Google+ (aka Google Plus and G+) is all the rage.  The Google+ social network is getting tested, talked about and turned on every day with new tips, tricks and tools.After you read more about Google+ and start using it, try some of the stuff listed below to help you get the most out of Google+.

1. Brand Your Website or Blog URL with Google+ – Thanks Chris Lang for sharing this one.  It’s a great way to brand your website or blog address so it forwards to your Google+ stream:

2. Use the Google Search Command – Thanks to Chris Brogan for reminding us how to use this Google search command to find interesting people on Google+ in niches or industries we’re interested in:

site:plus.google.com <WhatEverYou’reInterestedIn-WithoutTheAngledBrackets>

So for the term “marketing”, the search command would look like this: site:plus.google.com marketing

3. Improve Your Google+ Stream Display – If you’re using Google’s Chrome browser, try G+me to collapse the Google+ stream into a real-time dashboard for a cleaner display:

4. Follow The Rules of The Road – Here’s some good discussion on Google+ Etiquette.

5. Become a Share Master – Here’s another Google Chrome extension called Extended Share for Google Plus that allows you to share what you’re posting to Google+ on your Facebook, LinkedIn, tumbler and Twitter accounts.

6. Meet New People – And another Chrome extension called Google Plus Directory that allow to meet new people, make new friend circles, and choose from over 200.000 Google Plus profiles.

7. Presenting Google+ – Need to do a Google+ presentation or just want a template that resembles Google+ theme?  Here it is.

8. Read All About It – The Google+ Startup Guide by Saidur (“Cy”) Hossain.

9. Read the ToS – An artist’s rendering of the Google+ Terms of Service, illustrated.

10. Do I Annoy You? – An article on How to Hide From Annoying People on Google+.

11. Show My Circles – Another Google Chrome extension, called Plus Minus, lets you select which Google Circles show up in your Google+ Stream.  It also allows you to easily mark individual or all posts as read, offers a wide-screen view so you can see more content without scrolling, and loads more posts automatically as you scroll down.  Sweet.

12. Make It Flow – This Google Chrome extension called Usability Boost for Google Plus will help you visualize the flow of information on Google Plus.

13. Over To You – Now it’s your turn.  What have you found cool, necessary or just plain fun for Google+?  Add your suggestion in the comments below.

Okay, I’ll add one more.  To keep an eye on the new Google Chrome extensions, apps, themes, etc. for Google+, visit the Chrome Web Store and search on Google+, G+, or ”Google Plus”.

Also, here’s one one more, the Google+ WordPress Plugin that displays your “googleCard” in your WordPress sidebar.

That’s it.  Circle Me on Google+.  I’ll be lookin’ for ya’.

If you’re a business and haven’t integrated social media with your business, here are 10 steps to get you going.  You don’t have to do all of them. Grab a couple and get going.

1. Start a Blog – What do you do with a blog?  Your company blog should focus on the company’s expertise and knowledge and how that can help potential customers even at the blog post level.  Don’t just outline what you can do for them IF they become clients or customers, do it NOW in a blog post.  Give them something that will help them now.  Post to the blog on a regular basis if possibly.  Let people know you’re alive.

If a potential customer comes to your company’s blog, you want up-to-date blog posts.  Decide realistically how often someone can blog about your business.  An informative, knowledge-rich blog post once a week or two can go a long way.  I recommend 300-600 words if appropriate for your business.  Heck, give them your editorial schedule if applicable.  That way they’ll look forward to it.

2. Blog Posts – What type of blog posts to include on your business blog? Informative information about your product or service.  Not a diatribe that talks around your product or service but something that conveys your expertise.

What would you like to read about a product or service you’re about to invest in? Yea, we all like to visit a business website for a quick overview of what your business is about, but a “live” blog tells us your heart is beating.

Does it make sense in your business to provide case studies? How about lists that can help potential customers right away when they visit your blog: “10 steps you can take now to improve your _____.”

3. Who should Blog? – Who should write the blog posts in your company?  How about the people who work in the business and are excited about what they do and what the company does?  Can you provide an incentive for employees who write blog posts for the company like going home early to write a blog post?  Closer parking to the front door?  Jeans day, or two or three?  Find the champions of the biz, the “Go Doers”.

4. The Company Newsletter – Sure you’ve got a newsletter or everyday news that you update on part of your website, but how about cutting it up into 140 characters or less and get it out using Twitter.  Can you cut up your newsletter into small 140 character chunks of news that you can sprinkle out over twitter every 2-3 or 3-6 hours during the day.  Post to twitter a total of 12 times a day or 8 or 6, whatever makes sense for you.

