There’s so much social media going around that it’s hard to know which trends are worth spending your time on and which ones will fade away before you can say Google Wave. (I just got my good-bye to Google Wave letter this morning). Google+ is taking the world by storm, and this one looks like it will stay.

I love social media, but it’s just so hard to stay current and connected on all platforms. I told myself that I wasn’t going to invest too much time in it until Google+ started supporting business pages. Well they have, so I’ve been having a good time trying to figure it all out. Business pages are a lot like fan pages on facebook, but there are some important differences.

Only one person can be an administrator of a Google+ page. Facebook allows for multiple administrators. That means that unless you’re willing to give out your gmail password to the person that want to administer the page for you, you have to do all the posting to the page yourself. This can be a real bummer for larger companies that have multiple people running their social media campaigns. On the other hand, that means when people like Guy Kawasaki post something on Google+, it’s probably actually him.

There is no way to schedule posts on Google+. Facebook and twitter allow you to use tools like Hootsuite to schedule posts. Not so with Google+. Everything has to be done manually. To be successful with it and engaging, you need to log in to it at least a few times a day. On the other hand, that means when people like Guy Kawasaki posts something on Google+, you know that he’s actually online the same time that you are, and it’s easier to engage him.

There is no way to stylize your page so that it stands out in a crowd. With Twitter you get to play with the background of the page. With facebook, you can have a large logo and use welcome pages to let people know why they should “like” you. At least for now, every page on Google+ looks basically the same. You brand it with a square shaped logo, but that’s it.

There are fewer people on Google+ than on Facebook. That said, Google+ is growing in popularity (not like Google Wave) and has done a lot of things right to make it a very successful social media platform. They have taken what’s best in both Facebook and Twitter and have created a really fun platform that has been catching on like wildfire.

• It’s a live feed (twitter)
• You can add people to your circles (follow people) even if they don’t friend you (twitter)
• You can have posts that are longer then 140 characters (facebook)
• You can share pictures and videos without needing to open a new browser window (facebook)

Circles is another brilliant thing that Google+ has that facebook seems like it’s experimenting with now. By adding people to circles, you can share content that is relevant to them and not to others. In my personal Google+ account, I have circles for geeks and for anipals. I share my geekier posting with the geeks and the cute cat videos and animal welfare articles with my anipals. It’s great because I don’t feel like I’m spamming the wrong group with information that they could care less about.

I have a page for The Pet Wiki. On that, I share everything publicly. I figure that if you decide to add The Pet Wiki to your circles, you must be expecting to get pet stuff, otherwise you wouldn’t have added it to your circles in the first place. Another good reason to share things publicly is that the public posts get indexed by Google. Who couldn’t use some SEO help? I’ve seen some of my Google+ posts show up in search results. Not the pages that the posts point to, but the Google+ pages. That’s reason enough to be on Google+.

It seems like there’s a bit of mayhem going on with Google+ pages. As far as strategy goes for getting people to find your page, there’s a few ways to do it. Pages can’t put people into their circles, but they can put other pages into them. Find pages that fit your niche and add them. Share their stuff. Comment. Interact. People who have those pages in their circles will see you too. Write good comments, and you may get noticed by others and those others will add you to their circles as well.

Make sure to add people following you into your circles. If you don’t they won’t show up in your stream and you have no way to interact with them. No one wants to be in a one sided conversation. That’s not what social media is about.

Make sure to let other people know about your Google+ page. If you have a following on twitter and/or facebook, let them know that you now have a Google+ page too. Some may not have made the move to Google+, but others may have. It’s a good idea to share the information.

Another good way is to display a link to your Google+ page on your website. The +1 has been around for a while and a lot of people have started adding that to their sites. Now is the time to put a link to your Google+ page as well. I had fun adding it to the skin of The Pet Wiki. I’m very pleased with how it came out.

I would say that Google is Google and you know that it’s going to be big, but on the day that they announced the death of Google Wave, that just seems silly. This is different. With Google+ they didn’t try to create something new. The took existing platforms, copied them and made them better. I have totally joined the Google+ bandwagon. I hope to see you there!

