Google – Stay N Alive

Category: Google

Ford’s Future Competition Won’t be Cars – It Will be Software

Posted on by jessestay

Google gave us a peek into its future and vision today as it announced, and showcased new, Google-designed cars that are built entirely for driving on their own, without humans. The future indicates, to me not that Google is building its own cars as one would expect to be competition with companies such as Ford, Chevy, Toyota, and others, but that Google is sticking to its core strength and vision – software that makes the world more openly available to everyone. The future, my friends, for the automobile industry isn’t cars – it’s in software that gets you from one place to another – it’s all about Google Maps, and competitors to it.

As I visited Silicon Valley recently with my wife as I attended Facebook’s F8 developers conference, I had the opportunity to briefly stop by Google Headquarters in Mountainview. The one building that greets you, and says goodbye to you as you leave likely isn’t noticed by everyone. It has a big, teardrop-shaped marker in the front, and a couple Google maps and other types of cars in front. It stands practically across from the Google Android building with all the dessert statues. That building is the home to Google Maps, and I’m now thinking it is not a coincidence that it is one of the first and last buildings you see on Google campus.

Google’s Entrance Into the Collaborative Economy

My very smart friend, Jeremiah Owyang, as I’ve shared numerous times on this blog, is becoming well known for coining the phrase, “collaborative economy”, a future (and now present) where people no longer just share virtually with each other, but in real life through things like cars, homes and places to stay, and even real goods. In Chicago recently I got on my phone, connected to the Uber app, and it showed me a host of normal operators using their own cars to give people rides from the airport to their destination. As I toured the city, a company let me “borrow” a bicycle from one of many “Divvy bikes” and get around the city where I was able to tour one of the tallest buildings in the world and see Monet paintings at the Chicago museum of fine art. Jeremiah is most definitely onto something.

Companies like Ford and Walmart and others are taking notice to this new trend, many starting to partner with the likes of Uber and AirBNB (a service that lets people rent out rooms in their homes), and others. Some even creating their own similar services to empower and encourage people to use their (the company’s) products which those people own. The problem, I fear, is that in the end this is not the essence of where the collaborative economy is taking us. Google gets this, and I think we’re seeing a hint of it with today’s announcement.

Social Design in the Collaborative Economy

You see, the future doesn’t matter about the product itself. It’s about what the product can do for you. I’ve preached often about the concept of “social design” inside your product and even covered it in Facebook Application Development For Dummies. The idea is that you take the functionality of social networks and bring a person’s close friends and family from those social networks into the design of your app or product (which is often entirely virtual but not always). The next iteration of “social design” is to build software that truly, and ubiquitously integrates the collaborative economy within the product itself. In a perfect, socially-designed product you can’t distinguish between the “social”, and the product itself. It’s all one. Google is doing this with their self-driving cars.

In Google’s world, no one will ever have to own a car. In fact, they won’t even care if anyone else owns a car they can borrow. Google’s key asset is information, not “things”.  Where the cars come from won’t matter. In the future you’ll just say, “Ok Google, give me a ride from Chicago Midway to the Sheraton” on your mobile phone or Google Glass or desktop, and a Google Car will come, pick you up, take you to your destination as you get work done along the way, maybe even ask you if you’d like to stop for a bite to eat along the way (through a contextual, location-targeted ad by McDonalds, of course), and you’ll never even have to pay for the ride. It’s the collaborative economy at its finest, and the automobile industry may not even know what hit them when it does. In the end, information is always more valuable than tangible things.

The competition in the future for the automobile industry, I’m afraid, isn’t the fact that people are borrowing cars from each other and taking public transportation more. Granted, that’s part of it, but not the end result. The future competitor for the automobile industry is the same thing that took out many of the hardware companies of the 80s – it will be software, and the information it indexes. The key players will be software giants like Google, Microsoft (maybe?), Yahoo, and Facebook.

As the information industry makes its way into the collaborative economy, Ford, Chevy, Toyota, you name the automobile company – they will all need to develop competitors to Google Maps and others in the future if they are to survive, or at least remain as large as they are now. The big question is, is it too late? In the end, software still rules the world, and hardware just works for it.

https://youtube.googleapis.com/v/CqSDWoAhvLU&source=uds

Are YOU a Social Asset to Your Company? Are Your Employees?

