Over the years I’ve posted quite a few video tutorials on here and on other sites. The problem is that they were scattered all over — many on here, quite a few on Google Earth Blog, various ones on my Google+ account, etc. Recently I set out to get all of those organized, and the result seems to be pretty good.
With the help of Ali Green, we’ve put together a new site called A Brighter Web. On the site we have over 60 video tutorials on topics such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest and WordPress. We’re adding a few new videos every day, and we’ll be expanding our range of topics over time.
With that in mind, what would you like to see on a site like that? More social platforms, like FourSquare and LinkedIn? Or perhaps software tutorials, like Photoshop? Leave a comment and let us know what you’d like to see, and we’ll certainly take your ideas into consideration moving foward.
Last week I had the opportunity to meet with a few groups of United Methodist Church leaders near Washington, DC to discuss how the church can best use their websites and social media tools to reach people more effectively.
My social media presentation was largely focused on the fact that Twitter and Facebook are no longer tools for churches to be “playing with”; they’ve become legitimate communication tools. While most churches are doing fairly well with Facebook, Twitter remains a problem. I’m hoping the tools I shared with them will help get things rolling.
Google+
Even though the sessions were only a week ago, my thoughts on Google+ have changed. At the time, I said something like “You need to focus hard on Facebook and Twitter, and start playing with Google+ because you’ll need to be active there later this year“. As it turns out, “later this year” is now. The reason for the sudden shift is Google’s release of “Search, plus Your World”, which adds heavy Google+ integration into the search results. Here’s a quick video showing how that works:
That alone should be enough to encourage you to get your organization on Google+. But it goes further. Try searching for “music” or “cars” and you’ll get a result similar to the shot below. Notice the area that I outlined in red.
Notice that the red box is for Google+ profiles only; no Twitter or Facebook found there. That is seen by some as anti-competitive, and perhaps it is, but that’s simply how it works right now. Britney Spears trails a variety of artists on Twitter (Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, etc), but none of them are on Google+ yet. As a result, she’s suddenly getting a lot more free promotion when someone performs a search.
For now, that area doesn’t matter much for your business, but it will soon. For local searches, Google will almost certainly start showing businesses in your area instead of just generic industry-related results. If you wait until that happens before you join Google+, you’ll be way behind. Suppose Katy Perry sees those results and joins Google+ to get back in the game. While she may catch up to Spears eventually, she’s already behind by 1.3 million followers. How far ahead do you want your competition to get before you join the game?
Faces in the main results
Not only is that side bar relevant, but the main search results (in both personal and non-personal mode) are already full of results from Google+. In many cases, those results show the face of the author of the post even if the post was made on their own blog. For example, the below search for “google earth imagery january” shows my face next to the second result, because it knows that I wrote that article and it connects to my Google+ profile; and this is the non-personal results!
Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket
As much as I love Google+, I’m certainly not advising you to bail on Facebook or Twitter. As I said at the beginning, those are legit communications platforms and your organization needs to be active on both of them. For now, at least, all three are very important to your organization.
If you want to dabble in social media, there are places to do that. Play with Pinterest (connect with me), play with Path, or play with any of the other new services popping up. Pinterest may become more serious this year, but for now you can just poke the tires a bit.
I don’t have time
I hear it a lot — “not another service to keep up with!”, but it’s all about your mind set. Instead of worrying about how you’ll have time for three separate services, just look at it from the positive side. Now you have another way to connect with your customers, and this one will help you show up more frequently in the search results too. It’s a win-win!
Once you get things set up, simply take 10-15 minutes/day to post your latest thoughts and respond to people that are talking to you. It doesn’t have to be a huge deal. If it takes longer than that to respond to everything coming your way, then your business is likely doing well and you can afford to spend more time working with those people (or hire someone to help you out).
Do you think any other services are worthy of the full attention of your business right now? I can see LinkedIn being one for a few organizations, but that’s about it. Agree?
