Cari Stewart

Dear Google+,

You should probably think about a new name. Or at least consider spelling out ‘+’ so my punctuation doesn’t look stupid and so I can use an <h1> tag without my theme freaking out. I just hope you’re better than Buzz…

Anyway, I’d like to be the first to welcome you to the social network space and give you a snippet of my initial thoughts about you. That being said, are you going to take the place of Facebook? No way, Jose! But I like what you’re bringing to the table.

Circles

My favorite part of you is the Circles feature. I like that I can update only those in certain circles with information specific to them. Let’s be serious, if I can avoid being a circles where acquaintances say things like “It’s hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel when the walls are closing in on you,” that would be great.

I also appreciate that I can add a person to more than one circle. So I can have my grandma in my “family” circle, my “friend” circle, AND my “thug life” circle. So efficient. I love you can just drag-and-drop contacts where you want them; definitely a step up from trying to create groups and lists on Facebook.

Huddle

If you’re able to get Huddle to catch on, you will singlehandedly take down SMS. Not that it needs to be taken down, it would just be exciting. For those reading my letter to Google+ who doesn’t know what Huddle is, it is essentially a group text chat service. So you can chat it up with multiple people from your phone. I’m excited about it.

Contacts

I’m not a huge fan that I can’t take my contacts from Facebook and integrate them into Google+. It’s going to be so embarrassing when I only have a few hundred contacts when you launch. :/ But I guess that’s Facebook being stingy, not you being dumb.

Search

Since you were invented by the gods of Google, it’s only fitting that search is integrated into your UI. It’s kind of nuts to think that my search results will become connected to my social information. This is just going to make Google a better search engine as they will have more information about my preferences, but it’s also a little creepy. Google, you’re really starting to freak me out. But you still have lots of great.

Despite all your fun features – only a few of which I mentioned – I’m still seeing some holes in the initial snapshot of Google+. However, I’m excited to see where it goes. At the very least, if it gets Facebook to step up their game, I’m all about you.

See you when you launch!

Love,
Cari

P.S. I’m still waiting to hear back about my résumé …

SEO efforts are meant to improve the visibility of your website on search engines. There are about a pajilion different ways to do this; some a little more sketchy than others. But, the fact is, with Google constantly changing/improving – depending on how your rankings go – their algorithm, the more sketchy tactics don’t work anymore.

Content is King

I’m kind of sick of hearing this, but it’s true.

The latest trend: quality content. I agree with this wholeheartedly, and not just because I am, in fact, a content writer. Content is how you’re found online and Google is a lot smarter in the way it ranks good content.

Most people are only thinking about what they’re putting up on their own site. Then you have those who occasionally tweet or Facebook, which is also good. But what else are you doing? There are a lot of other conversations taking place on forums, blogs, discussion boards, Twitter, Facebook, etc., and you should be a part of them.

Finding Conversations/Web Outreach

K, it’s super simple. Set up Google Alerts and do some Twitter Searches. Done. Well, I guess you still have to do some other stuff. Set up Google Alerts for: competitors, industry keywords, your brand, your product, related products or services, etc.

Make sure you’re checking Alerts and Twitter Search regularly, otherwise they are going to accumulate real fast. Join relevant conversations or comment on related posts in a meaningful and personal way. If people think you’re spamming, it’s over.

Each time you join a thread, make sure you sign your name with a link to your site. And there you have it; backlinks from relevant sites. But again, don’t be annoying about it.

Maintaining Relationships

Once you’ve made contact within the blogosphere and twitterverse, make friends and believers. There’s nothing better than making fans and watching them spread the word for you.  And consumers are way more credible than you. Nobody wants to hear what the company has to say about themselves; they want to hear from the people who have had real contact with the company, both good and bad.

This brings me to my next point. Start some online PR and get involved in both positive and negative conversations. If anything, negative comments are what you should be tackling first. If someone is talking trash about you, find out why and try to fix the problem. Just be real and transparent. Even if you don’t make a fan out of them, they will appreciate the fact that you took time to respond.

Services

As you can imagine, this type of work can be very time consuming and tedious. But it needs to be done. There are companies that provide these services. However, most of them are pretty expensive and for most start-ups, that kind of cost is not in the cards.

For those who have the budget, here are some SEO/buzz marketing services:

Blast PR

We Are Social

Buzz.io

PRMarketing.com

Social Media Management Co.

… for about $10.

I feel like I need to give a shout-out to GraphicRiver. It’s totally fantastic. I used it a couple months ago on a project and it totally saved my life and made me look really good.