Posted on by jessestay

One of the things I talk about in Google+ Marketing For Dummies is the importance of getting your employees and brand loyalists involved in social media. This is something I’m seeing has more and more importance with the emergence of Google Authorship and the affect a public profile on Facebook has for individuals. The truth is, our culture is evolving from a culture of brands to a culture of people. The focus is no longer on your brand.

For that reason, I think it’s more and more important that you get your employees, or if you’re an employee, yourself, involved more and more in social media. In the future (and to some extent, now!), your job is going to depend on this!

Let’s take Google Authorship as an example. For one organization I worked with, we implemented Google+ profiles for high ranking officials/executives of the organization, and tied those profiles, using Google Authorship, back to content they had written on the organization’s website. With no content whatsoever on the profile, and solely the link to that individual’s profile, the organization saw a 300% increase in traffic on the individual articles written by those individuals on the company’s website. Imagine what it would have been like with MORE followers and MORE content on those profiles! You can see why I talked about making your website more about people, with content written by actual people in your organization in my books.

Just yesterday, SEO experts started complaining that Google was no longer providing keyword data back to websites for identifying the keywords people are searching for when they visit your website. Google is making it clear that it’s not about keywords any more. It’s about people, and real, genuine content. Your employees and the people behind your brand are a critical part of your SEO strategy now. You see the same with Facebook as they try to penalize “memes” and other brand-focused spam in the News Feed.

Google Authorship is just one strategy though. If you follow me on Facebook, you know I don’t have a Facebook Page for just me. I have Facebook Pages for my books and other brands, but not myself. Instead, I use what’s called a “Public Profile”, and allow people to “follow” me there. I actually do this on purpose. There, of course, are disadvantages to not having a Facebook Page for myself – I can’t advertise as easily (I can do a Promoted URL or Promoted Post back to my personal profile, however). There are no Insights/Analytics for personal profiles.

However, the advantage using a Public Profile is it focuses on me as an individual. It allows me to show the person behind my brand. When people follow me they know they’re following a real individual. I can comment much easier on others’ posts. In addition, I show up in Facebook’s suggestion algorithms as a person, which in my opinion favors more highly than Facebook Pages do. All of this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Here’s one example of why all that’s valuable: Yesterday Mark Zuckerberg changed his profile cover image on Facebook to an old graphic of all the relationships that exist around the world on Facebook which their data team put together back in 2010. Within minutes, he saw tens of thousands of likes on the cover image and I was seeing half my friends share it. I was familiar with this graphic because it hangs on the wall in my office – awhile back I blew it up and printed it out so I could show it off (If Facebook provided a way to purchase these they would sell off-the-charts!).

I commented on Mark Zuckerberg’s cover image stating that I had this hanging on my wall. All of the sudden that evening I started seeing friend requests from people trying to friend me, and new followers coming in like crazy! Within 12 hours I gained more than 1,000 new followers on my profile. It turns out Mark Zuckerberg liked my comment along with a few other of my friends that worked at Facebook, and that alone was enough to highlight the comment as the top comment on his cover image. Organically, 1,000 new followers in 12 hours is pretty good, and now I have the chance to build a personal relationship with every single one of those followers! Seriously, if you want to get some quick followers go reply on my comment that’s already highlighted there (only one reply right now!).

So as you can see, it wasn’t my brand, but my personal profile that provided the value. I couldn’t have accomplished that with a brand page, or bland brand website. You (the person, not the brand), and your employees need to be doing the same.

Next time you think about your presence on social media, stop thinking about Facebook Pages and Google+ Pages, and start looking at ways you can engage your employees and yourself as people on social channels. Make them “social embassadors” for your brand, and you should see ten times the success you are seeing with just one marketer and one team in your company focused on just the brand.

In these days, EVERYONE is a marketer! You need to be training your employees to be social assets for your company. If you’re an employee, your social presence, and even more than that, value (number of followers, etc), will be a defining factor of whether you, or the guy being interviewed next to you gets the job. It’s time to start learning to build audiences through social media, and build your own value for the companies you work for.

For companies and business owners interested, I provide a “Social Embassador” training curriculum as part of my “Everyone a Marketer” program. You can learn more about it here. Talk to me (jesse@staynalive.com) if you’re interested in training your own employees as social assets! I am also doing a webinar in 3 weeks that you and your employees can learn how to grow your brand through Facebook ads. Go here to purchase your tickets and learn more!

