Google_ for Business_ How Google's Social Network Changes Everything - Chris Brogan [74]
• Google+ enables you to cook up repeat searches. Simply put your search terms up in the bar at the top of the page, and then select Save Search to keep a copy of that search on your left sidebar.
• Build searches for your products, your services, your company name, any location that’s specific to your business, and maybe even your competitors’ information, and use these frequently to see who’s talking about you.
• Be diligent to the Notifications part of Google+, but realize that it won’t catch every mention of you or your business. Use both the search feature plus the notifications system to find people who could use help.
• If you have one department listening on behalf of the whole company, have a simple routing policy that tells this person how to send post information to the appropriate party. For instance, if your PR department manages your Google+ presence, but it sees a customer service request, it would want to forward this to the appropriate customer service person, and if that PR person finds a sales lead, he should know how to move that lead along to the appropriate salesperson.
• Realize that there are many ways to search for opportunities. For instance, I posted back in November 2011, about point-and-shoot cameras, asking what everyone was using. If you represented Panasonic or Sony or any of those companies, wouldn’t you want a moment to tell me about your latest and greatest? There’s revenue to be had in searching based on whatever one might be saying that invokes an interest in your product or service. Test this quite frequently and tweak your search terms as you learn what brings you more opportunity.
Posting
Consider an editorial calendar, where you encourage team contributions to posting. If you think about it, this is another point where you might discover cross-purposes in the use of Google+. In a larger company, imagine the kind of post and frequency of posts a salesperson might want to see. What about the marketing department and the PR department? What do they need? How can the senior team engage? Does support run your social media? Whatever the mix, if you push together one or two teams or disciplines into one Google+ business page, for instance, you need to put together an editorial calendar that explains which posts are coming out when so that you have a balanced approach.
If you encourage employees to post on their own pages, be flexible enough to allow (maybe even encourage) personal posts. Realize that we are all humans seeking to interact with other humans. If you sent your sales team to a conference to find prospects, you wouldn’t expect them to lead with talk about your world-changing products. You’d encourage them to make small talk and find points of similarity between themselves and their prospects. The same is true of Google+. By learning about the person behind the employee, many a better business relationship can be forged.
If you decide to adopt some kind of “vetting” process for posts, realize that the more complicated or red-tape filled this is, the less interest employees will have in posting. I’ve seen many corporations do a great job of getting their legal team involved early in the process to build out communications plans, and this tends to work best. Unless you’re in a highly regulated industry, put up the simplest of bumpers to help your employees know where the boundaries are, and then let them experiment a bit.
Encourage sharing, as well, so that employees don’t simply post the company news and the company’s perspective. The more your prospects and customers feel that you’re sharing information that’s useful to them, not just information that helps sell your product, the more trust those prospects and customers will have, and the more your efforts can take on a community feeling versus a sales feeling.
As stated elsewhere, posts with pictures get more engagement than posts without pictures. Slightly