Going Google across the 50 States: Two California-based companies find a common solution with Google Apps

[Cross-posted from the Google Enterprise Blog]

Editor's note: Over 3 million businesses have adopted Google Apps. Today we’ll hear from PlayPlainIt.com and Medialcoate, two companies based in California. To learn more about other organizations that have gone Google and share your story, visit our community map or test drive life in the cloud with the Go Google cloud calculator.

San Francisco moms and career women, Allison Howard and Laurel Kellam, are making it easier for Bay Area families to find events targeted at children under the age of five through PlayPlanit.com. Both Laurel and Allison work from home and meet up once or twice a week so the ability to be productive and access files remotely is critical. The two founders communicate throughout the day via Gmail and chat, and rely heavily on Google Docs to store, track and collaborate on just about everything.

According to Laurel, “As soon as we learned about the functionality and cost of Google Apps it was a no-brainer. Neither of us are ‘tech guys’ and we didn’t want to spend our money on any expensive equipment like servers. We’re big Google fans in general - we both use Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Voice for personal reasons. Also, as business owners who are responsible for every aspect of our start-up we knew we wouldn’t have the time or patience to troubleshoot Microsoft Outlook.”

Like Laurel and Allison, other companies have found that the cost benefits and collaboration tools offered through Google Apps can’t be beat. To learn more, we move south to Pacific Grove where we meet Marcelo Rizzo, Technical Manager for Medialocate, a translation services company helping Fortune 500 companies bring their products and content to global audiences. Marcelo tells us about why Medialocate chose Google Apps.

“Four years ago, Medialocate outsourced its Microsoft Exchange server to a hosting service. Everything went well for about two years. Then, all of the sudden, we were getting 75% uptime and a lot of user complaints. We pondered bringing Exchange back in-house. At $136 per user/year, it was not cost effective. We looked at other e-mail hosting services, but they were also not cost effective.

Finally we looked at Google Apps — $50 per user/year including support, document sharing and centralized management was unbeatable. It has become an integral part of our core assets and has helped boost our profitability by 30% over last year.”

Posted by Michelle Lisowski, Google Apps team

More than 2,000 solution providers embrace Google’s cloud channel model

[Cross-posted from the Google Enterprise Blog]

Shortly after launching Google Apps for business customers in 2007, we began to hear that IT solution providers were recommending Google Apps to their customers as a new option for messaging and collaboration tools. At the time, we didn’t have formal support for solution providers, and their only incentive was to act in the best interests of their customers.

During those early days of Google Apps, we spent valuable time gathering feedback from these leading-edge solution providers and learning how best to create an official reseller program for Google Apps that worked for solution providers’ business models. As a result, when we launched the Google Apps Authorized Reseller program in early 2009, we focused the program on providing resellers the best of both worlds - an innovative web-based messaging and collaboration suite for their customers and a reseller program that allowed them to retain and enhance their customer relationships.

An Apps ecosystem milestone

Over the past 8 months we’ve doubled the number of resellers in our Google Apps Authorized Reseller program, and now have over 2,000 authorized resellers worldwide. And our unique qualification process continues to ensure that new resellers understand both the business value and technical aspects of the offering.

During the past year we’ve highlighted a number of customer success stories where resellers such as Dito, LTech, Sheepdog, and Cloud Sherpas led complex customer deployments. These resellers, and many others, have put together growing businesses by focusing primarily on Google Apps and other cloud-based applications.

But that’s not all. We’ve also gained awareness and adoption within mainstream IT channel communities. This includes value added resellers, managed service providers, web developers, web hosting companies, Internet service providers, and system integrators, all of whom have established businesses with existing client bases and have expanded their business by offering Google Apps.

Going mainstream

Like the early adopters in 2007, these solution providers are foremost focused on doing the right thing for their customers. But they’re also taking advantage of the primary design point of our reseller program - allowing the reseller to manage the billing and support relationship and be the primary point of contact with the customer. We’ve recognized from the start of our program that providing resellers with control over billing and pricing, and allowing them into the primary flow of account provisioning, support, and messaging, is critical for them to effectively support their customers and make money.

We’ve seen strong adoption among managed service providers (MSPs) who tend to have fostered long-term, trusted customer relationships, understand recurring revenue models, focus on service offerings, and have fixed fee service contracts which are a great fit for reliable and predictable products like Google Apps.

Agosto is an example of an early MSP that has seamlessly rolled Google Apps into their full IT support helpdesk offering. They’ve been able to cross-sell their offerings in both directions, including converting customers of their Google Apps implementation service into full IT service clients. Even more powerfully, they’ve been able to enhance their long running client relationships by re-engaging them with relevant new opportunities to use collaboration capabilities in Google Sites, Video, and forms in Google Docs.

