Why Google+ is so Important for your Business

As everyone knows Google+ launched the long awaited business pages last week. It was interesting to watch everyone test the waters where almost everyone raced to get their page live but really only the content based (TV, Radio and other news) business have leverage it heavily.

Sure it is another social channel and yes it is going to require some additional effort but if you need proof on why this is important take a look at the search results below

Google is greatly advantaging the businesses that consumers are connecting with the additional call out. Couple this with the fact that your ads will now also show your Google +1 from your page and you can quickly see that you need to engage your customer base now. So if you don't have a page yet go get it build.

So now what to do next (after your Google+ Business page is built):

1. First you need to start contributing content on your Google+ page, at this point it can be the same content strategy as your Facebook and/or twitter page but you need to get a flow going.  Conversation is going to be different (and using ripples you will have better visibility into it reach) but consumers are going to want to see some form of communication not just a blank page.

2. Get your company behind it.  This is a great way to start the network growing, ask your team / company to add the page to a circle and share it with their friends and family.  If you have a group of pages make sure they are adding each other and sharing their content in the early days.

3. Add the Google+ buttons to your site. This needs to be both the Google+ page button as well as the +1 button. The +1 button should be page specific across your site, very similar to what you are doing with the Facebook Like button.  The goal is to make it easy for customers to share your content. This is critical for SEO as you want the individual pages shared not just the overall site.

4. Engage your other social networks.  Push people from your Facebook pages and Twitter account to the Google+ page. You have an audience that has already expressed interest in your content/brand/company so make sure that you letting these people know you are active on Google+

5. Experiment with content.  Google+ is still an evolving platform but with the photo, video and broadcast (hangout) capabilities this is a chance to establish a Google+ brand for yourself.  If your company is in a weak position in Facebook or Twitter vs your competitor this is the time to redouble your efforts and cement your position in the new social network.

Now to the question that everyone is asking: should I wait to see if Google+ is going to be a success?  The problem with this question is that if you wait by the time you determine success or failure for Google+ it will be too late.  I think the best way to look at this question is how Google is integrating Google+ into all of it products.  To me Google+ will naturally evolve and grow with Google.  Google's goal is not to build another Facebook but to add a social layer onto Google.  From this perspective I think they have achieved or, at least, are very close to making it a success.  Unlike Wave or Buzz I believe that Google+ is here to stay.

So no matter if you are a big brand or small local business (I think that for small business Google+ is even more important to get on board now) you need to spend some time building your presence out.  The 5 above steps could easily be accomplished in a few days so the only thing holding you back is yourself.

Good luck and have fun with Google+!

Building Customer Stories with Social Media

A very interesting use of social media that shows how to drive unexpected customer delight.  Engagement with a brand is all about building stories with them and although they talk about the impressions as if it was a campaign at the end of the video the real win here is the long term emotional connection they built at an individual level.  What they did with this is create brand advocates that should continue to tell stories (and build the brand) for years to come.

Shopping Cart Improvements

I am going to shamelessly steal a great video / ad from Google Analytics to prove a point and that is that we, as an industry, still suck at taking money from people when they really want to give it to us.

Simply put we focus on the wrong things, we look to cross sell, get email sign-ups, additional customer data and sell insurance and then we pat ourselves on the back when 25% of the people leave while trying to buy.

I think this video talks to a couple of key points A. That you really need to have a deep analytical understanding of your checkout and B. Put your process through a different lens, if this was a brick and mortar store (or another site) would it make sense.

Here are some tips that have always worked (for me) in improving the checkout experience (translation: make it easier for people to give money to you):

1. 0% abandonment is your goal: this part of your site is the easiest to increase conversion, people starting the checkout process are looking to buy so don't settle when people leave.  This means you have to have a very solid understanding of cart performance and this is more than just clickstream analysis, you need to understand the why (VOC tools like Foresee can help with abandonment surveying) and session replay (Clicktale or Tealeaf) to show what is happening from different view points.

2. Have an anonymous checkout: I know how this conversation goes, if we can get everyone to sign in we can target better, onsite and off, so we will force (and the key word here is force) our customers to setup an account to buy.  Think about how you would react every time you went to buy something they wanted to know everything about you...it simply wouldn't work.  So why do we believe it is acceptable online?  Give your customers the ability to checkout anomoyously and if you delight them they will be more than happy to take the relationship to the next level

3. Save everything:  Make it easy for people to check out in the future, save their address, credit cards and anything else that would help them out (think reoccurring orders).  This also means that you need to store the security number on the credit card.  No need storing the rest of the credit card info if you are going to make them go back to get that little 3 or 4 digit number.

