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Saturday, June 8, 2013

4 Creative Idea for On Air Hangouts

Posted by Unknown at 10:00 AM

4 Ideas for Hosting Google+ Hangouts 'On Air'

Image credit: Google+

Whether you're convinced that Google+ is a virtual ghost town or not, it can be difficult to refute the social network's stable of unique tools and features for business users. One of the most valuable is Google Hangouts, the tool that allows you to host video chats online.

With Google+ Hangouts, up to nine people can chat face-to-face for free on the network. Participants can watch a YouTube video together, doodle and collaborate using Google Docs.

Business owners can take the chat tool a step further with Google Hangouts on Air, which allows you to host video discussions and broadcast them live to the public. All a viewer needs to do is have a Google+ account and connect with a business of interest by adding it to his or her Circles. The video is broadcasted on the admin of that Page's personal YouTube channel and on the business's Google+ page.

Google+ Hangouts on Air can be helpful for internal and public use, but broadcasting them allows for deeper, face-to-face interaction with your customers that you might not be able to achieve with other channels online.

Here are some ideas for effective Google+ Hangouts on Air:

Related: Surprising Ways to Use Google+ for Business

1. Offer free product demos and webinars to your customers.
Providing value to your customers for free can be a rewarding way to encourage them to pay for your services in the future. Whether you're giving a sneak peek into the cooking classes you offer or teaching your audience about the newest changes to Facebook's algorithm, using this feature can be ideal for turning viewers into customers.

2. Host customer service sessions.
Set times with your audience where you're open to question and answers sessions about your products or services. Hangouts allow viewers to take their turn and easily ask questions as they have them.

Try hosting one of these sessions to see if your audience is interested. If they are, be sure to remain consistent about when you hold the sessions and for how long.

3. Interview experts and leaders.
Grow your audience on Google+ and the variety of the information your company provides by inviting industry experts and leaders to do a Hangout on Air. Interview them from your company's perspective and allow for questions from viewers. It's important to leverage the expert's audience to increase viewers of the Hangout and the circlers to your Google+ Page.

Related: 4 Tools for High-Def Video Conferencing

4. Hold regular giveaways and contests.
Reward your audience by hosting Hangouts with the sole purpose of stirring face-to-face interactions through giveaways and contests. A live giveaway can encourage increased visits to your Google+ Page and increased viewership to your other Hangouts on Air.

Provide prizes that are valuable to your audience not just in price but relevant to their interests and the focus of your business. The cost of the items given away as prizes can be worth the circlers, viewers and increased brand awareness your business receives.

Friday, June 7, 2013

The Internet is Offically Good for the Planet

Posted by Unknown at 4:00 PM

Is the net effect of the internet on the Earth’s environment positive or negative?

That’s the million dollar question that a group of about 100 people, including Vice President Al Gore and Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, tackled at a Google event this week. It’s also the question that I’ve spent about six years thinking about as I’ve written about the evolution of cleantech innovation and how digital technologies can drive efficiency.

The rub of the internet is that it is a collection of data centers filled with computing gear, networks that weave across continents, and a growing amount of battery-powered devices; all of these things need energy to operate. The disturbing part is that the energy consumption of the internet will only grow as the population hits 9 billion in 2050, and all of these people get connected to the internet.

But on the flip side of that energy suck is the idea that the internet can make processes and systems significantly more energy efficient, from transportation to shopping to the electricity network itself. Sustainability wonks call that dematerialization, or replacing atoms with bits. A study called Climate 2020 found that information and communications technology could reduce greenhouse gas emissions from other sectors of the economy, below business-as-usual growth, by 15 percent.

Other than that seminal report, there’s been a trickle of research that has reached conclusions along the lines of the notion that buying digital music online is a lot more energy efficient than driving to the store and buying a CD. Data center energy guru Jonathan Koomey, who’s a research fellow at the Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance and Stanford University, has led a bunch of this research, particularly around how the trend toward cloud computing has increased the energy efficiency of the internet. The web sharing economy is another much talked about trend that is indirectly making the use of goods (like cars and apartments) more efficient.

But all of this research is so new, and these issues are so complex, that answering that question — is the internet green or not? — is a very difficult one. After the day long Google event called How green is the internet? I have a lot more questions than answers.

More good than bad

Throughout the day of Google’s event it became clear that there are significant gaps in knowledge and in research. One of the problems for researchers has been getting access to really detailed industry data. The leaders of the internet industry have only just started to think about these issues, and are slowly warming up to the idea of giving their energy data to third party researchers. Google only revealed its total electricity use publicly a year and a half ago.