I’m involved in running a bunch of Facebook fan pages. Facebook is great, but it has some annoying little idiosyncrasies that take a bit to get used to. One thing I’ve always found annoying is the way that Facebook automatically makes pages for your place of work. It doesn’t matter that your company has a great fan page. There’s no easy way to associate that page with your profile.

There may not be an easy way to do it, there is a complicated one. In one of Social Media Examiner‘s videos, they tell you how to do it. It may be complicated, but it works (even if it only works in firefox). You can only do this if you are the administrator of the page. Here’s how it goes:

1. Install the web developer add-on for Firefox.
2. On Facebook, go to your fan page and click the [Edit Page] button on the top right (this is why you need to be an admin).
3. Your url will now include the id of your page. Copy the number after the “id=”.



4. Go to your profile and click the [Edit Profile] button.
   
5. Click on [Education and Work] in the left hand column of the page.
6. Type in the name of the company in the [Employer] box.
7. If your page employer doesn’t show up, click the [Add] link.
8. On the firefox toolbar, click the Forms menu and click [Display Form Details]. This will make the page look really nasty, but you only need to see it like that for a short while.
9. Paste the id number that you copied in step 4 into the box next to “<input name=”employer_id”>”
10. Turn off the display by clicking the Forms menu and selecting [Display Form Details] again.
11. Fill in the rest of the info in the form and click [Save changes].

That’s it. Easy, right?

If you work in a big enough company, like Coca-Cola, the fan page may show up without you needing to install anything on Firefox. You can just edit your profile when you type in the company (like in step 6) and it will automatically show up.  That didn’t work for me.

I can’t say that this is the prettiest way to update your information, but it works, so don’t knock it. Wouldn’t it be great if Facebook could figure it out for themselves?  I would have thought that Facebook would like to link to pages that have more information than those empty business pages that no one finds useful. Facebook seems to be constantly changing. I’m sure that they’ll get it together one of these days. Facebook certainly keeps us on our toes.

Leave me alone - I'm updating my status

I’ve spoken a lot more about twitter than facebook, because that’s where my pawpawty anipals are. When I was starting out in Social Media, that’s where I put most of my effort. I have a huge disadvantage with twitter because most of the people that I talk to that follow The Pet Wiki are many time zones away. It’s hard to have a conversation with someone that answers a question that you’ve asked five hours earlier. Because twitter is so ADHD, you’re already on a new subject by the time those answers come around. Twitter works best for things that have fast turnaround and engagement.

Facebook, on the other hand, is more my speed. I’m able to have conversations on things that are posted without feeling the need to be connected 24-7. It’s still very important to respond to the people you are connecting with, but since everything is topic based, it’s easier to talk. What’s better is that not only can I talk with the fans of the page, fans that might not know each other can talk to each other. It works out really well. I’ve met some really cool people not only on my fan page, but also on other pages of people that I follow.

Here are a few of the tricks of the trade that I use to make the facebook page successful:

