I speak a lot about Google+ as a tool for business. In fact I’ve just written a book called “Google+ for Business Tweet” and I’m presenting a second  Focus.com Roundtable  in February. So you might think my position would be that Google+ is the be-all end-all social media network for business and people should be pitching their blogs and Facebook pages out the window in favor of Google+.  And there you’d be mistaken.

Here’s the thing. Google+ is a social network with huge potential for businesses, but it’s best value is as an individual user, not a business page. If it had any of the following features it might be a contender, but as it is today? No way.

• A “vanity URL so you can direct customers to your page in print material or verbally. “Find me on Google+ at Google.com/SocialMediaCoach” would be one thing. But wh’s going to remember “https://plus.google.com/b/113284144259635347526/“???
• User interface editing abilities. If you’re good with using only the wall on your Facebook page, this might still work for you, but one of the ways Facebook has Google+ totally beat is the many ways you can interact with your followers. Custom landing pages, polling, events, insights into traffic and performance, now that would make a difference.
• Notifications. Managing a Google+ page is a bit easier now that you can add multiple admins, but getting an email or text alert that someone has reacted to a post , followed the page, or tried to contact you would be great.
• Integrated profiles. Currently there’s no way to know who is managing a Google+ page,  and precious little on the “About” page. Give us a place for a call to action, a link to our Google Voice number please.

Now there’s more, but after all Google+ is still in beta, I’m cutting it some slack. They’re working on it and it keeps getting better and better. For now though, here’s how you CAN use it for your business.

Research and outreach
Needless to say, Google profiles are a huge resource for business. Who’s interested in your industry? Where are the influencers and groundbreaking technologists? Follow the best of the best and learn about what interests them. Take a look at the Ripples of some conversations to find even more influential Google+ users.

Building the brand of your company through the intelligence of your staff
YOu hire the best and the brightest right? Let them shine on Google+ and help build the brand identity of your company through your fabulous employees and their ideas. This includes the CEO, the marketing team and your engineers. Nothing proprietary of course, but perhaps there is a collaborative opportunity out there waiting to be discovered.

Customer support
YOu don’t have to have a business page to support your customers. Search Google+ for people talking about your business and reach out to them as a human person who wants to help. Now that’s something they will remember. Be genuine about it though, no Trojan horses allowed.

Hangouts
Schedule some hangouts with your staff to talk to real live customers and potential customers. .Show them who you are and what you’re thinking about.  A relaxed environment like this can bring out the best questions and show you’re truly interested in the needs of your customers. Hanging out in somebody else’s hangout is also great. Don’t steal the show but be pleasant and useful. Add to the conversation and support the owner of the hangout.

Micro-blog
Really Google+ might be a good replacement for your micro-blog. Post URLs here with a short comment or two. Got a quick thought but not the time to write an entire blog post? No problem, on Google+ you can shout out and ask others for their input.

Collaborative meetings
Another way to use Chat and Hangouts is to share docs and screens within a Hangout with your team. If you work with a team spread out all over  the world, this is a great way to inspire unity.

SEO
Last, but certainly not least, is the HUGE SEO value of a Google+ profile for individuals. If your CXOs set up profiles with links to your business with the right keywords it may really be one of the best traffic drivers you have. We’re still testing this theory, but it only makes sense that these profiles will be SEO gold.

So, what do you you think? Are you ditching your Facebook page for a Google+ business page yet? Will you? Why or why not?

On January 18 websites all over the net will go dark from 8AM to 8 PM, and this will be one of them. Why? Well for one, because I still can. One of the most powerful things about the internet is that it is largely not controlled by government. Sure, I’m against piracy, but not if it means DNS filtering that could actually penalize lawful businesses. Not if it means messing with the Domain Name System and push users towards unreliable, less secure DNS servers just to avoid frivolous lawsuits, block “suspicions Foreign websites”, and squash the entrepreneurial spirit of the internet. Especially not if it gives companies who get your site taken down because of supposed IP violations without due process and even if you can later get it re-instated you have no recourse.

Want to know more about SOPA and PIPA?