4. Support as many browsers as possible: This goes back to that simple rule "make it easy to take money from people when they want to give it to you", nothing drives me madder (and at the same time shocks me) when I can't check out of a site on chrome.  Make sure that your cart, of all places, can support the top browsers and I would strongly suggest you go deeper here than the rest of your site.

5. Help:  Don't assume anyone understands anything about your cart, checkout or business, make it easy to get help or find out more information, have hover-overs that clearly explains what is needed and where it makes sense make it graphical (security codes).  Reassure throughout the process.  If you have free returns or anything else that makes hitting that confirm button easier call it out every step of the way.

6. Say Thanks: Not part of the checkout but remember to thank the customer on the confirmation page.  This is also the time to capture that email address or convert the anonymous shopper to an account.

Some random thoughts but these have all worked for me, if you have any of your own please share and lets all try and make what should be a really smooth process a better process than it is today.

Thanks Steve

The true legacy of ones life is not told by the millions of dollars you have but the millions of lives you have touched.  I never knew the man personally but can say that his passion for life, excellence and perfection helped shape the leader I am today. The world lost today not because we lost someone who made great products but because we lost someone who knew how to make it a better place with everything we do.

The Ultimate Google Analytics Study Guide

For those of you that have worked with me, heard me speak or have read the blog you know I am a big believer in open analytics within the organization.  The concept of open analytics is simple: instead of having a small group controlling the tools, as well as, the analysis and reports you ensure that your tools and training are available across the org so that as many people as possible are empowered to leverage data in their decisions.  This frees up the analytics teams to do deep analysis while everyone else has access to find the data they need.  Once executed you have multiple eyes, often looking at the data through a different lens, discovering insights about the business.

We are using Google Analytics to help with this transformation (along with many other tools) and with an incredible hand from the Google team we have many more people deep in the data from all functional areas.  A smaller subset of this group is also working towards their Google Analytics Individual Qualification.  Google has a great set of videos to help you along but one of our superstar IAs ((Francis (Hank) Henry) pulled this together from the video content and made, in my opinion, the best study guide around for Google Analytics.  Even if you are not going for the qualification this is a great resource to have around to to help learn the tool so you can get deep in the numbers.  Happy hunting!

Finding an Extra Week a Year - What will you do with it?

What would you do if all of a sudden you had a extra week to get those high value projects done.  We all have those meetings where we wonder why we are there and, often, these "regular" meetings happen just because they always have with no real value.  This is where it gets crazy, an hour a week is 52 hours over the year which well over a solid week of effort.  Imagine what you could accomplish with this extra week.

Now the trick is that you need to apply the following test to every meeting you schedule with your team or you are part of:  Is this meeting creating the same value that all the participants could achieve if they had a week to work on something else?

I am sure when you look at your schedule tomorrow you can find that one (maybe two or three) hour(s) of meetings that you would rather have to yourself, I know what I will do with that extra week...

Driving User Experience Through Content Creation

I was reading a business plan the other day that I had helped build for a telecom company in India ten years back and it amazed me how much that we had come in our connected lives.  Ten years back TV was still the major media and we used cell phones to call people not interact with the greater world.

Today online, and through our mobile devices, we are fully connected 24 hours a day and more than that we all have the potential to contribute to this connected world.  Seth Godin had a great post yesterday talking about how the ratio of Consumers and Creators has greatly changed recently.

What this all boils down to, from an eCommerce perspective, is how are you leveraging this trend (although trend implies it will move away from this one day which I don't agree) or your overall community to help enhance your online and shopping experience. 

First off if you are not doing enhanced reviews (videos, pictures, etc) you are already way behind the game.  You need to be looking for ways to further enhance your interaction with your customers.  Sephora does a great job of this through a question and answer type product that allows Sephora and their customers to interact with each other driving away the obstacles to conversion not only for that customer asking the question but many others that are consuming the data.  If you look at the example and how much it is leveraged by consumers across the site you can see what extra this brings to the user's experience.  You can then take this to the next level by having your customer contribute additional content, interact with their social graphs to help in buying decisions and leveraging their abilities to drive your product and brands.

The plain and simple websites of even a few years back no longer engage customers as they did in the past, you need to be evolving along with the consumers creation patterns and finding points in the pre and post purchase process to engage them.

If you don't think your product and service will work with this think again, people are creating everywhere and are willing to share on a much more regular basis.  If you still don't believe me take a look at this - a few days back there was an incredible glacier calving in Alaska (now you know the real reason for the post - I wanted to share these videos), from this there are now three videos angles showing this event that have been shared on youtube.com, what is amazing is that there were just a handful of people that could have witnessed this...crazy to think how far we have come.