1. Post regularly, but not too often. With twitter, there is so much noise already, you want to make sure that you have a presence on the feed. A nice thing about facebook is that there are two views. Most people see the feed as what is most popular, not just the most recent items posted. So if enough people like or comment on your post, it has a better chance of being seen by others. Even though you don’t need to be as connected with facebook as with twitter, you should still try to post a few times a day. Spread them out to have a better chance of making an impression.
2. Don’t repost the same way that you would retweet. I know that Guy Kawasaki talks about retweeting each interesting article four times a day. That might be good for twitter because with all the noise it can be hard for users to see the articles that you tweet. With facebook however comments rule. If you have a comment on a post, it’s a good idea to build on that post and not repost it. If you have no response to an article that you feel is deserving, you can repost, but it is a good idea to remove the original post so that it doesn’t clutter your wall feed. People will be less likely to like your page if all it does is say the same thing over and over.
3. Tag people and pages. I love tagging people and pages on facebook. It’s a great way to meet new people and let your facebook community know about them as well. To tag, type @ and then start typing the name of the page or person you want to tag. A drop down will appear and you can select the person that you want. This will create a like to the person or page and will show your post in their news feed. By creating the link, you are encouraging people to like these pages and you get people that go to these pages to know about you. It’s a great win-win. Note: To tag a person or page, you need to be friends or like the page with your personal account.
4. Create a welcome page. If you want to give a direct message of who you are and why people should become your fan, there’s no better way to do it than tell people front and center. I’ve used a couple of things for creating facebook welcome pages. The first is pagemodo. They have a pay version and a free one. I played around with the free one. What it does is it gives you a template to fill in for creating the page. The end product is an image. It looks really pretty, but you can’t add links to anything. If you want to link to special areas of your site or let people click through to a promotion, it just doesn’t work. Instead, I opted for FBML code that I purchased through HyperArts. I’m very happy with the results. For this, all you need to know is a bit of basic html, and maybe not even that. I like to play with things, so I went ahead and made some modifications to what I was given. Just having the basic stuff there was helpful enough to get me off the ground. This one does not have a free version, but it is a one time fee that I really think is worth it, unless you feel comfortable with taking on FBML by yourself.
5. Ads are easy and cheap. They are a great way to promote fan pages. The cool thing about facebook ads is that they are so targeted. I once heard about a guy that as a joke targeted his ad to be delivered to one friend. Since facebook stores all this information that people share about themselves in their databases, it’s easy for them to allow you to target to a very focused group of people. I target my ads to people who like all animals, but if I wanted to I could target them to women in the UK that have beagles, like the Rolling Stones and work at The Gap. You get the idea. You also get to choose how you want to pay for the ads – impression based or cost per click. I personally use the cost per click, but both work well and are really inexpensive.

There’s a lot more to write about facebook – like cool applications that you can add to your pages – but I think that I’ve covered enough for now. I’ll get to that stuff in a future post.

Hope you found this helpful. Do you have any suggestions on how to use fan pages? I’d love to hear them.

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/deerwooduk/3743375034/

Last week I had the pleasure of going to BarkWorld Expo in Atlanta, Georgia. It was such a fun experience and I met so many great people. In case you haven’t guessed it from my blog already, I love animals and social media. While there, I was given a chance to talk about both. How cool is that?

Most of my anipal friends spend most of their time on Twitter. Twitter is great. It’s the ADHD of social media. It can go fast and furious. I met a lot of these pals at pawpawties thrown by mai pal frugaldougal.

It was a lot of fun to be able to introduce the folks to a whole other side of social media – Facebook fan pages. Some people have set up profiles for their pets. While this is perfectly acceptable on platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn, this in a no-no on Facebook. If they find out that your pup has a profile, they can remove the account. That’s bad news. One thing that you can do to get around it is to set up a fan page for your furry companion instead of a standard profile. That is totally kosher.

Here are some of the things that I talked about for setting up a fan page:

• You need to have a Facebook account. If you’re not a Facebook user, you need to create an account an account for yourself. You can either do it now or you’ll be given an opportunity while you create the fan page.
• You won’t be able to remove administrator rights from the account that starts the fan page. I assume this was done so that there would never be any orphaned fan pages. The person that sets up the page should be someone who will be with the company (or pet) for the long haul. When I helped my daughter’s friend Tzipporah set up her page for her designs, I made sure that she created it. After that she was able to add me as an administrator. I’ve heard of people contacting Facebook directly to have an admin removed, but who wants to go through that hassle?
• Go to Facebook’s homepage, and click on the “Create a Page” link under the login area
  
  If you are logged into Facebook already, you can go to any fan page and click the “Create a Page” link at the bottom of the left column.
• Now you need to make some decisions. The majority of the people that I spoke to wanted to create fan pages for their pets, so I demonstrated by choosing “Public Figure”. Be careful when you set this. Once it’s set it can’t be changed.
  Set the page name and click the “official representative” box. Then click “Create Official Page.”
• If you’re not already logged in or don’t have an account, do that now.
• This will bring you to your page and the “Getting Started” tab. You can always go back and modify this information, so you can be a little more relaxed about what you choose to share. Upload a picture and fill in the basic information. You can even set your facebook updates to update your twitter status if you like.
  
