Google+ (Plus) Previews & Chatter: Get Ready!

Google+ Ante Portas

The Techworld is abuzz about Google+, many techreporter and Net Strategist have been invited by Google to field test Google+, called Google Plus. There is a lot of chatter, and yesterday I saw a good use case to great a collection of comments and the essentials on Storify.

If you are in a hurry, start on Google’s own page about Google+ and watch intro-clips about six main features. If you want to see what other people do with Google+, especially the “Hangout” feature, watch the recording of today’s “This Week on Google” TV Show hosted by Leo Laports, Jeff Jarvis and Gina Trapani. 

Haven’t been that excited about a new site and it’s possibilities for a long time. 

Presentations: On Blogging, RSS Feed, Email Marketing, Social Media

Upon several requests to republish our presentations, we share them now here on our company blog. All slideshows cover the topics: Web2.0, Bloggging vs. Website, email marketing, online publishing and the measuring outcome of initiatives and campaigns. 

All presentation are available on Google Documents and should work with all browsers. Please let us know if you have difficulties.

Note: Keep in mind that I used them during live events and they were meant to support the information I provided talking and discussing with the audience. They are not the whole experience.

All material is published under Creative Commons license. Feel free to use them with attribution and link back to Pauli Systems site: www.paulisystems.net

A Successful Entrepreneurs Seminar: Turning Your Passion to Profit 2011

Welcome: Turning Your Passion to Profit 2011 - SBDC FGCUA wonderful inspiring event for any aspiring entrepreneur with great presentations as well as great discussions during breaks. 

The first pictures were online directly uploaded through WordPress Android application from the floor of the Mini-Tradeshow and posted on Twitter. 

More pictures where shot by the designated event photographers, SWFL-Online Video, who also provided video coverage. We are looking forward to this year’s highlights on YouTube! 

The company with the most retweets, apart from Pauli Systems was Dax Enterprises. President Kena Yoke also share information about the event on Facebook and Sue Haberkorn took on LinkedIn and created the Event on Facebook. 

Over the course of the following weeks we will publish session material and more pictures. and a comprehensive look at what all goes into an online event marketing strategy and implementation. For now bookmark the site: “Turning Your Passion to Profit” – 3rd Annual Entrepreneurs Seminar & Mini Tradeshow  and sign-up for updates via e-mail notification so you don’t miss any announcement. 

And here, all in character, the thank you tweet, using Embedly’s API for rich snippets.

http://twitter.com/#!/TurnP2P/status/120155454662918145
http://twitpic.com/6th0rb

Google Analytics – Tool to Track and Analyze the Performance of Your Inbound Marketing Activities

Just published our slide deck from the Entrepreneurs Workshop: Turning Your Passion To Profit 2011 at Florida Gulf Coast University on slideshare.net  

Here is also a list of more resources: 

Google Analytics Blog

This is the offical blog of Google’s Analytics team. Read up about special features, update and take a deep dive into the heart of your Google Analytics data http://analytics.blogspot.com  

Smashing Magazine is the leading online magazine about web development and web design. They published a comprehensive Guide to Google Analytics and Useful Tools
Excellent online news site on all things internet, social networks and tools, with special tracks you can follow to make it easier to stay on top of the news.  http://www.mashable.com

PewInternet  

publishing statistics on Internet behavior. Very interesting to find out what people, your target audience do on the Internet. The site is tracking behaviour for over a decade and makes for great Sunday afternoon read.
http://www.pewinternet.org  

SEOmoz

Learn more about search engine optimization, what it can do and what it can do for your site. We love their graphic on Inbound marketing. The video series: Whiteboard Friday is an excellent weekly 15 minute video in which Randy Fish tackles some overall concepts and tackles one SEO Myth at a time.  
http://www.seomoz.org  

Google Analytics Help Page
Start out with the Glossary page as it lists all common terms and their definitions and usage context for Google Analytics. Quite a few seem to be self-explanatory. Considering the narrow context of website tracking, you can also use it as a reference to double check your assumptions when interpreting the results and numbers.
http://bit.ly/GAsGlossary