But if you ask that direct question — does the internet have a more positive or negative effect on the environment — there’s some researchers who are already leaning toward the positive camp. Koomey said at the Google event that he thought the preoccupation with the electricity use of the internet was misplaced. The overall system effects are more important than the direct electricity use, said Koomey, noting “Moving bits not atoms can have a major effect on efficiency.”

A research fellow from the Center for Industrial Ecology at the University of Coimbra in Portugal, Vlad Coroama, echoed those thoughts at the Google event: “Sending bits is usually much more efficient than sending atoms.” Carnegie Mellon Professor Scott Matthews, who’s done research showing how e-commerce is more energy efficient than shopping at physical retail outlets, wondered if the introduction of digital goods and e-commerce could have such a large impact that it could reduce carbon emissions and energy use compared to the current physical processes by a factor of ten.

But the complexity of the internet as a system, and how it effects people’s behavior, makes calculating numbers around this very difficult. For example, the process of driving to the store to buy a physical book is clearly more energy intensive than hitting a button to buy a Kindle single on your Kindle. But then you also have to take into account more complex questions like the embodied energy of making the Kindle, and the idea that when consumption is so easy and efficient, you might buy and download exponentially more e-books.

Throughout the day at Google, many noted, like Google’s Urs Hoelzle, senior vice president of technical infrastructure, that problems and opportunities need to be looked at from an entire systems perspective. Looking at just one aspect of the equation doesn’t give the entire picture. A couple people at the event also noted to me that one of the universities or research centers should be acting as more of a research hub for this type of data.

Even some of the data that is out there is difficult to prove. Professor Coroama’s number — that it takes an average of 0.2 kWh/GB to send data across the internet — was head-scratching to some, and several people noted to me that the number seemed high.

Then there’s the soft effects of the internet on the planet that don’t have to do with energy consumption at all. The high level visionary speakers — both Gore and Schmidt — focused more on the internet’s ability to open up access to information and organize people, which could be used for environmental, and climate-fighting, causes. Gore said that the digital revolution and the explosion of data are some of the most powerful tools that can be used to help solve the climate crisis. It’s hard to quantify such soft effects, but they could still be very powerful.

Keep it that way

The main issue now will be as internet access grows, mobile phones connected to the web proliferate and internet companies build ever more data centers, how does the industry maintain sustainable growth so that the equation doesn’t flip, and so that the internet doesn’t start to have a negative effect on the environment? There’s going to be 9 billion people on the planet by 2050 that could have a handful of connected devices each, and some of them will be spending their lives immersed in digital data 24/7.

That’s exactly why I thought Google’s Summit was so important: As a way to shine a spotlight on the issue, address its complexity, and see how the problem can be solved as the internet grows. Essentially designing the growth of the internet with sustainability in mind. Google can be one of the leaders of this discussion, as can other internet companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook in addition to hardware companies like Cisco, IBM, and Intel.

Going forward, I’d like to see a hub grow at a university or research center that can act as a collection point to draw together this type of research, and also to help validate it. I’d also like to see more mainstream attention on this topic of the intersection of the Internet and the environment. At the Google event, it was invite-only and had about 100 people that had been thinking about these topics for years. This topic is important enough that is needs more mainstream attention and discussion.

Monday, May 6, 2013

25 Amazing Google Tools

Posted by Unknown at 1:01 PM

Whether you love Google or love to hate Google, you have to admit one thing. Google offers a lot of free tools to use with the convenience of being able to access them with one login.

Marketers in particular should take advantage of these tools to get more out of their search engine and social media marketing experience. The following are some of the top Google tools marketers should embrace from A to (almost) Z!

1. Google AdSense

Ever created a niche website for linking purposes, affiliate marketing, content development, or another reason that never panned out? If the website gets even a moderate amount of traffic, and you have no other use for it for the time being, why not earn a little income off of it using Google AdSense? By simply placing some ad code in the header, content, and sidebar of the website, you can earn some passive income. The amount you earn will depend on the topic of the website and the amount of visitors it receives.

2. Google AdWords

If you’re not getting good enough traction with organic search traffic, then you might want to consider a paid search campaign using Google AdWords. By bidding for the right keywords, you can gain a considerable amount of qualified traffic where the conversions will meet or exceed the value you pay for your ads. Be sure to use advanced targeting options for location, mobile or desktop browsers, and other criteria to get the target audience you want.