• One thing that the getting started tab doesn’t tell you to do is to fill in the information in the little box under the image.
  This is very important to do. Most users will see this information. It shows up on nearly all tabs – excluding discussion and pictures. Make sure to represent who you are. If you have a website to link to, make sure to put ‘http://” before the url. If you only put www.yoursite.com, the link will not be clickable.
• Next thing to do is edit the properties of the page. Click the “Edit Page” link right under your picture. If you want to restrict your page to certain country, or gender, you can do it in the “Settings” area. Go to the “Wall Settings” and look at the options for “Default View of Wall”. You’re probably going to want to change this to be “All Posts”. By default, the wall is set up to show just what the admins put up, and people need to click through to “Others” to see what fans put there. It’s considered good etiquette to set it to “All Posts.” Unless you’re someone huge, like Coca Cola, and are afraid that it will be hard for people to distinguish the difference between what you post and what your fans post, change it.
  The “Default Landing Tab for Everyone Else” is what tab you want new users to see when they come to your page. After people Like your page, they will get the wall tab. If you set a Welcome tab or some other type of information, you’re probably going to want to change that setting.

That’s it. Your page is set and ready to go. You should let people know about it. To do that, you can create ads (I’ll cover that in another post) and share it with all your friends. An easy way to share is click the “Suggest to Friends” under the page picture.

If you have any questions about anything that I’ve covered here, let me know. I’m only a bark away. Have fun with your page!

I love to see things go viral. I also love when those viral things have to do with pet adoption. A couple of weeks ago a new video came out on YouTube from the Nevada Humane Society. I was not the first to see it. I don’t usually make my way to YouTube unless I’m looking for something specific. Things like ways to train your dog or a new cat breed. When I saw the video on facebook I knew that it was going to take off. I was the 437th person to view it. Since then it’s had over 58,000 views. Sweet!

What I really like about the video is that it’s fun. Sure, it’s a spoof on the wedding video dance. That just makes it familiar. It shows that shelters are a fun place to be. They’re not the sad places that have animals stuck behind cages, waiting to die. Adopting is a fun experience that people look forward to.

The honest truth is that I’ve been to very few shelters in my life. Most of the cats and dogs that I’ve had the pleasure to live with are animals that we’ve found. It’s not that shelters are a bad place, it’s just that I’ve always found them sad. I always felt that I would feel so sorry for the animals that going there would just break my heart.

One of the most important aspects of this video is how it takes the stigma off shelters and shelter pets. It’s true that these animals may not start out lucky, but there’s nothing wrong with them. They just need love and compassion.

I feel that in looking for a way to raise money, a lot of shelters have played the pity card. It might work to raise money, but there are potential risks with making these pets seem undesirable.

And that’s one of the reasons that I really, really love this video. If I could, I would go to Nevada and check it out. They make adoption fun. How much more desirable can you make a dog than precede his adoption with all that pomp and circumstance?

This week we have a guest blogger: Hadassah Levy. Hadassah has done great work growing The Pet Wiki and is the Social Media expert for Jewish Ideas Daily.

Pet Lover

The statement that had the most effect on me at the 140 conference in Tel Aviv was that the key to online communication is taking an offline interest and moving it online. In other words, there are very few online activities per se. Almost everything we talk about online is something we are involved in offline.

This is clearly true of the pet community. Pets are very much an offline activity – we feed them, play with them and groom them in real life. For some of us, that’s enough. But for others it is important to connect with other pet owners online to share information, humor, advice and support.

For website managers whose goals include building an online community around a specific topic, the challenge is to find people whose interests include theirs and give them a reason to join their community. To return to the pet example, a person who owns 3 cats is a potential community member, but he may prefer to spend his time on social media discussing politics, entertainment and his children’s accomplishments. But if this person sees value in a twitter account or Facebook page which talks about pets, he will join. And when he sees conversations that interest and stimulate him, he will express his opinion. When asked for his advice or to share something else, he will engage in that way.

When you’re thinking about social media, the key is to start by figuring out what resonates with your community. Think about what gets you excited and what kind of issues you like to hear about. What kinds of activities do you get involved in offline? What are your concerns and what makes you smile? Listen to what the members of your community are talking about online and experiment with different types of materials. The emphasis should be on “community,” not on “online.”