In the Internet of Things, the Server in Your Pocket Fills the Room

Posted on by jessestay

I’m going to go on record – the name “server” is going extinct. From servers that filled up entire rooms and buildings to just add simple numbers, we have evolved into a world where I can store a server in the closet of my office to do things like stream TV to the Xboxes in each room of my house. And with the Cloud, I don’t even have to do that. My Nest, my Fitbit, my Sonos, and other devices all use the Cloud to access the internet and sync with each other. But now with Google Glass and wearable computing I’m finding we’re moving to a new type of Server — the server in your pocket called your phone.

For the last several years if you wanted your portable devices to connect to the internet they needed to each have their own SIM card and Cellphone contract. With the many devices in our lives, that prices adds up more and more as I add a Kindle and/or a Nexus 7 for my 6 kids, an iPad for me and my wife, smartphones, and things like Chromebook and other similar devices that use cell connections to get internet. There’s a better way to do it and I think Google Glass is headed there – it’s through the server in your pocket.

Glass decided to take an approach that doesn’t use a cell connection or SIM card to get internet access. Instead, it uses either the bluetooth or WiFi tethering of your phone to get to the internet. It’s not perfect, nor is it ideal, and in fact I see it as one of the biggest complaints amongst users of the device. However, I think that’s a cultural issue that is going to change.

As I head out places now with Google Glass, there’s a process I go through. I check the battery on my phone and my Glass, make sure I have a backup battery, and then I turn on the Wireless Hotspot on my Samsung Galaxy S3 because it doesn’t support Bluetooth tethering. It’s not ideal, but you can see how just a few tweaks to the phone and a recognition that the phone is now the center of all devices around it will fix these issues. I can really see where Google is going with this.

I think you’ll see companies like Google and Apple improve your phone as not just another device on your home network, but the device that powers all of the “things” around you. You’ll see bluetooth profiles emerge where multiple devices can all connect to your phone at once and use the connection. You’ll see automatic awareness of the devices your phone is familiar with, without any user intervention. You’ll see better battery life and I bet you’ll rarely even take your phone out of your pocket, unless you need to truly draw or type something you just can’t speak out loud.

I’ve touched lightly on this subject before with the release of the iPad and integration of Airplay between Apple devices back in 2010 – we’re moving into a world where you’ll have many types of monitors that will automatically sync with your phone. One could be Google Glass. One could be the monitor on your desk. Another could be an iPad or tablet device. Others could be the windows on your car. Or how about Billboards on the side of the road? Or what about syncing with your brain waves and sending you signals with no monitor at all? Believe it or not, we’re almost there. Your phone will be your personal “server” and everything around you will automatically become aware of the presence of your phone.

To do this, Google needs to start improving the Android experience to do this – I expect they’re headed that direction. Apple does too. In the meantime, start practicing getting the word “server” out of your vocabulary – you are the server now.

The future is here.

Want Facial Recognition With Google Glass? Use Google+

Posted on by jessestay

In case you haven’t been reading Facebook or Google+ lately, I got my Google Glass Explorer Edition this past week. You can expect me to share much more of my experiences here as I learn about it. One of the most frequently asked feature requests I see surrounding Google Glass is that it would be awesome if it had some sort of facial recognition included. We’re seeing apps like MedRef that make facial recognition (sort of) available for medical professionals, but the question still remains, will we get to have it built in? Well the answer is it’s actually already there – if you turn it on in Google+.

In your Google+ account settings there’s an option to notify you if someone “Shares a photo or video with me that I might be in.” Enable that and even set it to send you an SMS when it happens. When someone takes a picture of you via Google Glass and shares it to Google+, it should notify you. Approve that, and now they know who you are.

Of course, it’s a bit of a hack, and the person you’re taking a picture of must be using Google+ and have this enabled to work, but it is a way to know who you are taking pictures of. So if you get Google Glass (when it’s available to the masses), and you’re taking pictures of people via the device, be sure to share it to Google+. Maybe if you’re lucky they’ll get notified that their picture was taken, approve it, and now you’ll have a tagged picture with their name on it.

It’s definitely not ideal, but this at least does suggest that it wouldn’t be very difficult to make facial recognition a more integrated part of Google Glass. Let’s hope by the time most of you use it you’ll get this functionality by default. In the meantime make sure you’ve got a Google+ account!