Use HootSuite to enter all or some of your tweets for the day with links back to an appropriate page on your blog or website for more information about a specific tweet.  Use HootSuite’s scheduler to send them out over the course of the day.  Don’t spam by selling and selling and selling.

5. Twitter – Talking about twitter, create one account to get started and then over time consider adding more twitter accounts if you can manage them.  Ask the question, “Can we split the focus using multiple twitter accounts and how would that help us?”

Let’s say you have a business twitter account with general information and news, and a second account that just tweets the deals of the day, assuming you’re in an industry that has products for sale, etc.  Can you take that model and apply it to your business.

However, if you’re using twitter, try to remain active with one account before splitting it up into multiple twitter accounts.  Can you provide tweets 1-3 times a day?  I would set no less than 3 tweets spanned over your typical work day (8-5) to start.  Don’t tweet multiple tweets at the same time.  Ask your twitter followers to retweet by simpling saying, “Please Retweet.”  Don’t over do it though.  Make sure it makes sense.  Also, leave 10-15 characters out of the maximum 140 characters for retweeting.

Just like the blog posts, are there employees who are champions for the company that can setup the tweets for an incentive.  Also, do you email employees about contests and winners of those contests?  Let’s say you’re a sponsor of a local sports team and you’re giving away tickets to those games.  Get that news out of the company and congratulate the people who won the tickets out on twitter as well.  This is one way that lets people outside your company know what you’re doing for employees.  But don’t be fake about it, be real, there are real people watching and listening.

6. Videos – Can you create videos under 5 minutes to help your potential customers?  You can use Screenr for free to record less than 5 minute videos that you can then upload to YouTube.  While on YouTube, create a Channel that people can subscribe to and put a link on your blog that points to your YouTube channel, encouraging visitors to subscribe to your YouTube channel.

When you upload your video to YouTube, make sure you put a link to your blog or relevant article back to your blog or website in the description area of the video.  Pick meaningful tags as well but don’t over do it.  Check out what other companies in your field are doing on YouTube and use that as an example.

7. Social Networking – Are some messages too short for email inside your company?  Can departments become more effecient if they use a tool kind of like twitter to communicate but not instant messaging?  If you have your own email domain, for example yourcompany.com, then consider joining your email domain to Yammer.  Yammer is just like twitter except it’s for inside the company only.  It uses your email domain to keep messages inside your company.

8. Research – Watch your brand.  Investigate your competitors.  Research what people are talking about that relates to your product or service.  Social media services like twitter allow you to search on specific words and phrases to alert you of any discussion that you’re interested in.  Use Google Alerts so you get emails or subscribe to those alerts in an RSS reader.

Subscribe to key blogs in your industry by using Google Reader.  You can read through the news in your industry quickly with an RSS reader like Google Reader.

9. Facebook – Facebook pages are all the rage.  Don’t just create a “normal” facebook account and think you’re done.  Create a page that includes some of the built-in facebook apps like videos, links, a full-fledged welcome screen, link your blog posts to your facebook page, discussions if appropriate, photos, notes polls, etc.

10. Time – Yes, it all takes time so don’t forget your main product or service.  That comes first.  Make your product or service killer and people will flock to it and tell other people about it.  No social media campaign will make mediocrity better.  There are ways to tweak your social media time and I’ll be exploring them here so make sure you subscribe.

New to facebook?  Need some guidance on getting started with facebook? Well you don’t have to look very far as facebook’s Help Center offers plenty of information for you to get started.

Finding People

Not so obvious sometimes, but look at facebook itself and start with the Getting Started Guide.  With this guide you’ll be able to answer the following questions:

1. How to find friends on facebook
2. How to find classmates on facebook
3. How to find coworkers on facebook
4. How to do a name search on facebook
5. How to edit your profile and upload your profile photo on facebook
6. How to upload photos to facebook and tag yourself and your friends
7. How to find out what’s going on with your friends on facebook as well as their photos

TIP: You can also type in a Google (or your favorite search engine) search like this: bill bolmeier facebook

While checking out the Getting Started Guide, see the accompanying Help Center and Safety pages.  The Safety page describes how facebook does not allow anyone under 13 years old to have access and parents should consider supervising anyone under 13 years old who is accessing facebook.

There’s also an email address abuse @ facebook (dot) com for people to complain about about nudity, pornography, harassment or unwelcome contact.  Your complaint will be acknowledged within 24 hours and a response issued within 72 hours.

The Safety page also lists websites for you to read more on internet safety in general as well as Safety FAQs for users and parents.