Jeff Pulver in Tel Aviv

I have to say that I really love hearing Jeff Pulver speak. The first time that I saw him in person was at the Bird Brain Un-Conference. He is genuine and sincere in what he does. He believes in people, encourages them, and enjoys their success. The only problems with conferences like Bird Brain and 140Conf is that you only get to hear him for about 10 minutes. That’s it and then it’s time for the next person to go. Fortunately he can do a lot with 10 minutes.

Jeff opened up the conference by talking about how, with the help of twitter and social media, we are building our time capsules. Everything we say and do on the internet is stored. In the future, we’ll be able to look back on the stories that we’ve created through our words and pictures. We are documenting our own lives as they occur. We are leaving digital breadcrumbs to be shared. Human nature gives us the desire to be remembered. We all want to make a difference and stand out in the world. With networks like twitter, we are able to share the everyday story of ourselves. It’s pretty powerful stuff.

Being that the conference was in Tel Aviv, part of the panel (a whole 20 minutes!) was scheduled to talk about where Israel stands in the world, technologically and in the use of the real time web. I think that everyone would agree that Israel is a front runner in innovation and that Israel has had a very high impact on the high tech world. According to some of the pannel, Israel is lagging behind in its use of the real time web. I can understand where they are coming from – I happen to be the foursquare mayor of 3 different locations. It’s not that I’ve checked in all that often, it’s just that no one else has. On the other hand, Israel is a very small country, and if you consider the size of the US and how many small towns there are, I think that Israel is doing OK. It’s true that there is a lot of room to grow, but we can do it.

One thing that I did not agree with the panel on is that they didn’t think that a revolution like Facebook could come out of Israel. If there is anything that living on the web has taught me, it’s that there are no boundaries. To talk to people, all you need is an internet connection. Not only do I believe that incredible innovation can come out of Israel, I believe that it can come out of any country. The key is not to try to create something similar to twitter, but to create the next game changer, like twitter did. Don’t be copycats, be innovators.

For a one day conference, Jeff really pulled together people from all walks of Social Media life. Food, comedy, fashion, music, and art. Things that wouldn’t really seem to go over well in 140 characters or less. I never really thought about how other mediums need to express themselves with pure text. The key is that all these domains can influence people on an emotional level. Once we like the music or art or food, we want to share information and learn from others what they have to say. You probably won’t start listening to a singer’s music because you like his tweets, but you will be more interested in knowing that singer as a person if his music speaks to you.

We make ourselves cool by association. There are a lot of products out there that get talked about on the internet. Every time that we like a page on facebook or talk about it on twitter we are building our personal brand by associating with other brands.

Twitter can be used to save lives. A great example was how twitter was used in the recent earthquake in Haiti. It was amazing to hear spokespeople from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) talk about the rescue mission that they conducted there. After the earthquake there was no goverenment to help with evacuation efforts. By listening to information that was being broadcast about where people were trapped, the IDF was able to find and rescue them.

In the world of the real time web, even the way that we are telling stories is changing. Twitter is a great way to create personas that can act out different plots. People can form emotional attachments to the characters as if they are real people, and then they can read the live drama as it occurs in the twitter feed. It’s really cool. I’ve heard about a project that happened before Passover, where the different bible characters tweeted out the Exodus. It can make the story come alive.

A teenager was also one of the speakers. Michael Matias spoke about what it’s like to grow up in the real time web. We’ve only experienced it as adults, but to grow up in a constant information environment is a very different thing all together. He is constantly online. Even when he watches television, he is connected to his computer. When asked if he had to choose between the TV or the computer, which would it be, he answered that he couldn’t make that choice. It would be like choosing between his mother and father. I find that a bit scary. On the other hand, he was able to attend classes in Israel while he was in New York with the help of a live feed from his classroom.

The last session was about ways to use Social Media for social good. Promoting causes, like clean water in third world countries with Twestivals and raising awareness of Gilad Shalit by trending topics were talked about. You can even donate your tweets through JustCoz.org to raise awareness for the cause of your choice. It’s really amazing. I have talked about the amazing things that Romeo the Cat and Frugal Dougal have done to help support animal shelters for a while now. Their pawpawty’s raise real money to do good.

It’s truly amazing how much reach we each have from our computers. What are you putting in your own personal time capsule?

