It would be much easier if, in this column, I could say that you don’t have to be everywhere. “Forget Twitter and LinkedIn, just choose whatever channel you’re most comfortable in—say email marketing—and email away.” But unfortunately, as Jenny Fukumoto from Ragan told me last week, you do have to be everywhere—or at least try.

“We feel like we have to be on all those channels because our audience is on all of them,” she said. “We have to be wherever they want to reach us. It’s all about accessibility. I posted a press release recently on one of the channels and right away someone emailed. She said our Disney Conference looks great but it’s too far. What else do you have?”

I bring this up because I’ve been reading a lot lately about Google+, yet I haven’t seen any conversations on our Marketing Listserv or on our LinkedIn pages. President Obama will hold a Fireside Hangout on Google+ Thursday taking questions online. According to Google’s “Official Blog,” the President’s Fireside Hangout will include a group of people who regularly discuss important issues of the day online.” They will ask questions, and then you and I are encouraged to submit questions as well through the White House’s YouTube channel. So far, 10,886 people have asked 3,333 questions and cast 58,134 votes. (Hmmm, sounds like Chicago.)

That number is sure to rise, as is the profile of Google+. I was looking at the excellent blog of SIPA member Astek this week—speaking of Chicago where they are located—and there is a post by John Armstrong titled Why Your Company Should Join Google+ Communities. “Let’s get right to the point: If you represent a company, you should be on Google+…,” he begins.

Armstrong explains why Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, though valuable channels in our search for customers, don’t measure up to Google+. He believes that Google, with their control of search traffic, is ready to make Google+ even more important to SEO. “Currently, the number of followers contributes to Google search ranking. If you want to be found on the web, that’s reason enough to sign up. However…Google+ Communities offers the chance to substantially and directly converse with people.”

He writes that because it is relatively new, Google+ will provide you with a “generally savvy” audience looking for “a balance of social interaction, information and entertainment.” And even more importantly, joining “Google+ Communities can put you in front of people segmented by interest, much like LinkedIn. “…but in Communities the companies themselves can interact with individuals. By posting pictures, links, text or video you can join the conversation and promote thought-leadership and your brand.”

Finally, he concludes that “content is not always king” on Google+. “Productive, interesting discussion” takes center stage. “People will follow you if you offer a personal experience and real value to the community.” Enough value that President Obama is hanging out there tomorrow.

Here are Armstrong’s tips for successful engagement:

• Search for communities and evaluate them. Some have no engagement and are spammed by brand promotion.
• Don’t be “That guy.” Self-promotion is deadly. You will be ignored, and worse, rejected.
• Smaller communities may be more active. In reach vs. engagement – engagement wins.
• Know the community and what they like. Offer that as content.
• Engage in existing discussions. Don’t just post updates and links.
• Google+ users are savvy and intelligent. Be transparent.
• Give credit to content when credit is due.
• Offer a unique viewpoint. Opinions are welcome and desired. Brands with no opinions offer nothing to a conversation.
• Get to know the people who +1 your posts or comments. Interact. (editor’s note – just when I finally become comfortable using “friend,” tweet,” “pin” and “snap,” I must now “+1.”
• +1 other user’s content. Show genuine interest and they’ll return the favor.
• Under settings/communities, uncheck “post updates in profile along with communities.” You don’t want duplicate posts in your profile if you post the same thing in multiple communities.

Much thanks to Astek for this great information.

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Ronn Levine began his career as a reporter for The Washington Post and has won numerous writing and publications awards since. Most recently, he spent 12 years at the Newspaper Association of America covering a variety of topics before joining SIPA in 2009 as managing editor.

“Working in 90-minute intervals turns out to be a prescription for maximizing productivity. Professor K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues at Florida State University have studied elite performers, including musicians, athletes, actors and chess players. In each of these fields, Dr. Ericsson found that the best performers typically practice in uninterrupted sessions that last no more than 90 minutes.”

That paragraph comes from an Opinion piece in The New York Times last week by Tony Schwartz, the CEO of The Energy Project and the author, most recently, of Be Excellent at Anything. He continues. “’To maximize gains from long-term practice,’ Dr. Ericsson concluded, ‘individuals must avoid exhaustion and must limit practice to an amount from which they can completely recover on a daily or weekly basis.’” For Schwartz, this meant writing in three uninterrupted 90-minute sessions for his last two books, instead of the 10-hour days for the three before, finishing quicker and writing better.

“…it’s not how long, but how well, you renew that matters most in terms of performance,” Schwartz writes. “Even renewal requires practice. The more rapidly and deeply I learned to quiet my mind and relax my body, the more restored I felt afterward. For one of the breaks, I ran. This generated mental and emotional renewal, but also turned out to be a time in which some of my best ideas came to me, unbidden.”

Here are findings from Schwartz’s special report, Energy: The X Factor in Engagement, Productivity & Performance:

• The 62% of people who do not take regular breaks tend to become less productive, less engaged, less efficient and less focused.
• Three out of four Americans have trouble focusing on one thing at a time. (Which reminds me, I’ve just come from the Cloud/GOV 2013 Conference and it’s amazing to see…oops, let’s save that for another day.)
• Americans are 14% more likely to eat lunch at their desks than their European counterparts. (Guilty.)
• 80% agreed with this statement: I spend much of my time reacting to immediate demands rather than focusing on activities with longer-term leverage. The report uses the phrase, “continuous partial attention,” coined by Linda Stone, former Apple and Microsoft researcher. (Recently, one of my Member Profiles said that she may have 25 Internet tabs open at one time.)
• Research shows that any time a person moves attention from a primary task to another one, it adds an average of 25% to the time it takes to complete the initial task.
•  Women are 10% more likely to skip breaks during the day.
• Almost 2/3 of people agreed that their decisions at work are often more influenced by external demands rather than by a strong, clear sense of their own purpose.

