Tag Archives: Google Plus

Social Media

What You’ll Get If You Request Your Google Plus Data

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By now every should know that Google Plus will be shutting down all personal accounts by April 2nd, 2019. If you didn’t… now you do. 🙂 Also by now you should have received an email from the address you used to create your account giving you the opportunity to request a file you can download that contains everything you uploaded on the site.


no more after 4/2/19

For context, this is the 3rd site I’ve done this sort of thing for. I’ve shown you how to do it for Facebook and I talked you through it briefly while addressing Instagram, so now it’s Google Plus’ turn. Unfortunately for me, after April 2nd this post won’t be evergreen anymore; sniff! The things I do for my readers. lol
Continue reading What You’ll Get If You Request Your Google Plus Data →

Social Media

Why Don’t Social Media Sites Want You To See What You Want To See?

Yesterday I wrote the below on my personal Facebook profile:

I’ll admit that a bit of this is self serving while being helpful at the same time (since I have a page with quite a few of you subscribed to it who probably never know I’m putting anything out).

social media vision

Do you see me?

If you have “liked” a page here on Facebook and want to be notified whenever there’s something new on the page, what you have to do is go to the page, click on the arrow next to Following, go to Notifications and click on it.
Continue reading Why Don’t Social Media Sites Want You To See What You Want To See? →

Blogging, Marketing, Social Media

The Concept of Social Media Marketing

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The concept of social media marketing is one that’s missed by a lot of people. Some people assume it means trying to sell products online by sending out a lot of spam email. Some people believe it’s related to those late night TV gurus who tell you that they’ll have you making millions of dollars within weeks if you learn their system.

Friendlies
Mo Riza via Compfight

There are a few differences between social media marketing and internet marketing, which is what a lot of people might be thinking of.

With a lot of internet marketing, there is little attempt to actually make a connection with someone. The idea is to push products, whether they’re products created by the marketer or not. Their push is to try to get big email lists of addresses and pound the masses to earn their 1 – 3% of sales and live off that. Some internet marketers do really well with that concept, while others fail because they were too late into the marketplace to truly be effective.

Social media marketing is much different. Its purpose is to establish a long term relationship with an audience in some fashion and hope to drive those people to them. If you have a traditional business location, social media marketing can help get people to come through the doors if done properly.

It can help you reach an audience who might have never heard of you. It can give you the opportunity to show some expertise in your field that people might relate to and thus help you build sales. At the same time, since it’s mainly done over the internet, and can be much more comprehensive, being known as an expert by more people works better.

How can it do a lot of these things? What kind of purpose can it serve? I’m going to say more, but first I’m going to share some links where I talk about social media marketing in some detail. Here are 5 links to articles on social media marketing in general terms that might help you understand what it’s all about.

Using Social Media To Grow Your Influence

What Is Influence?

Social Media And SEO

SMM – Audio And Visual Options

Social Media Marketing Won’t Work If…

Here’s what I see more of unfortunately. Though things might seem slightly better than they were in 2009 when studies showed that Twitter was mainly blather, spam, aka advertising, seems to have caught up, or possibly is just slightly under. It depends on what category you want to put advertising one’s own content, blog or otherwise in. Much of the automation that’s out there is to get the word out for an individual or specific company.

Just last week someone who’s known as a big time player on Google Plus actually posted the same link 6 or 7 times an hour between 6 and 9 in the morning (unfortunately I was up; ugh…). He did share a couple of things from others but in my timeline he was kind of irritating. To me, that’s spam to the nth degree.

On the other side, there are people who retweet others all day and never share anything they do; is that less irritating? In the last month I’ve dropped people I was following who only do that, or only post pictures or only post quotes. Is that engagement? Is that social media marketing?

I’m certainly not going to say I’m perfect at it but I think I’m pretty good. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve started sharing a lot more of my present and past posts from this blog and my business blog, as well as some quotes I’ve made in blog posts over the years from my business blog that I think might be motivational. I’m also sharing some of my video links. But I share as much content from others, moreso than my own stuff, and I add a comment to at least half of that, which sometimes leads into conversation.

To me, that’s what social media marketing should be about, adding in the concept of social media engagement. If you’re not giving yourself a chance to talk to your audience then why not just stick to email campaigns? Do you really think anyone is reading your posts on Twitter or Google Plus or Facebook if they know that you’re never reading any of their stuff, or that you’ll never respond to a comment they make back to you in those spaces?

Of course, this is my opinion. I ask you now, do you agree with any of what I’ve said, do you have your own thought on it? Let me know; I’d love to hear it.
 

Social Media

Is Social Media Giving You Everything You Need

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My wife and I always seem to have the same discussion about me and one of my particular eating habits. She says that I don’t always have a filter for portion control. When I’m hungry or thirsty, my mind doesn’t quite see that maybe “this much” is all I need to get rid of either of those things. At least not all the time.

IMAG0173
um, chocolate milk!

Thus, sometimes my mind will say “I can eat that entire pizza” when logically I know I can’t. It’ll say “you need to heat up 20 chicken nuggets” when I know I can only eat 13. And yet, every once in awhile I hear her words jumping into my mind saying “that’s going to be too much, restrain yourself, which explains this picture of chocolate milk that I made in a 32oz cup, bypassing the 48oz cup I initially grabbed; yeah, that would have come close to taking the entire carton of milk. lol

I know what you’re wondering; what’s that got to do with the topic above. The thing about social media is that most of us can define it based on what we think it is and what we think it should do for us. Most of us believe it’s supposed to be everything we want it to be, no matter what the limitations or realities might be.

