to reach out, on this blog, for the first time in quite a while, to offer up some of the things I’ve learned along the way. So gather ’round, and hopefully I can help someone else to navigate the wild world of startups.

  1. The best gift that anyone can offer startups is money. Advice and expertise are great, and they are helpful, but it all pales in the face of do-re-mi. And while startup competitions may not want (or, truly, be able) to part with too much of it, it is money that is most needed because, to truly succeed, someone has to quit their day job. You know, the thing I just got a few weeks ago? Yeah. Someone has to take a flying leap into outer space – but that person still needs to be able to afford ramen and a futon.
  2. Speaking of ramen and futons, the startup game is, often, played by the young. This is not to say that those of us who were born during the Kennedy Administration have naught to offer. Rather, it is that we have mortgages. We may have children. We have lives that often require more than minimal Connector-style health insurance. We may have aging parents, credit card debt or any number of things that make living off ramen, on a futon, nigh impossible.
  3. However, this does not mean that the not-so-young do not have a place in the land of startups. But that place is often a different one. The enthusiastic feel of Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney
    Cropped screenshot of Judy Garland and Mickey ...
    Cropped screenshot of Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney from the trailer for the film Love Finds Andy Hardy. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

    (now I’m really dating myself) yelling, “Hey, kids! Let’s put on a show! We can get the barn!” is replaced with “Let’s see if we can get this thing to work before defaulting on the mortgage/Junior needs braces/gall bladder surgery is required/etc.” Our needs are different, and we may be more patient with setbacks. This does not necessarily spell being less hungry but, perhaps, less able to truly go for broke. The not-so-young person’s role in a startup is often more advisory. We are the ones who can’t quit day jobs until the salaries are decent. And that day may never come.

  4. Startup events are best when they have a focus. Mass Innovation Nights, I feel, is something of a Gold Standard. There is a coherent beginning, middle and end to each event. It’s not just a lot of business card trading. The participants and the audience get good conversational hooks. Making contacts is vital – I hooked up with the Bot Boys at an event like that – but it can’t just be “Hey, let’s get a bunch of startups together, eat pizza and trade business cards!” The startups that are succeeding are too busy for such activities. And those that aren’t ….
  5. Cloud computing, apps and software companies are everywhere in the startup space. With the Bot Boys, we can stand out a bit as we are a hardware company. Having a product that people can see and feel is valuable amidst a sea of virtual stuff.
  6. The downside to that is that hardware companies have spinup problems that cloud computing companies just don’t have – app companies do not have to worry about shipping and packaging. They do not have to perform quality control checks on shipments. They do not have to work on product safety.
  7. No one wants to talk to the job seeker, but everyone wants to talk to the entrepreneur – and those are often the same person! Human nature is a bit odd in this area, but I have seen people who are barely past the “I’ve got this great idea I’ve sketched on the back of a napkin” stage where there is a flock of interested people swarming around, whereas a person honest about looking for work is often overlooked.
  8. Charisma counts. While one founder is going to be the inventor or the developer (the idea person), the other pretty much must be the socializer. Otherwise, even the best ideas are all too often buried. Someone must be willing and able to do public speaking, elevator pitching and sales. This need not be an experienced sales person, but that person has got to be a lot friendlier and a lot more fearless than most.
  9. Most startups and most entrepreneur groupings will fail, morph, coalesce or break apart before succeeding. And perhaps that is as it should be, for being nimble is one of the characteristics of a successful startup. If the product sells when it’s colored blue, but not when it’s colored green, dip it in dye, fer chrissakes!
  10. We all work for startups, or former startups. Even the large financial services firm was, once, a gleam in someone’s eye. Every invention started off as an idea. Even day jobs were, at one time, in places where the founders were living off that generation’s equivalent of ramen and sleeping in that era’s analogue to a futon. Yet somehow, against the odds, they made it.

And a lot of today’s startups can, too.

See you ’round the scene.

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Career changing Content Strategy Facebook Opinion Quinnipiac SEO Social Media Class Twitter

Quinnipiac Assignment #15 – Reflections about ICM 522

Quinnipiac Assignment #15 – Reflections about ICM 522

With the end of my first Social Media class came a request for our overall impressions of how things went. Hence, I prepared Quinnipiac Assignment #15 – Reflections about ICM 522.

Quinnipiac Assignment #15 – Reflections about ICM 522

My classmates and I were also tasked with showcasing what we felt was our best work.

I was so very pleased that I had a few works to choose from, but I narrowed my choices down in order to save some space.

My reflections essay included comments about the video and essay portions of Module #4, Module #9, Module #10, Module #11,  and my Final Project; that video is duplicated below.

Module Four was about the Ad Astra Star Trek fan fiction writing community. Module Nine was about the Facebook page that my partner, Kim Scroggins, and I created for our ‘client’, the as-yet undiscovered Rhode Island rock band, J-Krak. Module Ten was about the creation and growth of the Twitter stream that we made for J-Krak. And Module Eleven was all about our less than successful experiments in spreading the gospel of J-Krak to MySpace and Google+ (the former was a particularly abysmal showing. At least our client’s presence on Google+ assured better placement in overall search results).

The class was great fun, and I could not get enough of studying for it. I have never, ever had a course like this before, where I was so into it that I could not wait to study, and I did all of the extra credit because I wanted to, and not because I necessarily needed to. That has never, ever been my experience with a class before this one. This overwhelmingly positive experience has given me the incentive to not only finish my Social Media Certification training, but I am also rather seriously considering going on and getting my Masters’ Degree in Communications, with a concentration in Social Media.

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Quinnipiac Social Media Social Media Class

Quinnipiac Assignment #13 – Review of the J-Krak Communities

Review of the J-Krak Communities

Once again, this was a week where we did not have to create a video. Instead, we conducted a review of the J-Krak communities that Kim Scroggins and I had created. We compared our efforts on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and MySpace. We also reviewed our efforts in the blogosphere.

Our efforts were all as strong as we could make them (at least, I believe so), but our levels of success were certainly all over the place. We ranged from exceeding our thirty follower requirement for Facebook in about an hour, to nearly no engagement or followers in Google+. Although, in all fairness, the number of views on Google+ was fairly impressive. We were about to join the overall conversation in Twitter. Our experience on MySpace was, we felt, a waste of time. And our blog had a decent following, and the followers were, by the end of the semester, beginning to tip more heavily into the realm of true followers, as opposed to our classmates, friends, and families, who would follow us in order to be nice and help us out, versus people who were truly interested in our message.

Review of the J-Krak Communities

Instead, we wrote up a PowerPoint slide show to get together our strategy for the final two weeks of the semester.

We spent time over the past week performing a lot more social listening and analysis. We grabbed screen shots of all sorts of things which ended up in our final project, which I will post next week.

J-Krak Final Project Presentation

I hope you enjoy our presentation about our review of the J-Krak Communities.

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