Me and my partner in this crazy adventure need to get marketing materials – business cards, letter heads, envelopes, folders, sales slicks, CD labels, yada yada yada – ready for a new company super fast. Neither of us are designers nor did we want to pay for a designer to do what we knew would take them two seconds.

This is when GraphicRiver saves lives. They have tons of different designers submit designs for personal and corporate branding materials. You just choose the template you like, pay a few dollars for the Creative Suite files and PDFs and they’re all yours. One thing, you do need to have at least basic knowledge of Creative Suite to be able to personalize the templates. If you don’t know anything about CS, you can use all the internets to find some tutorials.

With our project, we actually used templates from two different designers. One was fantastic to work with. The other template was in weird formats and it took me forever to figure out layers and junk. But, again, it was better than me trying to design it myself.

This is what I suggest for non-designers either marketing themselves or a start-up: get a real designer to put your logo together. If you don’t know a designer, use an online service like Logoworks or 99 Designs to create your logo. Once you have a logo, color scheme, and fonts, find a GraphicRiver template package that works with the brand you’re going for and make the appropriate changes. Done.

Here’s the thing, if you want to be a successful marketer, you need research to help you effectively reach your audience. But many of us may find ourselves lacking the money to pay for thousands of dollars worth of demographic reports or professionally moderate focus groups and in-depth interviews.

So what do you do? You get creative and look for other sources of information that will help you understand your audience. Here’s the information you need:

Demographics

K, you want to know age, gender, race, ethnic origin, and geographic location. This information will tell you where to reach your audience; essentially, it determines your media plan. Their demographic information gives you insights into their media consumption. Are they more dependent on the Internet or TV for their information? Do they read the newspaper? What magazines are they into? How often are they on their cell phones? Etc.

Psychographics

Psychographics is all about messaging. This is where you get into the brains of your target market. You want to know them better than they know themselves. What do they do in their free-time? What movies and TV shows do they like? Are there certain personality traits that connect them all? But the most important question you need to answer is what motivates them? Once you know their motivation, you’re gold.

Now that you know what kind of information you need and we’ve already established you don’t have a pajillion dollars to throw at research, here are some research options:

Online Surveys

Survey Monkey is a free online market research service. You create your own survey to ensure you get the answers you want and the information you need. The tricky thing with this is that you have to make sure your survey questions make sense and are not leading. You definitely need to do some research before you writing an effective survey.

Mechanical Turk works the same as Survey Monkey; you write your own surveys and submit it for responses. However, you have to pay for this one. It’s nice, though, because there is no minimum fee; you pay for how many responses you want. Mechanical Turk then takes 10% commission of your hits.

Online Focus Groups

Here are some options to simulate the effect of a traditional focus group:

· Create your own forum

· Comment on relevant blogs and start a conversation

· Participate in relevant discussion boards

Man-on-the-Street

Just go talk to people. Usually this involves a video camera for documentation purposes, but we’re poor around here, so you can choose to do your interviews with or without a camera.

Hopefully you’ve determined what you’re audience is into, so you know where to find them. Then, you know, you can talk to them. Make sure you have specific questions you want to get answers to. If you walk to enough people, you should start to see some patterns in their responses that will allow you to start crafting your messaging.

Stalking

That’s right kids, get on your creepy shoes, it’s time to do some good old-fashioned stalking. All of these tools are more effective if you have some kind of contact, enrollment, or mailing list to search from, instead of just shooting in the dark.

Spokeo – More like Spook-eo. Yeah, I made that up. K, this is one of the creepiest sites I have ever been on. You just look up a name, specify the city and state, confirm the address and then get all kinds of crazy information. There is a monthly fee, but it’s super cheap for the information you get. It gives you demographic information, interests, income, social networks, relationship status, email, bios, photos. It’s nuts. P.S. if you don’t want your information on Spokeo.com, you can have in removed.

Facebook – Just do what you normally do on Facebook; stalk people. Except this time it won’t be a potential date or old high school friends who are super weird; it will be a potential customer. You can see all their interests, their friends, their pictures, favorite movies and books, pretty much their whole lives. Do you feel really creepy right now? Yeah, that’s a valid feeling.

MySpace – Repeat tips in the “Facebook” section. However, this will only be effective if you are marketing to 13-year-old girls or 50-year-old men who flirt with 13-year-old girls.

Blogs – Blogs can provide incredibly insight into anyone’s brain. Find blogs that fit your audience profile and see what you can learn just from reading blogs. You can also comment on relevant blogs and start conversations. Chances are if your blogger fits the profile, their readership will also have similar characteristics.

Welp, I wish you only solid findings and crazy insights that will make you tons of money and, in turn, allow you to buy real research.