3. Google AdWords Keyword Tool

Need keyword ideas for your search engine marketing campaign or paid search advertising? Try the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. When you enter a term that offers a wide range of ideas, like SEO, you will get groupings of keyword ideas that you can dig deeper into. While the total of the global searches is not always spot on, it can give you an idea of whether one keyword is more or less popular than another. You can also see an approximate cost per click (CPC) amount, if you were trying to target the keyword using Google AdWords.

4. Google Alerts

Want to keep on top of the latest news, mentions of your brand, or other items in Google search? Then set up your Google Alerts. When you enter a search query, you will get a sample of the results you would receive and the option to have them delivered regularly to your email inbox or RSS reader. You can use this to keep up with your competition as well to see where they are getting mentionedor are building profiles.

5. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is probably one of the most powerful Google tools that you can use a as a marketer. You can learn so much about your website’s visitors including, but not limited to, the following:

Demographics – Learn more about your audience, including their location and language.
Social Engagement – See what social networks visitors come from and how they interact with your website’s social plugins (custom coding must be implemented).
Technology Used – Find out what browsers, operating systems, and networks your visitors are using to view your website.
Mobile Information – Curious if you need a mobile website? Find out how many of your visitors are using mobile technology.
Traffic Sources – Analyze what websites, keywords, search engines, and other referrers send traffic to your website.
Top Content – Get a handle on how effective your content is by seeing your top entry and exit pages.
What Leads to Conversions – Set up goals in Google Analytics to find out which visitors complete conversions such as purchasing a product or signing up for a mailing list.

So really, there is no excuse for not using this powerful and, best of all, free tool on your website.

6. Google Blogger

If you want to start a blog, but you’re not ready to commit to a self-hosted blogging platform such as WordPress, then you might want to consider Blogger. If it’s been awhile since you last took a look at it, you might be interested in some of the latest improvements noted in the above video. There have been rumors in the past that getting links on Google-owned properties can help with the indexing of your website, so don’t overlook the power of Blogger!

7. Google Blog Search

You may be wondering exactly what is so special about Google Blog Search that merits a mention as a powerful Google tool. It’s not necessarily the search itself, but the fact that you can turn the search results into an RSS feed. Why is this so great? If you take the following URL:

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=utf-8&q=link:http://domain.com/&tbm=blg&tbs=sbd:1&output=rss

Then replace domain.com with your website, you can get an RSS feed of the latest links to your website on a blog.

You can use this to keep up with mentions of your website on blogs, or you can use this to keep up with your competitors. For example, if you are looking forguest posting opportunities, seeing what your competitors can get might lead you to some good places to submit to yourself.

8. Google Books

If you love reading, then Google Books can be a good place to go to find books online in all genres, some of which you can read for free. But from a marketing perspective, if you have a book, then you will want to get it listed on Google Books so that you can sell it to an even larger audience, especially now that Google is competing with iTunes and other online media retailers with their newGoogle Play store for music, books, movies, and Android apps.

9. Google Calendar

Want to keep up with important events in your daily schedule? Then Google Calendar is the answer. You can share your calendar with other users or even to the public and embed it onto your website. You can even set reminder alerts to be sent as a popup when you’re logged in to your Google account or via email. Use it to keep track of guest posting opportunities, Twitter chats, advertising expiration dates, editorial calendars, and much, much more.

10. Google Chrome

If you’re not using Google Chrome, then you’re missing out. This browser really is fast and has a ton of extensions, apps, and themes that you can install to increase your marketing productivity including some favorites such as:

Google +1 Button – +1 and share a web page to your Google+ profile anywhere using this extension.
Google+ Notifications – See your Google+ notifications on your browser (when logged in to your Google account).
Klout – Addicted to knowing Klout scores? Use this to see Klout scores next to users while using Twitter.com.
SEO Site Tools – Learn a lot of valuable on-site search engine optimization information about any website you are browsing (including Google PageRank) using this extension.
Simple Social Metrics – Install this extension to quickly see the number of tweets, likes, and +1s for any page you are browsing.

11. Google Docs

Want to share documents, spreadsheets, presentations, drawings, and tables with other users to view online or download? Then Google Docs is for you. You can collaborate with multiple users or just give access to a read-only version of documents like the publicly accessible Twitter Chat Schedule spreadsheet. You can even create forms and send them via a link or directly in an email to collect survey answers, crowdsource post information, and other data.

12. Google DoubleClick Ad Planner

Need some quick traffic or demographics information for a website? Get it usingGoogle DoubleClick Ad Planner. The larger the website, the more information you will be able to find about it including the average visitor’s age, gender, education, household income, other sites visited, interests, and keywords searched for.