• Here’s the anti-SOPA protest site.
• Here’s what President Obama said about it.
• Rupert Murdoch and Chris Dodd think it’s a good idea (what does THAT tell you?)
• Here’s the full text of the SOPA bill on the Wall St Journal site
• Here’s the text of the PIPA bill

I’m giving you two perspectives. Now go decide on your own, because that’s the best thing about the internet, you get to gather your own data and make your own choices. Isn’t it grand?

Maddie Grant threw down a glove challenging a number of people to participate in a meme answering the question “How are you going to change the world in 2012?” It’s a great question.

I love the chaos theory metaphor called the butterfly effect. The idea is that a small, relatively insignificant act can created marked and sometimes unexpected change. The flap of a butterfly’s wing can cause a hurricane on the other side of the world.

Small business that we are at Tatu Digital Media, we have been fortunate to impact corporations and individuals and show them how to be more effective and efficient in how they do business online. Hopefully the effect of our small efforts can help to change the world in ways we can’t begin to predict.

We are already working with a number of non-profits to help them understand social media tools and techniques. In fact, it’s part of Tatu Digital’s mission for a minimum of 25% of our work to be with non-profits. in 2012 we plan to increase our pro-bono work through interactive training for nonprofits, particularly in inbound marketing practices and of course, using social media.

Through our work with corporate client we’ve amassed a pile of content on these topics that will be useful to non-profits who want to expand their outreach to volunteers, donors, evangelists and potential team members through inbound marketing. We’ll be adding social media training webinars or live sessions for non-profits throughout 2012.

The first of these trainings will be a webinar for Vivanista on January 12, 2012 at 9 AM on using Google+. Come join us, it’s free, you just need to sign up.

Stay tuned for more of these free training sessions for non-profits, and if you work with non-profits and would like to talk about setting up training on social media or inbound marketing, talk to me.

Now, what are YOU going to do to change the world in 2012?? Add your thoughts in the comments!

I follow almost 4,000 people on Twitter, over 1500 on Linkedin, and more on Facebook, Google+, blogs, forums, a zillion social networks, wikis and more. I get around 800 emails a day (half of them are alerts, newsletters and feed reports for my clients). I’m not bragging, there are plenty of people with more, it’s just a fact of my life. How do I manage to do all that every day and still run a full time business? Great question. I don’t. Nobody else does either, at least not by themselves and definitely not every day.

Here’s the big deep dark secret about using social media for business; you’ve got to have discipline. If you get derailed by Farmville for an hour every time you go into Facebook your business may have a problem. If it’s open all day in your browser while you “work” then you may need an intervention.

People tell me 5-6 times a day that they can’t make time for social media. I agree it’s hard, but when you look at how much time it takes to cold-call a customer, visit their office, buy them lunch, walk their dog and take out their trash to get their business it’s nothing.

Think about the literal time it took to get one client to return your calls. Break it down. How many times did you have to contact them before you could talk business? How much aggregate time did it take? Now multiply that by how many individuals you want at the top of your sales funnel this week.

Now look at social media where you can break the ice and get that initial conversation10, 20,100 or thousands at a time. Then you continue to add value to their day every single day with the click of a mouse and a few carefully chosen mentions. To top that off the very people you reach will share your message and value with their own connections and act as your agents to attract new business to you without you even lifting a finger.

So don’t talk to me about how social media takes too much time when it’s really that you aren’t focused in how you’re using it. By this I don’t mean you are constantly pushing out your marketing messaging and talking about business. You know as well as I do that you don’t approach a new client, stick your hand and say “HI, I’m Janet, buy my stuff!”. No, you have to get to know them first. Listen to what matters to them and what they care about, then you can help solve their problem with what you have.

Turn off Twitter
Leaving Twitter open in your browser all day is distracting. Set your mentions and direct messages to send you an alert. I use TweetBot on my phone and it lets me know when I get a message and I can then respond. I open Twitter up 3-4 times a day, scan for new things to share and decide if I’m going to send them now or later. I shoot off a few pertinent Tweets, bookmark some links for later reading and get off.

Scheduling is your friend
I use a combination of tools to schedule my updates and they almost all have a browser bookmarklet so as I surf I can add items to the scheduling tools on the fly. Sure some posts are timely but a lot of them can wait a little while and if you use an app like Buffer you can send that tweet when your network is most likely to be paying attention too. I also use Hootsuite which is good for scheduling a series of tweets for when you may be traveling or getting close to an event you want people to know about.