We’ve also seen adoption among web development, design, and hosting companies, for whom providing an email service is often a necessary part of helping small businesses with their online presence. Companies like Vision Multimedia Technologies are able to remain focused on their primary business of web development by using Google Apps to reliably handle the customers’ email, while also introducing the benefits of the rest of the Google Apps suite. And they’ve been able to offer consulting and web development services such as implementing portal and workflow solutions based on Google Sites to streamline content management for clients. All while providing the customer a simplified, single bill to pay.

Whether they’ve incorporated Google Apps into their existing business or they’ve built new businesses around it, a common denominator among our successful resellers is that they view bringing Google technology into their customer relationships as a way to strengthen and increase the strategic nature of these relationships.

While we are excited to have more than 2,000 resellers in our program, we anticipate further enhancing the program, the Google Apps suite, and the Google Apps Marketplace, to help our resellers grow their business with both new and existing customers.

If you’re an IT solution provider, learn more and get started with our reseller program today. Or if your company is using Google Apps and you have a preferred solution provider that you’d like to see get additional training on Google Apps, send them this post and we’d be happy to work with them.

Posted by Jeff Ragusa, Google Apps team

AdWords: 10 years of your success

[Cross-posted from Inside AdWords]

In 2000, just a couple of years after Larry and Sergey founded Google, we launched our online advertising program, AdWords. The story of AdWords is literally the story of you, our advertisers and partners. We’re all deeply inspired by your ambition, creativity and innovation as we’ve all worked to build this new online advertising world over these past ten years.

So we felt the best way to mark this moment was to applaud and honor AdWords advertisers by sharing your stories and successes with the world. This December, as part of our AdWords 10th birthday celebration, we’ll be publishing a global map featuring businesses who are happy to tell their stories. Join us by creating a short (three minutes or less) YouTube video or written piece (750 characters or less) telling us your story: who you are, what your business is about, how it’s grown, and the role AdWords has played in your success.

You can learn more at this website (including submission instructions and sample videos), and we’ll keep this blog updated with the latest AdWords 10th birthday news.

So, what’s your story?

Posted by Jason Shafton, Inside AdWords crew

AdSense in Your City is coming to Seattle

[Cross-posted from Inside AdSense]

Over the summer, we traveled to five cities across the US for our AdSense in Your City program. The first round of roadshows got great reviews from attendees, so we wanted to extend the program to meet more of you and provide publishers in a different part of the country with personalized optimization tips.

On Wednesday, November 10, we’ll be in Seattle for our fall AdSense in Your City adventure. A few of our optimizers will be in town to hold 20-minute optimization sessions at a local coffee shop between 10:00 am and 4:00 pm. We’re going to keep it casual this time around, so we can provide one-on-one consultations to as many of you as possible.

We’d love to meet you, so please fill out this form if you’ll be in the Seattle area on November 10 and would like to schedule an appointment with our team. Once we get your RSVP, we'll follow up via email with additional details if there's still room. Scheduling will be done on a first-come, first-served basis, but we’ll do our best to include as many of you as space will allow.

See you in Seattle!

Posted by Katrina Kurnit - Inside AdSense team

40% increase in sales, virtually overnight

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Scott Imbrie, CEO and Co-Founder of Original Skateboards. His passion is longboarding, a popular new form of skateboarding that also blends elements of surfing and snowboarding. Scott started Original in 2002 with his brother, Brad. The brothers began selling longboards shortly after Scott's 20th birthday, when Brad was just 17. Original distributes its products in most surf, skate, and snowboard shops on the East Coast of the United States and in many other areas around the world.

When my brother, Brad, and I first started Original, we were a small company in an unknown sport. We realized right away that we needed to connect with a broad spectrum of potential longerboarderss to introduce the world to longboarding. We also needed to connect personally to our customers and show them an entirely new kind of product. If we could find a way to do both of those things, on any scale, large or small, we felt we would be successful.

We theorized that by creating videos that viewers connected to on a more personal level, we could generate interactivity between our customers and Original to build brand awareness. With this mentality, even a small amount of exposure could be profitable. If we could achieve a large amount of reach while maintaining personal connection, we might be able to see big results at a fraction of the expense of traditional broadcasting. We integrated ourselves as characters, and filmed our first project.

In June 2007, we discovered YouTube. It was the solution that would allow us to share our videos with the world. We uploaded our first project and kicked our small business into high gear. Upon uploading, sales jumped 40% and steadily climbed.