I’ll own up to it; I’m one of those people. I have my own idea of what social media is supposed to be, and I want it to be that thing, and yet it’s not that thing. Let me explain.

I enjoy much of social media, but I find it lacking. I love Twitter, which you’ve heard me mention before. I’ve enjoyed Facebook, and I keep trying to make Google+ work for me the way I want it to work. LinkedIn, well, I can’t say I’ve ever gotten any business from my participation there, even though that’s what it’s supposed to help us with, connecting with those people who may be able to use our services.

What is it I want from social media? Truthfully, when all is said and done I want more engagement, and I want it more immediately. As an experiment, last night I decided to try an experiment. I announced around 8:30 that I was going to hold a Google Hangout at 9PM and that anyone who wanted to come was welcome, as I could take the first 8 people who asked to participate. I posted it on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook.

I wasn’t expecting much, and for the first 10 minutes that’s exactly what I got. No one came; not even a hint. So I decided to invite some people, and invited 8 of them. Two people popped in surprisingly, and two others acknowledged it on G+ but neither could come. The two who showed up were Michael Belk and Beverly Mahone. Shocking to me was that both of them showed up via their smartphones, both then tried to get on through their laptops and failed, and Michael came back to the phone, while I never could get Bev back on. I thank both of them, and Michael and I had a good conversation for awhile after he got back on.

I know some people would say that I should have put that message out way in advance but I had to try an experiment first. Here’s my take on it all. If there are a billion people on Facebook, 500 million on Google Plus, and 300 million or so on Twitter, and all of these sites have people on them 24/7, and 9PM Eastern time is only 6PM out west, I should be able to post something 30 minutes before its time and have some people show up. Of course, I don’t have that many people following me so let’s look at it this way. If I have almost 700 people following me on both Google Plus and Facebook and another 3,000+ on Twitter, that’s almost 4,500 people, and if that’s the case I should still be able to get at least 3 or 4 to show up, wouldn’t you think?

Yum… lol

That’s what I thought. As Michael and I were talking, he said that the problem with social media is that it’s not really social. On Google Plus most people seem to be interested more in promoting themselves than in talking to anyone. For the most part the same is true of Twitter. On Facebook, people love playing games and sharing images, and you might be able to get a conversation going that takes place over a number of hours, but for anything immediate you have to use that chat function, and most of us don’t like that.

Isn’t that thought provoking? Social media not really being social? Goodness, for most people it’s not even a great way to market, no matter what we try, and when I think about it, most of the people on Twitter are marketing more than communicating, and I have to share in that one, although I only post my links twice a day at most. I try engaging people when I share some of their links & quotes and occasionally talk to people, but not all that often, and that’s my favorite platform.

Is social media giving me everything I need? Not even close. But what about you? Are you getting everything you could possibly want out of it? I’m not talking marketing wise now, so don’t answer that question. And I’m not talking blogging either, since I consider that part of social media, though more indirectly. How do you view what you get out of social media now? Is it enough, or is there something else you wish you were getting?

Oh yeah; that other picture is of… well, you know what it’s a picture of. I ate all of that as well, in one day but not in one sitting. My wife is right; sometimes I just want too much. 🙂
 

Social Media

Google Authorship – Pretty Cool!

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Last week on our Hot Blog Tips newsletter, Brian Hawkins talked a little bit about the new Google Authorship program and how, with a Google Plus account, you can how have your image show up next to your content in Google search, along with some other cool stuff. I wanted to show you what some of it look like and just how cool it really is.

First, check out the image below:

That’s what comes up on Google when someone is lucky enough (lol) to put in a search term that brings up my blog, in this case my business blog. You notice how it not only brought up the post along with my image, but it brought up more links from my site highlighting the same post in different ways. It also brought up some of the other posts that I linked to, but I didn’t want the image to go on and on. Truthfully, this is really cool, and to make sure it wasn’t a fluke because I was signed in on my Firefox browser I pulled up the same search terms on 3 other browsers on my computer and the same thing came up, with my picture, in the same order. Trust me, that’s pretty cool.

There’s the thing though. Because I have to many different blogs I wondered if it would pull up my picture for those blogs as well under my name. Below is one of the topics for this blog:

I posted the same link on Google Plus some days later and this comes up:

I’m not mad at that. But there’s one more thing that I thought was pretty cool. By having that Google Plus account, it also accessed my YouTube channel and pulled this up for one of my more recent videos:

I don’t know about you but I’m uber impressed and think this is the coolest thing. Two of my other blogs have images as well, and only my local blog won’t show the images. Why?

The only way G+ will do this is if you’ve verified the email addresses associated with those blogs. I have all the email addresses on my G+ profile except that one because I didn’t create a separate email address for it, using my personal email address that I subscribe to newsletters and the like instead. I don’t want that one out into the public so it only comes up if I have to write someone from that blog, which to date I never have. But I can live with that.

In our never ending quest to be better known, I have to say this works great for me, and the thing is that if someone just put in my name and a topic I might be associated with, it works out as well, as the example below shows what came up when I typed Mitch Mitchell Leadership, no quotation marks:

It listed a bunch more articles as well because, well, I have written lots of articles on leadership on my business blog.

Anyway, I wanted to share that with you in case you want to think about doing it for yourself. By the way, if you’re wondering why Google looks like this for me, check out an old blog post I wrote about Stylish.