WordPress Plugin: Ultimate Google Analytics  
Install the tracking codes after successfully setting up the account is an important hurdle to take. Most dynamic website building tools come with Google Analytics built in. For WordPress there are quite a few plugins available.
And I published a How-To post for NFN4Good.org.
You can follow it in six steps and probably half the minutes.
How to install WPlugin: Ultimate Google Analytics  
http://bit.ly/How2WP-GA  

Mailchimp – a rockstar among the Email marketing Systems and providers, also have a very helpful feature Analytics360. It allows you to bring the stats all into one dashboard: your email marketing campaign, your twitter account and and your WordPress Blog. Then you can analyze the direct correlation of traffic changes with the main Inbound Marketing activities: Blogging, Emailing and Tweeting.  
Learn more here:  http://goo.gl/dIoR0  

Even if you won’t use the Analytics360, Mailchimp integrates very nicely with your Google Analytics account. Here is more information: http://goo.gl/eZoaB

Facebook Open Graph & Facebook Timeline

Ever since #f8 the Facebook Developer conference, Mark Zuckerberg used to announce major changes to the Facebook OpenGraph and the Facebook Timeline. I followed the event and also collected a few stories especially on Facebook Privacy on a new curation tool called Scoop.it. 

Traveling down the Facebook Timeline
A couple of weeks ago, AAUW CA Online Branch Program director, Sandy Kirkpatrick, and we discussed a few scenarios and disected who will see what posting, comment or tag, for the various privacy settings in your account. As a part of the program, I was also asked if I could explain Facebook Timeline and how it will change how our profile appears for our friends. To answer that question, I took a deep dive in my own Facebook Timeline and published my experience on the non-profit technical support site of the Naples Free-Net. You can read all about it here:

Traveling Down The Facebook Timeline

Happy Holidays: Play for Charity For Change

Charity For Change Holiday Game 2011

Since Charity for Change started in Spring 2008, Pauli Systems has been involved on various levels with the organization and the team around its Executive Director, Karen Conley.  
This year, Charity for Change created a fun Holiday Giver Game to be played by community members and it helps introduce the program to a broader audience!
The Second Chance Foundation pledged $30 for each player that answers three MathQuiz questions correctly between December 14 and January 1, 2012.  
 Start Playing the Holiday Giver Game here
No worries the questions are on fifth grade level! It’ll take only about 3 minutes and is great fun.  You’ll also meet Giver and as he always says:

It’s a great day to give! 

SBDC Social Media Bootcamp Open for Registration

Social Media Bootcamp: How to use Social Media to Increase Traffic to your Website?

Presented & Hosted by Small Business Development Center & Relevanza, Inc

Register here
 Saturdays March 3rd, 10th and 17th – 9am-12 (noon)

Florida Gulf Coast University, Lutgert Hall, Room 1203

Social Media Bootcamp

It’s time to go social!  Are you taking advantage of Social Media?  Is your website ready for Social Media? Will it help you reach and grow your audience? The power of Social Media allows users the opportunity to create/communicate with an online community to work for you, to increase traffic to your site. Although each social network has it’s own ways to display information and rules to engage with your audience, once you are past the mechanics and past setting up the space,you will be able to streamline publishing and interact with your followers.

This three-part course will teach you how to set-up your profiles to maximize search engine visibility and connect the profiles to your website. After this course, you will know how to make your website ready for the 21st century and increase search engine ranking. You will also learn how to publish and broadcast to the networks and how to listen to the influencers in your field and grow your network and interaction with the audience.  A large part of the course will be hands-on and discussing case studies for various industries of successful ongoing blend of social networks with lead generation. The networks covered will be: Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr.

When: Fridays –  Jan 13 + 20+ 27, 2012 (Time: 3pm to 6pm)

Where: FGCU Renaissance Academy, Naples

Register here

Slideshows and Recap SBRN Social Media Summer Series

Our Social Media Summer Series at our monthly meetings of our Small Business Resource Network featured fascinating get-togethers and productive, lively, discussions.