On Facebook I use a combination of Hootsuite and MediaFeedia. Both tools allow me to monitor and update multiple accounts which is great. Mediafeedia also allows you to send out special offers to your fans and like Hootsuite pro, delegate to others on your team as needed.

Check the mirror
Is your messaging getting derailed by cool cats and hip conversation? Use a tool like NutshellMail to see a summary of your conversations on a regular basis.What do you talk about most? Who are you talking to a lot and who is talking about you? Use what you learn to fine tune your messaging and reach out to connect with people on a deeper level.

Delegate
You don’t have to do it all yourself. There are lots of task that can be handed to a virtual admin. Moderating forums, replying to basic questions on your social networks, finding new topics for your to comment on or RSS feeds to add to your reader, research on industry information for your blog posts, updating your blog software or finding the right plugins.All of these things and much more can be done by a talented assistant. Heck, you can deliver a pile of information and have an admin split it up into items you can share on your social networks and schedule them for you. These are all things you can outsource and leave the focused personal interaction to you.

Turn off email
I tell my clients to contact me by direct tweets, text, phone and email and in that order. According to many recent surveys email is dead. I won’t go that far but honestly I just don’t read it as often anymore. I only hit my email box 3-4 times per day. I scan for spam and delete it, filter all of my alerts into mailboxes relative to the topics so I can scan and use or delete, and filter all of my clients into boxes so I can scan the boxes quickly and see which businesses are sending me mail and reply quickly.

Get a plan
An organized plan can be a huge help. If you blog create an editorial calendar. If you use microblogs think of a theme for what you want to talk about and schedule some conversation starters. Then fill in the gaps with real-time post to specific people. If you are blogging set aside some time once a month to brainstorm new ideas and if you can, write 2-3 or even more blog posts, then schedule them for release. Better yet, send them to your admin and have him format and schedule them for you.

Stay focused
If you love the games on Facebook, surfing for videos of cute cats or save them for after hours. Your goal is to create relationships and raise the visibility of your business. Keep your eye on the ball and think of never making a cold call again.

Choose your friends
Be thoughtful about who you connect with. The idea of automatically following anybody who follows you on any social media network is a recipe for a clogged private message box full of spam. Even more important, people judge you by who you follow to decide if I want to be associated with you. Set aside a few minutes each week to look at those new followers. Are they truly interesting or after you as a notch on their social media bedpost?

If it’s not working, quit
You don’t have to be on every social media network in the universe. Keep your networks limited to what is truly useful. If a network just doesn’t work for you just move on. Maybe the crowd you want isn’t there or maybe you just hate the interface. Don’t worry, there are plenty more where that came from. I tell clients to pick one network you like. learn it and let your followers tell you where the next network you need to use is. Go where the potential is not where the social media gurus tell you you “gotta be”.

Follow through
Social networks are a tool for business but they do not replace actual conversation. Once you break the ice with social media reach out to the people you’ve connected with. Give them a call. Meet face to face. I can’t tell you how many out of the blue conversations have become fruitful business this way. Go ahead, give it a try! Here’s my number 408.216.7423.

One of the fantastic things about the growth of social media is how it has widened our window on the world. We live in amazing times where we can create deep friendships with people we may never meet face to face, or meet people whom we’ve known through social media networks for the first time face-to-face and it’s as if we’ve lived next door to each other for years.

As I wrap up the year I want to take a moment to share with you 15 amazing women bloggers I’ve gotten to know, respect and learn from on a daily basis. Some of them I know in person, but many I know through their blogs and Twitter personas. You should probably get to know some of them too. By the way, instead of just linking to their blogs I linked to some of my favorite posts, so make sure you visit those links! So, without further ado, a few of the many women I’ve learned from this year in no particular order at all. Am I missing someone? Help us find new great women bloggers and add your favs to the list.

Amber Naslund

@Ambercadabra Amber co-wrote The Now Revolution with Jay Baer, they really get what makes new media work for business. She’s smart, she says it like it is, and her insights on business and marketing are spot on. Amber’s recently left her role leading the social media charge at Radian6 to go out on her own with HiddenStartup and it will be fun to watch her grow her business.

