I’m still barely safe to solo in the whole social marketing arena. But yesterday, when I learned Google Friend Connect (although still in beta) has been released to the world, I dared to give it a go. Why?
Well, social marketing is being touted in some circles as the new SEO, and I have heard that this application – Google Friend Connect – has the potential to revolutionize that whole arena. Google Friend Connect in fact brings social networking to your own website. It allows visitors to easily sign on or become members, to engage other visitors, and to do some other interesting things too, such as rate postings, make comments, add videos, and such. All from your own site!
The list of ‘interesting things’ is bound to grow quickly too, as developers jump on the bandwagon. But even today, one of the best things about Google Friend Connect is that it allows visitors to invite their friends on other social networks to join them right on your site! As long as the content at your website is worthy, the possibilities to bring new eyeballs to your website with this viral capability surely must be worth taking the time to figure out how to get it up and running.
Check out this video for more background on Google Friend Connect and its potential to network with others with similar interests online.
Turns out that Google has made it all very easy to get started with just five easy steps:
- go to the Friend Connect Page
- enter the name of your website and its url
- download two files from Google, and upload them to the root directory of your website
- edit the default settings for colors and size of the Friend Direct display
- copy the html that runs the Members Gadget that Google generates for you and paste it to the page(s) where you want to display it
With that, you should be good to go! Five or ten minutes, max.
For those of you with a Wordpress site (yours, not a freebie at wordpress.com), the obvious place to insert Friend Connect is in a sidebar. To do that, just create a new text widget, copy the html code into it, and name it. If you don’t want to display it on every page, use Widget Logic, a nifty Wordpress plugin that lets you tell each of your active widgets where to reveal themselves.
If you want to add some further interactivity, go back to Google’s Friend Connect page, and look for Members gadgets or Social gadgets in the left hand margin (see image to the right). I looked at Social gadgets, and thought the Wall Gadget looked interesting. The installation process for the added gadgets is essentially the same as installation of the Friend Connect application itself. Again, as this site is a widgitized Wordpress site, I created a new Text Widget, copied the html code to it, and used Widget Logic to make this app show up only on single posts.
Google Friend Connect is about the power of social networking. If you don’t think this Web 2.0 stuff works, check out this video:
That’s it. the only downside so far is that it’s awfully lonely here on my social networking-capable site. I would be honoured if you would become a member.
Bye for now,
...Victoria's blogging real estate professional.