Our YouTube channel now has over 105,000 subscribers. We refined our business model with online video at its core, and our business has continued to grow exponentially.

Find out more about how YouTube has driven our success as a company.

Posted by Serena Satyasai, Marketing Manager, The YouTube Team

SMB Week Canada Wrap-Up: What’s a Small Business to Do?

Chris O’Neill, Managing Director for Google Canada, recently spoke at the 10th annual Small Business Forum organized by Enterprise Toronto. In his address, he highlighted a few essential steps all small businesses and entrepreneurs should be pursuing to grow their business and reach new customers.

So before you get caught up in the hustle and bustle of the holidays, take the opportunity to make sure you’re using every online tool available to you that can help you make the most of this shopping season. There’s no time like the present to engage in these five things:

• Establish an Online Presence: 20 percent of searches on Google are related to location, so it’s important for local businesses to have a presences on the web. A website does not need to be complex to serve its purpose. Creating a user-friendly, well-structured website will also help search engines like Google find and index it easily. Google Webmaster Tools provides a free and easy way to make your website more Google-friendly.

• Use Free Marketing to Reach Customers: People search Google.com and Google Maps to find local business, so make sure your customers know where you are and what you’re all about by claiming your free Google Places business listing. In addition to sharing your location, phone number and business hours, use Google Places to engage with customers by providing photos, video, coupons, public responses and more. You can also take advantage of free marketing opportunities by posting content to social networking sites, such as YouTube.

• Know Your Customers: To understand why some visitors aren’t converting, get website analytics data and learn what potential customers are doing on your site. Google Analytics is one of these analytics products, and it’s a free and powerful tool that can help you answer questions about the effectiveness of your content, how engaged your users are with your site, where they abandon your shopping cart and much more. With the right data in your hands, you can make smarter website design decisions and also make sure that the money you spend on advertising is actually delivering the results you want.

• Advertise Online: Online advertising is targeted, measurable and flexible. Products such as Google AdWords allow business owners like you to connect with your target audience at the exact moment they search for your products or services online. With AdWords, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad is taken directly to your website. You also get actionable analysis and performance information, so you know how to refine your ad copy or the keywords that trigger your ad to appear on the search results page. Plus, any business can be up and running in 15 minutes.
• To find out about all our advertising tools and products, visit our Google for Advertisers site for Canadian businesses.

• Embrace the Cloud: Web-based applications, such as Google Apps, are helping to streamline productivity and ensure that your business is running efficiently. Your employees can collaborate on documents in real-time and access them from anywhere, whether they’re on the road or at the office. This suite of online products also helps businesses spend less time and money managing email and other IT services, giving them the ability to focus more on what they do best: creating quality products and services, and sharing them with customers. Best of all, you can get started with Google Apps for free!

Posted by Andrew Swartz, Small Business Blog team

Google Places now more widely available in Asia

[Cross-posted from the LatLong Blog]

People often use the Internet to look for businesses in their nearby vicinity. For example, a mother in Karachi might be trying to find a dentist for her teenager, or a young professional in Colombo may find himself in need of a computer repair shop. People also go online to research places they might visit when traveling, such as a dive shop in Palau, a backpacker hostel in Kathmandu, or a cooking class in Phnom Penh.

Because of this increasing trend in which people search online to find local establishments, business owners all over the world are realizing how simple and easy it is to reach their target customers through free business listings on Google.com and Google Maps. We’ve been gradually expanding access to our online database of local information, called Google Places, and it has recently become available to businesses and locations in 30 additional countries in Asia.

Example of business listings displayed on google.com

If you haven't already claimed your free listing in Google Places, doing so can help ensure that customers see accurate information about your business, and increase your likelihood of being found from desktop and mobile devices - even if you don’t have a website. With your free Google Places account, you can:

• Be found: Verify your information to make sure people can find you on Google
• Stand out: Engage customers with photos, coupons, custom posts on your Place page and more
• Get insights: Use info about your listing to make smarter business decisions

Any business located in a region where Google Places is available (now more than 100 countries) can sign in to Google Places at any time to claim or update their listing. And for those of you specifically located in South Asia (Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Maldives), Southeast Asia (Macau, Cambodia, Myanmar, Brunei, Laos), Western Asia (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan), North Asia (Nepal, Afghanistan, Bhutan, Mongolia), and the Pacific (Fiji, French Polynesia, New Caledonia, Guam, Papua New Guinea, Northern Mariana Islands, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Samoa, American Samoa and Palau), we warmly welcome you and invite you to check it out!

Posted by Andrew McGlinchey, Product Manager