Naomi Dunford

@Naomidunford Naomi is one smart marketer. She calls herself a “micro business marketing consultant”meaning she loves to help small companies get the most out of their marketing without spending a ton of money doing it. She’s salty, irreverent and I always learn something from her newsletters I can apply to my own business.

CJ Brasiel

@CJBrasiel CJ is one of the most sincere and generous people I know. She blogs about real estate at TalktoCj where she shares everything from Silicon Valley market info and tips on marketing a home to local events and politics. If you’ve got a question about real estate, San Jose or cat rescue, ask CJ and if she doesn’t know it she’ll find out.

Liza Sabater

@BlogDiva Liza blogs on culture, tech and online communications. She’s outspoken and often outrageous in Spanish and/or English and a delightfully refreshing voice among the usual culture and political pundits out there. Read Daily Gotham for her insight into New York politics and culture.

Shelly Kramer

@ShellyKramer Has been named one of the 200 most fearless women in social media and the top 30 women entrepreneurs to follow on Twitter by Forbes Woman. She’s smart, sassy and never afraid to say what she thinks. Shelly owns marketing and branding agency V3 Integrated Marketing.

Maddie Grant

@MaddieGrant Another fearless woman entrepreneur, Maddie is a co-author of “Humanize, How people-centric organizations succeed in a social world”. She co-funded Social Fish, working with non-profits and association to show them how to make the best use of social media.

Liz Strauss

@LizStrauss Liz is the founder of SOB Con, dedicated to connecting the great thinkers around the internet to get together and brainstorm, share best practices and insights and get to know each other one on one. She’s also a leadership and marketing mentor and is on more top 100 social media, blogging and women in business lists than you can shake a stick at. At the same time she’s down to earth and generous with her knowledge on all of the many platforms she participates on.

Corvida Raven

@Corvida SheGeeks is the name of her blog and Corvida delivers all that us girl geeks love. Wanna learn about tech, social media, mobile? Corvida delivers it all up with her characteristic sense of humor and she makes the geeky technical details approachable and helps keep me on top of the latest gadgets, gizmos and software I just gotta have.

Sarah Perez

@SarahinTampa Another amazing tech blogger, Sarah brings her experience in the financial, retail and software industry to TechCrunch where she is always on top of the latest news, gadgets and mobile apps. I first started reading Sarah’s work when she was at ReadWriteWeb and now
she’s at TechCrunch turning out all you need to know about tech.

Nina Kaufman

@NinaKaufman An award winning speaker and business lawyer, Nina blogs about legal tips and best practices for business on everything from Trademark law to the risks of letting your employees blog. Scan through her posts and you’re sure to find something you wish you’d known about before.

Lisa Hammond

@thebarefootceo Founder of the Barefoot CEO and author of “Dream Big, Finding the courage to follow your dreams and laugh at your nightmares” and several other books dedicated to empowering and inspiring women to live the life they want to live.

Beth Kanter

@Kanter Speaking of non-profits, Beth is the queen of all things social media in the not for profit world and she shares more generously than anyone I know. Her book, “The Networked Nonprofit”is a must read for anyone wanting to understand how social media fits into their business model. Her Slideshare, blog and wiki are treasure troves of information for small business and non-profit alike.

Sonia Simone

@SoniaSimone blogs at Remarkable Communication where she writes about effective content marketing, among other things. She’s also co-founder of CopyBlogger Media and also ThirdTribe, spreading the word of how to do Internet marketing the smart way.

Catherine Friend

Catherine is the author or “Hit by a Farm–How I stopped worrying and learned to love the farm”. With my own history of growing up in rural Wisconsin her stories regularly leave me rolling on the floor with tears in my eyes. Really. This is how life really is out of the city.

Nilofer Merchant

@Nilofer is a Ted speaker and cultural change agent. She’s worked with humongous corps like Apple, Autodesk and inspires innovation in businesses of all sizes and types. If you’re looking for someone to disrupt your normal way of thinking about your business you should know more about Nilofer.

