Going Global: Google Style

As you may have known from our previous blog posts, we kind of love to talk about social media. So of course we were thrilled to be the first hosts for a monthly series of webinars organized by our friends and global public relations partners, PR World Alliance, where we discussed optimizing LinkedIn company and brand pages.
 

While we may have been talking about LinkedIn, we also ended up getting a crash course in the social world of Google. As we were expecting a number of attendees from countries all over, we decided to use Google Hangouts on Air, an easy and free service that allows anyone with a webcam and microphone to become a virtual radio/TV host and anyone with a computer screen to tune in. Streamed from our headquarters in New York on February 19, we were joined by attendees from countries including Turkey, Italy, Canada, Sweden, France and Greece.

The page for our scheduled hangout came with its own private message board where the invited users could leave notes and messages. Leading up to the webinar, we used this as a way for us to leave tips for attendees or for them to tell us they were participating. Once the presentation began, we kept this open dialogue running by regularly checking in and asking attendees to post questions to the page. This allowed us as hosts to interact with the viewers and also let each attendee interact with each other. Rather than a one-sided conversation, the webinar became a social dialogue where each attendee could share his or her own tips and tricks. The U.S. was responding to Sweden, French was responding to English… no form of communication was off limits.

Throughout the webinar we discussed some of our favorite tips and best practices for LinkedIn. We walked through the required steps of creating an active company page such as selecting administrators, encouraging employees to link their current positions and outlining a rich company overview. We shared insight on what makes good content and how adding multimedia elements strongly drive engagement. We also introduced the webinar attendees to some of our recommended social media management tools such as Hootsuite and Buffer, which allow an administrator to schedule and queue posts; and Bitly, which shortens links and provides additional click though analytics.

In the end, even though Feintuch Communications was in front of the camera, each attendee had their own voice and role in the event. A big thanks to PRWA for letting us share this presentation and to all those who attended and shared their questions and advice!

You can view an archived cast of our first webinar and join our global conversation through the PRWA LinkedIn group.