Help Me Sell My New Book – Get Free Stuff!

Posted on by jessestay

Who wants to help me promote Google+ Marketing For Dummies? I need volunteers to share my new book, now available on Amazon (http://stay.am/gplusmarketing) in the best way they are able. This can be through an ad that stays on your blog for a month, a mention to your audience as many times as possible over the next month, a shoutout in your email list – let me know in the comments what you’re willing to do. Here’s what you get if I agree to your offer:

1. I’ll send you a free, signed copy of the book, and an extra book to give to your audience.
2. Some time in the next month (first come, first serve), I’ll do a post on StayNAlive.com featuring a few items I notice with your website or social presence that I think you can improve (let me know what you’d like me to look over with your offer).
3. I’ll give you a free code for 1 week on Pluralsight to access my courses (and others) on Facebook and Google+, and get a screencast-overview of my best tips for marketing on Google+.

Let me know in the comments what you might be able to do to help sell Google+ Marketing For Dummies in the next month, and I’ll contact each of you to arrange the above items as you’re able to help out. I’m also open to other ideas if you have something grand planned!

How to Get Notified When People Talk About Your Website on Google+

Posted on by jessestay

Want a notification any time someone comments or posts about your website on Google+? You can do this with Google Analytics:

1. Go to the “Traffic Sources” section of Google Analytics for your website
2. Expand the “Social” sub-section.
3. Click on “Sources”.
4. Click on the “Activity Stream” tab next to the “Social Referral” tab

Now you’ll have a list of everyone posting and commenting about your website on Google+. You just need to create an email alert. To do this:

1. At the top of the page, click the “Email” link (next to “Advanced Segments”).
2. Select the attachment type you want.
3. Choose how frequently you want to be notified (I choose “Daily” – it would be nice if they had an “Immediately” option).
4. Designate an email address for who will receive the report.

5. Enter some text into the body of the email that you want to appear in each email you receive.

Click “Send”, and you’ll soon be receiving notifications of every person that links to your website from Google+!

This #dummiestip will be in Chapter 13 of Google+ Marketing For Dummies

The Marissa Mayer Era is All About Product

Posted on by jessestay

People keep saying Yahoo engineers and employees are going to feel less-likely to want to leave Yahoo now that +Marissa Mayer is the CEO. While I’m sure it will be a more comfortable environment, I would be worried right now if I worked there. Here’s why:

Yahoo needs a complete reboot.

If Marissa’s smart, she’ll kill just about everything except a few core projects the company is good at, and start over. Yahoo’s now the underdog, which means they need to move fast. They need to go back to startup mode. The mode Google was in when Marissa joined Google. They’ve got to be able to move faster, move better, and out-pace the likes of Google and Facebook as they move forward. They need a core focus as they do this.

For that reason I anticipate many employees being let go and Yahoo going back to core principles and values. Yahoo, more than anything needs to focus.

My Yahoo? Goodbye. Yahoo mail? Goodbye. Flickr? Goodbye. You can probably say most programs outside search, social, and perhaps mobile will go. Or, Yahoo will decide a different focus and get rid of everything that is not that. If they don’t, Yahoo won’t survive. They simply can’t, nor can they move fast enough right now to beat the competition. In many ways, this is what Google did with Google+ (but Google could afford not to need to lay anyone off in the process). I bet Marissa does the same at Yahoo, at even greater scale.

Marissa’s an expert at Product Management – that’s what she did at Google. This means she’ll pick a few products, iterate quickly, and move fast. Then, they’ll expand from there and adapt as they grow. At the moment Yahoo’s stuck in waterfall mode and Marissa’s the perfect person to get them out of that mess.


Posted originally on Google+.

2012 Google I/O – Is This the 2007 Facebook F8?

Posted on by jessestay

All eyes should be on Google’s Annual Developer Conference, Google I/O next week. As the first Google I/O with the Google+ Team, and a serious read/write API yet to launch, I predict we are about to see an explosion of social apps at a level we haven’t seen since Facebook’s F8 Conference in 2007 when they launched their platform to the world. The parallels are very similar.