Yes, it’s all hallow’s eve, and while the kiddies are thinking about candy and costumes and spooky houses they’ll visit tonight, business people have a different idea of what’s truly scary. Especially PR and marketing professionals who are watching social media speed up the reaction time of their customers to light speed. How can we keep up? For your reading pleasure a few horror stories and near misses from businesses around the world. There is a lesson in every single one, so pay attention!

Citibank
Social Media is no new medium to Frank Eliason, SVP for Citibank, so when Occupy Wall St protesters heard that Citibank staff had called 911 when protesters entered a branch in New York and the word went out on multiple social media channels that people were being arrested, he didn’t sit on his hands hoping it would all blow over. He didn’t waste any time gathering as much data and content as he could so people could get a better picture.

Sure, there was the video of protesters being arrested, prevented from leaving the building, but there was also video from inside the building during the protest which basically showed the protesters disrupting business, not canceling accounts, but asking for support from the staff.

Now Frank was on his way to speak at PivotCom, where he could have expected a lot of tough questions about leaving his office at a critical time to attend a conference. He opened his talk with the video of the arrests followed by the video of what was going on inside which prompted the staff to call 911.

The lesson?
By doing this, Frank reached thousands of people through Google Plus, Twitter, Facebook and several blogs, possibly many more than the Occupy Wall St folks simply because of his own network combined with the powerful networks who were at Pivotcom. Basically leveraging social media to show the whole story and showing at the same time that transparency is ALWAYS best.

Ragu
Ragu sauces thought they could take a poke at Dads’ apparent ineptitude at cooking dinner for the kids fairly safely, and many years ago mebbe so, but with today’s social media savvy dads, many of whom make the choice stay at home to care for the family and/or work at home– it just wasn’t so smart to launch their “Dad Cooks Dinner” video channel. Needless to say Dads didn’t think it was funny.

Then somebody at Ragu got the bright idea of reaching out to some Dads on Twitter, notably CC Chapman, a blogger and social media celeb who is also known as a “Digital Dad”.

CC went on a pretty good rant on the subject and of course other social media people picked up the flag and ran with it, although not all of them took his side in the discussion, including the mommy bloggers who gave their opinions in the video. In fact I brought it up in a panel on Social media for brands at OMMA Social in San Francisco last week.

In the end CC decided to make his own sauce, showing that yes, Dads CAN cook too. He even offered a little social media advice for Ragu, just in case they were paying attention. It’s good advice too. Click the link and go read it. It doesn’t look like Ragu did though.

What did Ragu do? Eventually they called CC to talk to him, but their initial reaction was to stick their head in the sand and ignore it. The videos are still up, showing they either decided to ignore the whole mess, or they really just don’t care, but not before it got a little out of hand.

The lesson?
After being dissected in social media circles for weeks, in the end Ragu leaves a bad taste in some people’s mouths. Why? Because they didn’t do their homework and they didn’t engage their target market in a genuine way. Rather than offering the videos up as a sauce in your face slap, they might have posted a contest that pitted both Moms and Dads against each other for the most innovative recipes and put a positive spin on Dads in the kitchen instead. They could have reached out to Dads and asked them for their secret ways to use the sauce to spice up meals instead of pitting Mommy bloggers against Daddy bloggers. Lastly they should have researched who they were reaching out to sop they would have a clue as to how it would be received.

Chapstick
As you’ve seen above not all of these social media nightmares are huge worldwide disasters, and if responded to in some way that engages the people involved things can settle down and people can be reasonable. But if you don’t talk to them, or try to muffle their voices it’s going to get ugly. Take Chapstick for example. They posted a pretty silly add of a woman up-ended over her couch, hair flying, apparently looking for her long-lost tube of Chapstick on their Facebook page above the catchy title “Where do lost Chapsticks go?”. Apparently the image needed to be explained, and they wanted to invite people to share their thoughts on this riveting topic on their Facebook page.