The first session’s topic was: “It starts with a Blog Or Get Your Website Social Media Ready“. 

We talked about how a blog – or website update – improves dramatically a static website’s search engine visibility and also serves well as a communication and information hub when venturing into the online communities on public social networks. We talked about the most important features of a blog.

More in-depth look at the most popular blog engines and their differences is available in Birgit Pauli-Haack’s post on 4 Best Blog Engines For Small Business & Start-ups”.

Why People Share? The most overlooked part of Social Media MarketingOne of the fundamental principles of Social Media is information sharing and we looked at the motivations of why people share information with their networks.

At the end of the first evening, we looked at the webstats of a client’s website converted to a blog four months earlier and now publishes four to five times a week. By comparing website traffic prior to the blog, we saw traffic increased 3 1/2 times after the blog and traffic increased 2.25 times on the website’s lead generation page. What we learned is a blog will get you two birds with one stone: It increases tremendously your search engine visiblity and it will provide great, relevant and sharable content for your online business network and will spread ideas & solutions.

The second session was All About Facebook and how to use it for your business.

We walked through the anatomy of a facebook page (as opposed to a facebook profile) and again discussed how to make social media really work with relevant content shared with your inner circle and by collaborating with strategic partners to enlarge the reach by multiplying the posts by, “liking,” commenting and sharing. Again we looked at a few ways to reach beyond your own group of friends by taging partner company pages, working with sponsors of the same event and doing something good for non-profits with whom you might be engaged. 

The discussion after the presentation included suggestions for separating a personal profile from your company’s page, a very important part of Facebook marketing. For small business owners this is an important distinction. On one hand, you communicate with friends and family; but on the other hand, you have friend requests from members in your various business networks who also want to connect with you on a personal level.

It’s not uncommon for business owners to mix business and leisure on Facebook. A company’s brand page will also have “likes” or fans the owner has accumulated through a personal profile on Facebook. You don’t want to bore your friends with business items nor do you want to reveal too much personal sharing to business associates.

The potential conflict needs to be carefully navigated. If some posts or notes are boring to your friends, they might also be boring for your clients and company fans. And even if people are your friends, they still might be interested in your company’s project.

(To be honest, most of my life is related to my work on the Internet and quite a few of my friends are working in the same field so we share some common interests. On the other hand, I am very much involved in community projects as a volunteer and sharing information on the company page wouldn’t be appropriate but I have no scrupels when it comes to shout-outs for my favorite non-profit or cool events around town. Most of my friends seems to have been quite forgiving when I post business techie-stuff on Facebook and I also learned to live with the fact that there might be quite a few hundred people that “hide” my stream from their own newsfeed.)

A lot can be learned about the performance of your social media activities within your audience. Study members of your audience and find out what’s relevant to them. If it’s good enough, they will share it with their own friends. But if it’s not, you are just shouting into the warm summer breeze.

During August’s meeting, people gathered around to learn, “Why You Should Bother with Google+.

We explored why search engine result pages change with different social signals around the Interwebs. We also looked at Google+  Killer Features – Circles, Ripples and my personal favorite Google+ Hangouts. A brief discussion also revealed a very interesting observation: Facebook is for talking to people you know. Google+ is very good to find new people that communicate in a particular space. That is also a phenomenon that Google+ has in common with Twitter, where I discover interesting people all the time.

The last few minutes on the 3rd evening we spent exploring the company pages on LinkedIn. How to create company pages,how to post and how it looks in followers’ news stream. The unique propositon of LinkedIn Company Pages is that you can also list specifically your company’s products and services and your followers, customers and business friends can give recommendations on specific services or products. None of the other social networks allow this kind of product/services-oriented communication.

The three presentations by Birgit Pauli-Haack have been posted on Slideshare.net for download, review and study. 

Session 1: It starts with a Blog Or Get Your Website Social Media Ready!

Session 2: How to Use Facebook for Business?

Session 3: Google+ & LinkeIn – Yet Another Social Network?