In practicality, it’s probably good to attempt to reach some sort of middle ground. The commotion in our lives these days is unprecedented. I get jealous watching an old sitcom where the family sits down to a relaxed breakfast reading the paper. There’s just too much to do, review, check, update, post, reply and yes, tweet. Yesterday I saw that even NPR is running a new ad campaign seeking cattle-ranching fashionistas and sky-diving algebra teachers—giving in to the fact that our interests are now all over the place.

It makes sense—more sleep, focusing on one thing at a time, taking breaks, looking long-term and feeling a sense of purpose about what we do. The trick is marrying those undeniable truths with the demands of work and family. I would like to help further but unfortunately my 90 minutes are up. Check back with me later.

Subscribe to the SIPA Daily for more specialized publishers industry news.

Ronn Levine began his career covering sports for The Washington Post and has won numerous writing and publications awards since. Most recently, he spent 12 years at the Newspaper Association of America covering diversity and Newspaper in Education (NIE), before joining SIPA in 2009 as managing editor.

There was a great deal of conversation at the recent Breakthrough Conference about innovation. How does it occur? What can you to do encourage it? James McGinty, vice chairman of Cambridge Information Group and winner of the 2013 Peter E. Jackson Innovation Award, offered his credits.

“When we talk about innovation itself, rarely do we think of the boss,” he said. “I’ve been gifted to have great bosses who allowed me to take a lot of risks and allowed me to fail.”

Later on, Steven Kulyan, executive director of the NYU Poly Incubator Initiatives, said, “It’s not about creating innovation, it’s about fostering it…Entrepreneurs understand that you need to have a structure early on. We had a case where a new company wanted two CEOs; they didn’t have a structure. They didn’t want to put together a blueprint for success…The reality today is no longer whether you’re an entrepreneur, but how entrepreneurial you are in whatever you do.”

Gifford Booth, co-founder and partner of The TAI Group, then offered his road map to how innovation happens. It starts with an idea, he said, followed by an emotional response. Then there are beliefs and then there is failure. “You can’t get to a new product without going through failure,” he said, and then hopefully some success.

He gave two examples, Bob Dylan and Robert Pridmore. Dylan kept at it and became famous whereas for Pridmore, also a budding musician, it was just too hard. “Dylan has never been a victim of his success,” Booth said. “He continues to reinvent himself.” That was another theme of the Conference—that these are not times where you can rest on past achievements. Booth urged you to “keep your beliefs” and to seek “clarity in your communications to all the people around you. [Can you] communicate in a way that fosters innovation?

He pointed to meetings where the CEO says this is the strategy. “But then it’s not clear.” To foster clear communication, Booth suggests:
- check the assumptions. Are there guidelines for interaction?
- manage conversations;
- create a code of conduct;
- create a safe environment.

Many of the newest startups began as collaborations in college, where the atmosphere is probably the most conducive to trying, failing and trying again. The latest example I read about is Snapchat—where the photos and messages you send disintegrate minutes after like a Mission Impossible tape.

“Snapchat has its origins at Stanford, where [the founders] first met as fraternity brothers,” wrote Jenna Wortham in The New York Times. “Mr. Spiegel presented a prototype of Snapchat in spring 2011 to one of his classes, but it was greeted as impractical and silly by his classmates. Undeterred, Mr. Spiegel and Mr. Murphy shared an updated version for the iPhone with about 20 friends in September 2011. A few weeks in, they started seeing an influx of new users, paired with unusual spikes in activity, peaking between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m.”

Now, they’ve raised “$13.5 million in venture financing, led by Benchmark Capital, which values the company at $60 million to $70 million even without an established revenue stream.” You don’t want to know how old the founders are. Of course, the fact that these young entrepreneurs grew up with all this technology and social media helps their instincts to create. But there has to be something to that collegiate atmosphere—the lack of pressure, the easy bonding, the immediate testing among peers—that allows for innovation.

In a later session on the key catalysts for innovation, Nina Link, the former CEO of the MPA—the Association of Magazine Media—spoke of a small publisher member that actually took eight people out of their full-time jobs and were told by the president, “You have six months to blow up my company.” She believes that companies need “two parallel initiatives”—your core business and a path of an innovation center where future growth and not incremental gains are the focus. “It’s coming up with big bold ideas that need time to grow,” Link said. “…what are the resources they both can draw from without giving one an advantage over the other?

“The CEO needs to make sure there’s room for discovering the next big thing,” she said, adding that a little paranoia can be good.

“You will not be remembered for the agility that you navigated big company politics,” said moderator David Reimer, CEO of Merryck & Co. “If you’re a start-up, you will not be remembered for how you got the business capitalized. You will be remembered for how you were driving these things long-term, literally on a day-to-day level. Don’t spend time on crap that anybody can be doing. If it’s crap, be honest with yourself.”

Be bold, they all said. And be malleable. “Don’t be afraid of rapidly changing and then changing again,” said Merrill Brown, director, School of Communications and Media, Montclair State University. “Learn from three months of data and make changes. The things I’ve failed at [is when] I didn’t have the courage of my convictions.”

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Ronn Levine began his career covering sports for The Washington Post and has won numerous writing and publications awards since. Most recently, he spent 12 years at the Newspaper Association of America covering diversity and Newspaper in Education (NIE), before joining SIPA in 2009 as managing editor.