OK, silly image right? No big deal right? Well, some people posted comments on the Facebook page complaining about the ad and blogger Margot Magowan didn’t think it was funny. She blogged about it and then posted on the wall of the Chapstick Facebook page. Chapstick admins deleted the comment. Others posted their thoughts on the subject and Chapstick deleted those too. Then they took down the ad and replaced the picture of the girl with one of some tubes of Chapstick. Problem solved right? Oh no, this opened a Pandora’s box of complaints and user launched “Butt seriously, Chapstick” a page on Facebook all about the whole mess where people could complain to their heart’s content. Golly, we can hardly wait to see response to the new campaign featuring Australia’s top model with the tag line “Never let your lips go naked”….

Had they not pulled the comments down it might have all blown over with a simple heart felt apology for any offense.

The lesson?
Seriously. It wasn’t the ad itself, it was how it was handled. Chapstick had a great opportunity here to reach out to the consumer and say something like “Gee, we’re sorry you don’t like the ad, we didn’t mean any harm”. and call it a day. They could have made a series of images with people in equally silly situations searching desperately for lost tubes in odd places. Really, their only mistake was trying to cover it up by deleting comments. Negative comments are an opportunity to learn from your users and to let them know you are listening. To correct a negative assumption.

I’m well aware that there is a huge amount of cyber bullying going on out there, particularly with our kids, but that’s not what this post is about. Not entirely anyway. This one is about people using social media as a weapon to bully brands and service providers into getting what they want.

We’ve all heard the story about the blogger at a Blogher event who threatened the Crocs shoes rep with retribution on her blog, waving around her legions of followers as a reason to give her free shoes, and there are a lot of these stories, more every day. “”Ya know, if you don’t give me shoes – I could totally write something bad about you on my blog.”

Or the mega Twitter user who spoke the magic words: “Do you know what Twitter is? Because I have over a million followers on Twitter.” against a Maytag customer service rep.

Today I was talking with a volunteer at a local cat shelter. She had helped a client connect with a lovely cat, told them the cat might need some adjustment time and sometimes cats get the sniffles when they’re stressed–like moving to a new home. She went through the several pages of agreements and such and spent over 2 hours with the client so they would understand all the potential challenges of adopting a rescue.

As luck would have it an issue developed with the cat and the volunteer had given them her email, so instead of contacting the shelter they contacted her. They proceeded to demand that she personally solve the issues and just to add that extra weight to their influence they informed her that “We’re tracking all of this on Facebook” implying that if she didn’t solve it they’d be talking about her personally with her neighbors and trashing the shelters reputation to boot.

She never even had time to offer to resolve it before he brought out the heavy social media artillery. This means that any resolution can be perceived to be because of the threat, not just because she did the right thing. I happen to know her quite well. Trust me, she would have done the right thing and she did.

These are not at all unique stories. Everybody seems to know one. We’re becoming a culture of instant gratified “or else” and even litigation over interactions on social networks is common. When did we become so rude? Just because you have access to social media doesn’t give you license to swing your social network around like a mace.

Some things never change. There are trolls out there still who love to vent their inner curmudgeonly spleen on anyone within reach. We all know at least one. But what is your personal perception of the person who is constantly complaining and throwing their weight around?

That’s right, you think they’re jerks.

Well, unless you ARE them–and if that’s the case, this message is specifically for you– social networks go both ways.You may think you can use your network as leverage to get what you want but your network sees that too. They’re watching. Sometimes it backfires on you to be obstreperous with a brand your network thinks highly of.

How do you want people to perceive you? How do you think people perceive the people in the examples above? Can’t we just all get along?

Today I’ve got a guest post from Christian Arno. Read below for more info.

Most businesses are now well aware of the benefits that using social media can bring, such as driving sales, getting customer feedback, building brand awareness and more. However, the majority are still only focusing on major social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Whilst these channels are undoubtedly very useful, there are also extremely popular social networks in other countries which should not be overlooked.

A 2010 report from Econsultancy found that over 80% of marketers are planning to spend more on social media this year, but only a quarter will focus their campaigns in more than one country.

This is actually quite a surprising statistic given that a separate study from Common Sense Advisory found that companies typically see a return of $25 for every $1 they invest in localization.

In addition, English only accounts for 31% of language use online, so it’s easy to see how ignoring foreign markets in your social media campaigns  could mean dismissing a large number of potential customers.

Choosing your networks
The major networks such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are typically used by people of many countries, so it makes sense to have a presence there, segmenting your channels by country.