13. Google Drive

Want to share files online? Then Google Drive might be worth a try. You can currently store 5GB in Google Drive, 1GB in Picasa, and 10GB in Gmail for free. Pricing begins at $2.49 per month for 25GB and goes all the way up to $799 per month for 16TB. Welcome to the Google cloud!

14. Google Gadgets

Want to extend the functionality of your website, browser, or Google Account? Check out the line of freebie Google Gadgets available at your disposal. Gadgets are organized in categories including news, tools, communication, games, finance, sports, lifestyle, technology, and politics.

15. Google Insights

Google Insights allows you to search for keywords to see their trends over time. This way, you can see whether a keyword is gaining in popularity, see worldwide search trends over the course of a year to find popular months or seasons for a search, see search volume by region, and find a list of top ten related searches and rising searches.

16. Google Mail (Gmail)

Need email with a smart filtering system? Gmail might be the answer. One of the best features in Gmail is the ability to filter messages into multiple labels and have them skip the inbox or simply label them for easy archiving. Using your Gmail filters wisely can help you keep your inbox clean and organized. Plus, the search function on Gmail is not too shabby either.

17. Google Places

Want your local business to show up before organic search results? For some keywords, it can thanks to Google Places. Be sure that you claim or add your listing on Google Places, complete your profile, add photos & videos, and encourage reviews so that your business will make it to the first page of search results.

18. Google+

Google+ is Google’s latest and, to date, most successful foray into the social networking world. They have not only created a thriving social network, but they have incorporated it into almost every aspect of the Google experience, including Google search results themselves. Thanks to personalized search results, you can actually rank higher than normal in search results for those you are connected with on the network. Be sure to check out this quick guide to learn why you should be on Google+!

19. Google +1 Button

With +1 counts showing up in search results, you might want to go ahead and install the Google +1 Button on your website and content. This will make it easier to share on Google+ as well as add to its social engagement numbers. In addition, when someone +1s your website, their connections might see it placed higher in search results as well.

20. Google Reader

Google Reader allows you to view and organize your RSS feeds all in one place. If you’re already using your Google Account for Gmail and Google+ on a regular basis, why not keep track of your favorite blog’s RSS feeds, Google Alerts, and other feeds in the same account.

21. Google Translate

If you run into an email, blog comment, or webpage in another language, useGoogle Translate to quickly translate it into yours. The best part is you don’t even need to know what language it is in thanks to the auto-detect features. It may not be a perfect translation, but it will get the main point across.

22. Google Trends

Google Trends offers a variety of information such as the searches that are currently popular, Google Insights data for keywords, and traffic trends for websites if you search for a particular domain.com. You can even enter multiple domains, separated by a comma, to compare traffic. Note that traffic trends are only available for websites with a high volume of traffic.

23. Google Voice

Google Voice allows you to create a phone number to make and receive phone calls and text. You can view your messages in an interface similar to your Gmail. It’s a good alternative if you don’t want to give out your office or cell phone number for particular contacts!

Another cool little trick with Google Voice is that you can set up a Google Voice number specifically for tracking how effective your phone number placement on your website is. Every time someone calls in using your Google Voice number, you can count the calls in your Google Voice account. This will allow you to test the size, location and color of your website phone number.

24. Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools is another Google product that puts a large amount of valuable data at your fingertips. If you have already set up your website with Google Analytics, you can easily add it to Google Webmaster Tools to start learning the following.

Site Configuration – This section checks your website’s settings on the web, including preferred domain canonicalization, sitelinks, URL parameters, change of address, and users who have access.
Site Health – This section includes crawl errors, stats, blocked URLs, and malware alerts.
Site Traffic – This section includes search queries (aka, possibly some of the keywords omitted from Google Analytics thanks to the keyword not provided, links to your website (a comprehensive view of your backlink profile), internal links, and +1 reports. +1 reports tells you the search impact of results showing your website’s +1 count vs. without showing it, +1 activity on your website, and audience demographics.
Site Optimization – This section includes your sitemaps, HTML improvement suggestions, content keywords, and other resources.

Also, be sure to keep an eye on the Labs section at the end. It changes with new, experimental Google Webmaster Tools features. One Labs feature that I would like to see return is statistics on any pages for which you are the author usingGoogle authorship.

25. Google (Owned) YouTube

Last, but not least, if you want to dominate the video market, then start with Google-owned YouTube. Not only will your video be available to YouTube’s millions upon millions of visitors, but it will also be on prime real estate for showing up in search results. Even if you can’t get your website on the first page of search results through traditional SEO, you might be able to get there with video!

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