Privacy Settings

After reviewing the above help information, I recommend visiting the Privacy page where you can set details related to the following categories:

1. Privacy -> Profile – By default under both Basic and Contact Information I set every drop-down to Only Friends
2. Privacy -> Search – By default I set Search Visibilty to Everyone.  This allows anyone on facebook to search on facebook for me.  You can certainly adjust this as you see fit. (see below)
3. Privacy -> Search – Under Search Result Content I checked: My profile picture, a link to add me as a friend and a link to send me a message (see below)
4. Privacy – Public Search Listing – I check Create a public search listing (see below)

Privacy -> News Feed and Wall

I might change these settings but see the image below to see how I have mine set.  By default I believe facebook has all of these checked but I uncheck all of them to start and then look at each one to determine if I want certain information to always be broadcast to people.

For the remainder of the security settings, I use the default settings at this time for Applications.  There’s also a Block List that you can use to block people by name or email address.

TIP: When you add new friends, start using Lists right from the get go.  You can use these lists later on to control who sees what as well as just a good mechanism to organize your vast amount of friends you’ll acquire as you use facebook.  Create lists as you add friends and create lists by navigating to your Friends -> All Friends menu selection, look in the left-hand column for creating and managing lists.

That’s it!!  If you’d like, Friend me on Facebook.

If you’re like a lot of folks who send scheduled tweets to twitter via whatever service you use, here’s a way to send your scheduled tweets to twitter and a status update to facebook at the same time.

The Twitter Side

HootSuite allows you to send twitter tweets immediately or later (scheduled tweets).  You can add multiple profiles for your one HootSuite account if that’s something you’re looking for.

The above image will send a tweet at 11:10pm on Wedensday, 09-09-2009.

The Facebook Side

Now, browse over to facebook and install Selective Twitter Status.  All you have to provide at this point is your twitter username and click the save button.

After installing the Selective Twitter Status facebook app, type your tweet into HootSuite as seen below with an ending #fb tag and your scheduled or immediate tweet will go to both twitter and facebook.

That’s it!!  The purpose of this article was to show how you can schedule a tweet to twitter as well as send that tweet to your facebook as a status update.

If you use TweetDeck, Seesmic or any other twitter client, you might  already have the capability to send a tweet to both twitter and facebook but not on a schedule.  So this is a free and easy way to get the job done.  I love TweetDeck by the way and would love to see a scheduler in there.  We’ll see.

Control Freaks

If you really want to have a lot of control over multiple social media sites and the scheduled information you’d like to disseminate whether it’s from your blog, twitter, facebook or other social media sites, you can try the service postlater.

If you found this article hlepful for yourself or anyone you know, consider retweeting it and/or saving it to delicious.  I appreciate the support and you’ll be a more awesomer person for it.      Awesomer – Yes, that is correct engish.

What’s you’re primary communications device – a cell phone?  Twitter?  Facebook?.  Here’s a video with Guy Kawasaki being interviewed by Robert Scoble.

So, what’s your primary communications device and how could you live without it for a week?

Providing videos on your blog or website are a great way to get a point across, offer a how-to, tutorial style video, as well as entertain your readers with your many talents, if you have many talents.  

A screencast is a video made by recording what’s on your computer screen.  Various tools can be used to record what’s on your computer screen including some of the tools I talked about in my article 4 Screen Recording Tools.

But, what do you do after you’ve recorded your screen? Well, you can upload your video(s) to various video sharing sites.  For this article I’ll only concentrate on a few.

1. Flickr Video

Recently, flickr added the ability for users to upload 90 second videos for free accounts.  We’ll see how the flickr video turns out as far as popularity.  Flickr is so well known for photography that mixing in video could be just a ho-hum experiment so we’ll have to see what happens.

Obviously you can’t do a ton with 90 seconds but it keeps videos short and to the point as well as challenge your creativity to provide compelling videos.

2. 12Seconds

If you have a twitter account and use the twitter client TweetDeck, then you might have seen the 12seconds button that lets you see videos from the 12seconds site.  With 12seconds, you communicate in 12 second chunks of video.  These are comparable to the 140 characters that Twitter allows you to communicate with.

3. YouTube

Does YouTube need an introduction?  Well maybe not, but I’d like to point out a few features that bloggers can use.

You can drive traffic to your blog by placing videos you create on YouTube and embed them in your blog posts.  Providing a memorable watermark on your video, as well as a link in the first line of your description, could entice viewers to browse to your blog from YouTube.

Another feature of YouTube is a Channel.  Channels are a page you setup on YouTube with your videos you’ve created.  Typically the URL is http://www.youtube.com/user/<accountname>.  In my case my YouTube Channel is http://www.youtube.com/user/billbolmeier.