Figures from Facebook show that English is the most used language on the network, followed by Spanish, French, Turkish and Indonesian. Research like this is handy for localizing your company’s social media efforts.

However, the point is that you shouldn’t stop with these global networks, as there are other networks within individual countries which are extremely popular. You’ll need to do your research, and also consider asking local social media professionals about the best local platforms for your business.

Qzone, Renren, Mixi and Orkut
Qzone and Renren are massively popular in China and can’t realistically be ignored if you’re targeting customers there. These social media sites have as many as 380 million and 120 million customers respectively. Some have argued that many of the accounts are actually dormant, but it’s worth looking into and testing the waters, as this could be a massive potential audience.

Research shows that Mixi has the largest slice of the market in Japan, with an estimated 30 million users, whilst Orkut has a significant impact in both India and Brazil.

Xing
Xing has been dubbed by some as the “European LinkedIn” due to its popularity in countries such as Switzerland, Austria and Germany. Whilst the site may not be more popular than LinkedIn, it does have around 10 million users, which illustrates how it’s essential for business networking in Europe. Xing works in a similar way to LinkedIn in terms of networking, building contacts and gathering references. It costs around $8 per month for a premium membership, but free accounts are available too with fewer features.

Viadeo
Another significant professional networking site in Europe is Viadeo, which has around 30 million registered users, with members from all across Europe. Around one in ten registered users, for example, are thought to be from France. However, the network also attracts members from China.

As with LinkedIn and Xing, registered users can pull in other social media activity such as a Twitter feed, document and presentation-sharing software and more. The site has a fresh, modern look, but it can take a little while to get used to its functionality and interface.

It’s well worth spending the time to research the social networks outside the major players used in English-speaking countries. If you’re doing business internationally, the same rules apply for social media as they do for all other marketing – always localize!

About the author
Christian Arno is the founder of professional translation services provider Lingo24, experts in the foreign language internet. Launched in 2001, Lingo24 now has over 150 employees spanning three continents and clients in over sixty countries. In the past twelve months, they have translated over forty million words for businesses in every industry sector, including the likes of MTV and World Bank. Follow Lingo24 on Twitter: @Lingo24.

You may have been watching one of those PR nightmares in progress, this time with healthy food giant Whole Foods?

Whole Foods teamed up with Halal food brand Saffron Road to promote targeted products on their web site as well as some giveaways of coupons and gift certificates on their web site in their first Ramadan marketing campaign. So far so good right? After all why shouldn’t they support a holiday that is celebrated by millions of Americans?

A post on their blog, written by Yvonne Maffel, offered up recipes featuring Saffron Road’s offerings and giving a little background on Ramadan and that she would be giving away coupons and gift cards on her blog, My Halal Kitchen. The feedback on the Whole Foods blog is overall positive and friendly. Couponsare also offered on some other sites, like Zabihah, a guide to finding Halal food and restaurants. Good so far.

Fast Company posted Whole Foods Celebrates, Monetizes Ramadan which pointed out that in-store campaigns weren’t planned yet, but the entire promotion was to be online. Again, comments were largely positive, though there were a few complaints that Whole foods didn’t celebrate Jewish holidays.

Then all hell broke loose
A Houston Press blog post broke with a copy of an internal email to the team in the Southwest region (Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas and Oklahoma). There’s a copy posted here and here’s the inflammatory excerpt.

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Blogger Debbie Schlussel posted “Anti-Israel Whole Foods Wishes You a Happy Ramadan” which jumped all over Whole Foods with claims like, “I received many reports from Whole Foods customers that Israeli olive oil and other products had been removed from the shelves of many Whole Foods, replaced by the Palestinian terrorism olive oil. My reports didn’t stop ignoramuses like Michelle Malkin Fraudkin from blindly urging people to buy goods at jihadist-enabling Whole Foods, merely because its CEO was under fire for opposing Obamacare. ”
By the way, Debbie’s gone after Whole Foods before, including this gem. “Welcome to Palestinian “Fair Trade”: Olive Oil Sold @ Whole Foods Funds Study @ Anti-Semitic, Pro-HAMAS Universities; Dr. Bronner’s Soap, Too“.

Yikes.

