Just a few days ago, happened to stumble across the audio from our conversation. We touched on a few things and felt that it would be worth sharing here on the blog.

After some slicing and dicing into the best parts, you can give it a listen below. Thanks to Elijah for giving me permission to post the audio here on the blog and check out his site Fandura which makes creating custom mobile apps, simple.

While that’s all fine and dandy, one can’t deny the growth the platform has seen. That doesn’t necessarily mean businesses should start investing a ton of time and take away from Facebook and/or Twitter, but it’s something to pay attention to and start learning more about, that way one can utilize the social network to its full potential.

But what do I mean by still in its ‘Twitter’ phase?

A fast computer. A fast smartphone. A fast line at the post office (good luck). Technology and the advancements have spoiled us. They’ve also spoiled your customers and your audience.

But that’s not what this post is about. This post is about a far greater issue within the social media realm. As someone who works in the industry and is for hire, there’s a lot of stuff to see. Social media related blogs are a dime a dozen. Social media guruexpertninjarockstarjedis are a dime a dozen. Advice, tips, tactics, strategies, fairies, unicorns, glitter, are a dime a dozen.

One thing that’s quite abundant is two words: Build relationships. Building relationships are absolutely crucial to your business in general, and are exceptionally important when utilizing social platforms. Most of the time though, it’s complete BS.

Relationship building is just one aspect of a social media presence. One can listen to, watch, or read about building relationships all day, how to better create them, and so on.

While focusing on all this talk about relationships and retweeting all these lovey dovey “feel good” blog posts is great, if an actual strategy and plan is not in place, none of it matters. This is specifically true if you’re trying to build a brand or business through social.

If there’s one piece of advice to sum everything up, it’s this: Building relationships is important and crucial on a daily basis. But without all the other pillars, it’s only going to get a social media presence so far.

Yes, engage. Yes, interact. Yes, whatever buzz word you prefer, with your audience and customers. Just don’t let the lovey dovey side completely consume the side that puts it all together in a nice, concise structure.

Engagio looks to help those that are wanting to keep track of conversations and be able to respond in a (hopefully) timely manner.

What the tool does is pull in your comments, @ mentions, etc., from social networks as well as commenting platforms, and organizes it in the same way you would use email.

At the time of posting this, it’s currently in private beta and you can sign up here. Click “Sign Up Now” and use the code “mikestenger” to get exclusive access.

Having personally used Google+ since June 29th, it quickly became a very valuable resource and something that was very much worth the time investment.

With Facebook and Twitter so clearly dominating the market for a good period of time, the introduction of a finally viable social network from Google, was a refreshing change.

With the new version of social search, Google Plus can no longer be ignored. So, what is so great about it? How can it further aide marketers looking to build their brand or business?

Hangouts

Group video chat, 10 people, for free? Pretty amazing. While most of the hangout usage is for more personal than business means, the opportunity for brands to use hangouts is phenomenal.

Dell has already shown what’s possible with them using hangouts to help answer customer questions. The Black Eyed Peas, a hip-hop/pop group, did a hangout from a concert so people from all over the World could join and watch while they performed for thousands.

What hangouts bring to the table is much more than group video chat, something that’s been around for many years. They bring an exciting and powerful way to connect deeper and create more powerful experiences. Having group discussions around a specific topic, recording that conversation and uploading it to Youtube, is one quick example.

We’ll see more brands use it for customer service while with the Hangout On Air functionality, the ability for anyone to watch a hangout live, we’ll see discussions that both inform and/or bring value around certain topics. Again, the opportunity is there.

Bold, Italics

While this may not sound like that big of a change, it really is. Millions of bloggers such as you and I are familiar with enhancing content. For those who aren’t familiar with this on Google Plus, to use bold you simply surround the word or words with the * symbol. To italicize, you surround the word or words with _.