Your YouTube Channel is your YouTube home page. Your profile on your YouTube Channel, which includes a link to your blog, can also help drive traffic to your blog.

The comments section of a YouTube video is where you can connect with the folks who watch your videos and comment.  The same audience who just might become your blog readers.

There are links to popular social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook and others that allows viewers to promote your video on those sites.

I did a 6-minute video on Ubuntu Linux 8.04 in April 2008 and as of today there are over 35,000 views with over 100 comments.  The website address was embedded in the video as a watermark and in the first line of the description of the video to help drive traffic to that blog.  It worked pretty well but overall I’d say YouTube video watchers seem to hang around YouTube and not stray too far.

4. Viddler

Viddler is another site you can publish your videos at.  There’s a community section for friends, groups, comments, link your Twitter account in your profile as well as your Flickr account.  Your viewers will also have the ability to promote your videos at other social networking sites.  You can also embed Viddler videos in your blog posts with embed code.  In fact, anyone can embed a video in their blog or website with the code provided.

5. Revver

Revver pretty much has everything we’ve talked about like the other video sharing sites offer, but include revenue sharing as well.  The more you promote other videos and other folks promote your videos the more you can possibly make.

Videos at Revver are categorized to help focus viewers on what they’re looking for.

Revver has a WordPress plugin that makes it easy to include video in a blog post.  Like each video sharing site I’ve talked about, there are embeddable video controls that look and act different from each one.

Other video sharing sites include:

• Vimeo
• blip.tv
• Yahoo Video
• Forget about Google Video, they’re not taking anymore uploads.

What’s Next?

Want to distribute your video to multiple video sharing sites at once?  TubeMogul is a video distribution site that takes your video after you upload it to TubeMogul and distributes it to various video sites that you select for you.

TubeMogul offers analytics of your video from the various sites to help you see how your videos are doing.

Need a video search engine?  Use Blinkx or Truveo.  Blinkx is “the world’s largest and most advanced video search engine.” Billed as “the Remote Control for the Video Web”, Blinx has over 35,000 hours of searchable video.

Now that we’ve talked about video site we’ll create a video and distribute it.  That will come in another post.

Here are 13 points I took away from reading Trust Economies: Investigation into the New ROI of the web by Julien Smith and Chris Brogan.

1. Trust
2. ROI = Return on Influence
3. The relationship comes before the sale
4. Friends look out for each other
5. The edges between work and social life are blurring
6. Do you friend your boss on Facebook?  Do you Twitter your sales rep?  You do now.
7. What you feed into a social network becomes another point we can use to connect.
8. Humanity-over-IP is the protocol
9. Get involved with communities of interest
10. Make the person you’re speaking to a rock star
11. Attention as currency
12. Create value before you need to
13. Make deposits of your time and attention

Want to create you own social networking site?  One site I found is SocialGO and it allows you to create a full-featured social networking site for free.

After starting to research these type of “create your own social networking sites”, I discovered that’s there’s quite a few of them.

So, what’s the best place to start?  Check out Jeremiah Owyang’s 2007 article List of “White Label” or “Private Label” (Applications you can Rebrand) Social Networking Platforms, Community Platforms which lists quite a few sites as well as lot of valueable info in the comments about other sites as well.  Well it’s been updated on his new post Forrester Wave Report: The Leaders in Community Platforms for Marketers (Part 4/4).

Here are 9 enterprise-level social networking products that rose to the top from Jeremiah’s report:

1. Jive Software – http://www.jivesoftware.com/

2. Telligent – http://telligent.com/

3. KickApps – http://www.kickapps.com/

4. Pluck – http://www.pluck.com/

5. Awareness – http://www.awarenessnetworks.com/home/

6. Lithium – http://www.lithium.com/

7. Mzinga – http://www.mzinga.com/

8. LiveWorld – http://www.liveworld.com/

9. Leverage Software – http://www.leveragesoftware.com/

Although the products above are enterprise-level platforms, there are plenty of other sites to check out in his article List of “White Label” or “Private Label” (Applications you can Rebrand) Social Networking Platforms, Community Platforms.

Here are a couple podcast links on YouTube with Jeremiah Owyang:

1. HiveLive’s Podcast Series: Jeremiah Owyang Podcast Part 1

2. HiveLive’s Podcast Series: Jeremiah Owyang Podcast Part 2

New to Social Networking?  Here’s a video on Social Networking in Plain English by the Common Craft folks.

Subscribe to my blog for more discussion on Social Networking.