The Huffington post accused Whole Foods of “capitulating to Islamophobes“.

Gawker Said they “Caved to Wingnuts”

Twitter posts started popping up to boycott Whole Foods and criticizing them for giving in. (for a campaign they never cancelled.)

Then the story started to turn. Even on Twitter

The Atlantic Wire posted “How Whole Foods Got Accused of Caving to Bigots”. In which they detailed the blowup of the story and NPR posted “Whole Foods: Ramadan Promotion Has Not Been Cancelled“.

TBD posted “Whole Foods infuriates the Internet with halal foods” with probably my favorite comment on the whole thing. “The good news is that if the PC police and the wingnuts all stay home, there will be more room in the parking garage for people who just want to buy halal-certified lemongrass basil chicken in peace.”

All in all it’s a mess, and it’s clear that it’s pretty easy to get people all riled up. Me included–until I did a lot of homework and actually talked to Whole Foods. A lot of people haven’t done that and so this keeps going around and around. After all, the Huff Post said it was true…..

For their part, Whole Foods has been transparent and forthcoming. Here’s a screenshot of a few of their posts about the issue. A tweet I sent out this morning was responded to within 45 minutes and they quickly followed up with an email response to my request for information.

What about the Whole Foods PR team?
I emailed Elizabeth Smith, National Media Relations Coordinator for Whole Foods, and asked her: “Was it ever supposed to be more than an online promotion, and has Whole Foods changed the way the individual stores handle Halal or Jewish products in any way in relation to this brouhaha or because of the holiday?”

Here’s her response.

Hi Janet –

Thanks for asking; I appreciate the opportunity to clear things up. Yes, the promotion was primarily online. We have not changed this promotion since its launch and will continue to promote this and other upcoming seasonal and holiday products too.

Our company statement addresses it too:
Whole Foods Market is NOT canceling our current halal promotion, which is centered around the timeframe of Ramadan. We invite shoppers seeking out not just halal certified products, but products that also meet our high quality standards to try Saffron Road and other regional offerings in our stores.

We never sent a communication from our headquarters requesting stores take down signs at all. We have 12 different operating regions and one region reacted by sending out directions to promote Halal and not specifically Ramadan after some online negative comments.

We’re excited to be offering high quality halal products for our shoppers and we stand behind them and our promotion of them, just like we do with other seasonal and holiday products.

I hope this helps clarify.

Best,
Elizabeth

They’re listening, responding to news, social mentions and blog posts quickly, getting updates where there needs to be updated information  and being open and honest with their responses.
I say the PR department at Whole Foods did a pretty darn good job. What do you think they could have done differently?

I ran across a post about Johnathan Stark’s crowd-funding experiment this weekend and I couldn’t resist playing along. Here’s the story. Johnathan created a web page on his site and uploaded a screen shot of his Starbucks Card. Anyone who wants a free cup of coffee can download the card to their phone, scan it at any Starbucks that accepts mobile cards, and–if there’s enough money on the card–get a free cup of whatever. Now if there’s NOT money on the card you can add money to it to cover your coffee and maybe the next person’s as well.

I was going to post the screen grab of his card here, but I figured it would get me in some kinda hot water (yes, pun) so you’ll have to go to his site to try it out. I did use the card and it worked flawlessly. and then I uploaded a little cash to keep it going.

What’s been even more interesting than that it works though is that Johnathan and his friends built some graphing apps to upload the progress of the card to a special Twitter stream just for the card at @Johnathanscard (over 3600 followers to date) with up to the minute balances and it’s pretty cool seeing how it flows. He even shares the code for doing it with the Twitter API calls on his site in case you want to do something similar.

The graph below was pulled from the last two hours of his Twitter stream and shows an update every minute. It’s interesting that most people seem to upload enough money to cover their coffee and some change, while others clearly added larger amounts, up to $50. From a VERY rough analysis with a tiny portion of the data, 32% didn’t upload any funds, 68 added more than they spent and the average was $9.64.

All in all it’s a great experiment in crowd-funding and it will be interesting to see how long it goes and if Starbucks gets upset about the whole thing. It will also be interesting to see if somebody else does something equally interesting with the idea. If you do, please post here and share it with us!