Taking time from a business trip to root for the Mets

Everyone talks about how to do Social Media. About how important it is to do Social Media. About how you have to be part of the conversation and how you have to be involved with your users. The one big thing that they’re not saying about Social Media is about how much fun it can be.

I work in a different niche than any of the friends that I see on a regular basis. I love animals. I always have. None of my friends have any pets. I find that such a pity. They really don’t know what they are missing. There is so much that having pets adds to life. But I digress, that’s not what this blog post is about.

Social Media has been a wonderful way for me to connect with like minded people that share my passions. I’m passionate about animals and their welfare. When I created The Pet Wiki, I was creating a place for all animal lovers to come and share their knowledge with the community.

When I get up in the morning, one of the first things that I do (sometimes before I get out of bed) is to check my user page, twitter feed and facebook fan page. I want to know what’s going on and be part of the conversation.

I live in Israel, so most of the friends that I’ve made over the past year are people in different time zones. I have been able to connect with wonderful people from all around the globe. I have friends in every continent. Our love of pets has been a unifying factor. Social Media has given us a platform to bring us all a little closer.

I’ve been pretty successful with growing the fan base of The Pet Wiki. If I had time to work on it full time, I think that I could be more successful. There are just so many hours in a day. Luckily, when you work on Social Media, if you’re in your niche, you really don’t feel like you’re working at all.

The biggest trick with Social Media is getting people who love being social involved. That might not necessarily be your marketing team. I don’t come from a marketing background. I’ve worked in Content most of my professional career. I’m good at it because I love it and I love spreading my message. I love engaging people.

This isn’t work at all. I kind of feel guilty about being on twitter and facebook so much. Although it’s work, it’s not work. It’s truly a pleasure to do what I do.

T-shirts

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. The more people that I deal with, the more that I realize that people are good.

I’ve been running a T-shirt giveaway for The Pet Wiki for the last couple of weeks. The only thing that I ask of people is that they post a picture of themselves wearing the shirt, with their pet, to facebook. I figure it’s a win-win situation. Fans of The Pet Wiki get shirts, and I get a little (hopefully viral) publicity.

The thing that gets me about all this is how amazing people are. Instead of people asking for Ts and not committing to send a picture, people have gone out of their way to tell me about their pets and how they can’t wait for their fur babies to be in the spotlight. I even have someone who is going to make sure to get pictures of landmarks in Australia into her pictures. Wow, The Pet Wiki really gets around . I am so pysched!

Most of the people that are getting shirts are people with whom I’ve had a relationship on Twitter. I know them. Although we’ve never met in person, we’ve had real conversations. I’ve been able to make great friends all over the world. It’s fun to think that my Ts will be worn in places like London, Sydney and even Croatia (and all over the US and Canada).

Talking about how good people are, another thing that really suprises me is foursquare. Foursquare is a service that allows you to let your friends know where you are. When I originally heard about foursquare, my initial reaction was that if I broadcast where I am all the time, people would be able to know where I am and break into my house. What does that say about me? Not that I’d break into anyone’s house, but it was something that did concern me. I’m cool with it now. Foursquare gives me the opportunity to meet great people, where ever I am.

The same is true of twitter. Have a question? Need an answer? Just ask and there is sure to be someone out there on the web who can help. It’s not just that they can help, they want to help. In the words of Guy Kawasaki “it’s a beautiful thing.”

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure that there will be people that will take advantage of others, but the positive, by far, outweighs the negative.

The first week of the Social Media Success Summit was amazing. They kept it going with more incredible presentations the second week:

• 18 Tips for getting the Most Out of LinkedIn with Lewis Howes
• How Big Businesses are Leveraging the Power of Social Media with Whole Foods’ Marla Erwin, Best Buy’s John Bernier, and Home Depot’s Sarah Molinari
• YouTube Marketing Strategies with Greg Jarboe
• How to Bring Raving Customers Repeatedly to Your Local Business with  Foursquare’s Tristan Walker and Groupon’s Andrew Mason
• 5 Social Media Case Studies Worth Close Examination with Ann Handley
• Creating Buzz with Social Media Contests with Michael Stelzner