I’m down in Fort Morgan, AL this week for a little vacation with the family, and I’m shocked at how lazy the realtors are around here. Like most beachfront communities, most of the homes are either for sale or rent, yet many of the sale/rent signs are broken, every “take info” box is empty, and I’ve only seen one house that has a unique URL on it. 90% have no web link, and the rest simply link back to the main site for that company. QR codes aren’t even being considered. If you’re a hard worker and want to live at the beach, move down here — you’d be a hero!
For a wider look at the Real Estate industry, check out the infographic below, created by Mashable. It illustrates some very interesting numbers regarding how the Real Estate industry is using social media.
A few things that jumped out at me:
84% of real estate professionals are now using social media. That’s it? I would have expected that number to be in the mid-90′s. Granted, many aren’t using it effectively, but that 84% includes those people. 16% apparently aren’t doing anything with social media yet.
73% of homeowners are more likely to list with a realtor that is willing to do video, but only 12% of the real estate industry current has a YouTube account.
The real estate industry uses Facebook more than other small businesses, but they’re way behind in Twitter usage.
Anyhow, check out the infographic below. Anything else jump out at you?
Over the past year, I’ve worked with a variety of churches to help get their social media effort off the ground or help to fine-tune it. Some have embraced it quickly, while others have stepped back to take a more measured approach. My advice is to simply dive in, because it’s happening whether you’re there or not.
Before we go any further, read this short post from CarlBliss.com about Chris. Guess what? Your church probably doesn’t have just one “Chris” — you’ve probably got dozens of them! When I started intentionally focusing on social media at Mt. Bethel a few years ago I found that that there were already more than 30 Mt. Bethel-related groups on Facebook (here are some of them), and an “official” group didn’t even exist yet!
I find that churches are choosing to take wildly different approaches to social media. Over the past six months, three churches that I’ve worked with come to mind. All three are fairly large churches, with 500+ in attendance each Sunday.
Church #1 is scared of social media. Thoughts of lawsuits are running through their mind, and they’re afraid to do much of anything. They’ve finally created a Twitter account and a Facebook Page, but both are mostly empty and quite useless.
Church #2 is trying too hard to be perfect. I helped them get things set up a few months back, but they’ve yet to do much of anything. They’re still very excited by the possibilities, but their Twitter account has just a single Tweet (“Welcome!”) and their Facebook page has less than a dozen fans.
Church #3 is rolling. They didn’t have their full plan worked out, but they started posting events on Facebook, tweeting snippets from the sermons, and simply went from there.
In all three cases, “Chris” is already out there talking about the church, and the only difference is whether the church is able to respond. Using the examples above, only church #3 is listening (and responding) to what is going on.
When people talk about your church online, are you able to:
Answer their questions?
“@yourchurch What time is dinner on Wednesday?“
Respond to criticism?
“It took me 20 minutes to find a place to park at Your Church“
Encourage their happiness?
“Awesome worship at @yourchurch this morning!“
The only way to handle any of those questions is if you’re out there with them.
That being said, don’t be foolish. Especially at the beginning, just keep things light and informative. Talk about events, sermon notes, that kind of thing. As things evolve, work on developing policies for which employees can post, content ideas, etc.
Also, when creating your church presence on Facebook be sure to create a “Page” and not another “Profile”. See this post for why that is important.
The conversation is happening whether you’re there or not, but you’ll look a lot better (and reach a lot more people) if you join in.
Matt Cutts explains in the video below. In a nutshell, he says they haven’t specifically changed the way social media links count toward your site, but they’re always changing the algorithm and some of the changes certainly could have had an impact. They’ve made about 300-400 changes in the last year, and some of those may have had an effect on the weight of social media links that point to your site.
Anyhow, watch the short video below for Matt’s full answer:
Over the years I’ve posted quite a few video tutorials on here and on other sites. The problem is that they were scattered all over — many on here, quite a few on Google Earth Blog, various ones on my Google+ account, etc. Recently I set out to get all of those organized, and the result seems to be pretty good.
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