Let’s look first at the original APIs for both. Some may not be aware of this, but previous to Facebook’s 2007 F8 conference, they too had an API very similar to the state of Google+’s API today. Called “Facebook Developers”, the original API in 2006 was limited to a small number of requests per day, very similar to Google+’s current platform. It was mostly a read-only API, with, eventually, the ability to create widgets that could be embedded as apps on a person’s Wall – a new feature of Facebook at the time. You could also access very limited data about a person’s friend graph and wall posts. It wasn’t until F8 of 2007 that Facebook really opened the floodgates for this, increasing API requests, opening up the ability for “Canvas apps”, and giving full access to integrate apps into multiple “integration points” within Facebook itself. In fact, it wasn’t until years after that that developers could really start integrating this data into other websites and mobile apps. Just like Google+, Facebook took baby steps to launch their API, but when they were ready, they launched big.

Google+ is in a very similar state today. Their platform is limited in the number of requests you can make per minute, and per day. They only allow a few select enterprise partners write access to the news feed. They’ve opened up a few elements, such as games, to a few partners to integrate right on Google+, but in very limited form. They’re in a very similar state to Facebook in 2007. When Facebook launched though, developers came in droves, seeing user growth in the millions in a matter of days. Facebook itself grew significantly during this time.

It was during this time that I met Paul Allen, who was looking to launch his company, FamilyLink (originally called We’re Related). He and I both saw eye-to-eye on the power of this platform, and while we both took our separate ways we saw first hand the power of platforms like these.

While I’m sure Google has had the opportunity to learn from Facebook’s mistakes (Facebook has had to change their platform quite a bit since they originally launched), I anticipate we could see a similar flood when Google+ finally launches their full platform to the world. Will we see a Canvas Page-like approach? I’d guess we will – OpenSocial supports this and much of Google+’s current platform bases on OpenSocial standards.

I anticipate a number of integration points, a raised request limit, and as a result an increase in apps, and developers coming to the Google+ platform. There’s one advantage Google+ has over Facebook though: Google+ has Google. Remember always that Google+ is just a social layer over all Google products. That means even their platform will likely some day extend across all of their products. This is exciting, and what will bring similar success to developers in the same way Facebook did back in 2007.

Next week is a very exciting week for Google+ and Google as a company! I’ll be there every day of the conference, and I can’t wait to see what gets announced. To me this is one of the most exciting conferences in the history of Google, and it will be fun to have a front seat to this moment in history. Keep watching my stream on Google+, and on StayNAlive.com to keep updated of the event!

(Disclosure: FamilyLink is a former client of mine)


Originally posted on Google+!

Why Changing Your LinkedIn Password Is Not Enough

Posted on by jessestay

The news is spreading today that LinkedIn’s database was hacked, and millions of users accounts have been compromised. I keep hearing over and over again to “change your password.” That’s smart. I changed mine this morning. Something that people aren’t saying though is that your other social networking accounts could be at risk as well thanks to LinkedIn’s poor security policies. Here’s why:

If you’re one of the majority of people that use your password on more than one social network (yes, I’m looking at you, because you’re likely one of them – there are even security professionals that make this mistake), the first thing I would do as a hacker once I decrypted the digested passwords obtained is not target your LinkedIn account. Instead, I’d start going through Facebook, Twitter, and even Google and start trying it there where I could do more damage.

Is it the same as your Gmail account? Sweet! I get some LOLz on your behalf, and I can now start making password requests, without your knowledge, to all of your other accounts. Now I can post to the Google+ Pages you manage. I can post to the Facebook Pages you manage. See where I’m getting?

If you were using the same password on LinkedIn as anywhere else important on the web, you need to go now and change your password there as well. Here are some quick tips as you do so:

  • Make it more than just a word and numbers. Make it a sentence, preferably with letters, spaces, numbers, and even non-alphanumeric numbers (like $ and * and others).
  • Keep it at least 10 characters long – if you take my above recommendation, that should be easy because sentences are easy to remember.
  • Use a different password for each social network. You could use a similar password, but add a different set of numbers or words to the end to help you remember which is which. Figure out a system that works for you and that you can remember.
  • If you can, rotate your passwords every so often. Change the numbers or words added to the end. Add a character or two. It’s up to you. That will prevent this from being a problem in the future.


These tips should keep you safe, and they really aren’t very difficult to do. You just have to build a system, and do it!


This article was shared first on Google+.