The benefit of being able to bold or italicize content on Google+ is that it brings more attention to your content which translates to more +1’s, comments, and reshares. There’s of course room to overdo these enhancements, but using bold and italics where necessary, are a refreshing change from standard text.

Ripples

From a marketing standpoint, you want to know how well you’re performing and from a social media standpoint, you want to know who and how many people are sharing your content on any given basis.

So, “What are Ripples?” Ripples on Google Plus are an interactive graph of all the people who’ve shared a post and is built into every public post. Each person is represented as a circle (no surprise there) and you can easily see who your most influential sharers, are.

This is great because when you keep track over time of who your most influential sharers are, you can make an effort to consistently interact with them and further build a relationship. Similar to a coffee shop taking extra special care of Bob who stops in everyday, you can take extra special care of the relationship you have with your most influential people.

“If you’re using Google+, how are you using it?”

Within every business, there are employees, but how do you better integrate them and get them involved with the overall social media strategy?

Your employees are your biggest asset. And they can also be an incredible asset to your social media presence. Here’s some thoughts on getting them to become brand ambassadors:

Need a good starting point for creating a social media policy? The online database of social media policies is a great place to get ideas.

One thing is often missing however. Growing up, I had it pretty easy. Had lots of friends, got to do lots of things, and had many fun summers while school was out.

You see, my Mom and Dad got divorced when I was very young, shortly after I was born. My Dad lived an hour and a half away and would see him every two weeks when school was in session. Once school was out for the summer, that would change.

I love my Dad. He’s an amazing man. But let me tell you…

I absolutely hated physical labor over the summer at his house. Looking back, it was very easy and not bad at all, but being a kid and a teenager, you tend to overdramatize things and situations beyond normal logic.

One summer I remember moving a shed. Not one of those rinky dink, fit your lawn mower and a couple other things shed, but one probably four times the size, plus an entire second floor on top of that. As usual, my Dad did most of the work, but I assisted.

Where my Dad lives, he’s got a big backyard out in the country so that means he can burn stuff. The shed we were moving needed new shingles as it was getting pretty old and there were multiple leaks which caused a new second floor to have to be put in.

It was 80+ degrees and as him and my Stepmom were pulling the shingles off and throwing them down on the ground, I’d have to pick them up and take them about 30-40 feet away and throw them in the fire.

Looking back, they probably weren’t legal to burn, but this was a long time ago and before all the global warming controversy. Anyways, if anyone is familiar with roofing shingles, they’re pretty damn heavy. Combine that with a blazing hot fire and it being well over 80 degrees on a hot summer day, and you’ve got yourself a workout.

What seemed to have taken hours when it was probably a third of whatever I thought, the job got done through work and busting ass.

Here’s the thing: If you want a successful and effective social media campaign, be prepared to work and bust your ass. Nothing comes easy in the digital World.

And let’s stop with the “there is no competition” and “there is only one you” nonsense. That just puts people and companies out of touch with reality.

The success of your campaign is directly reliant on A) Strategy, B) Plan, C) Your business/brand as a whole including what you have to offer to the marketplace, and D) Your work ethic.

If you are not prepared to work, then you are not prepared to get results.

But social search isn’t anything new? And you’d be right, however, Google Plus is integrated within social search on a large scale. A lot of people saw this coming. Some didn’t. Either way, this is a big shift for the search marketplace.

With that said, if you have a personal brand or business, Google has made it where you simply can’t ignore their social network anymore. This is the future and, well, I’ll just shut up so we can dive into the video below.

P.S. Want to disable social search completely? Here’s how to do it in just a few seconds.

The most recent change, #newnewtwitter (actual hashtag), is a step toward a better experience and getting users to be more active, something that is a big objective going forward.

With that said, Google Chrome, the 2nd most popular browser on the planet, has a slew of extensions to choose from.

After digging around in the Chrome Web Store, I found 4 extensions that really enhance Twitter.com and felt they were worth sharing.

Twitter Extender
Open Tweet Filter
Twitter Refresh
Twitter Layout Reverter