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Earlier today, two of my favourite companies - salesforce.com & HubSpot - teamed up on a webinar about growing your business with social & inbound marketing.  

The great irony being, that as the event was taking place today at noon EST, twitter itself was down.  Here we had a social media webinar without twitter and the standard “live tweeting” social engagement.

Doubling down on the irony, I would have missed today’s event altogether if not for another social network, Google+.  

Let’s Talk Social… Without Social

Featuring Jamie Grenney, VP of Social Media and Online Video at salesforce.com, and Mark Roberge, VP of Sales at HubSpot, the event aimed to educate attendees on how to use and measure inbound and social media for building deeper relationships with prospects, and growing your social database using remarkable content.  

As with all of HubSpot’s great online events, they planned ahead and had their hashtag ready to go.  The webcasting service was outfitted with both a question pane and a twitter tab alongside the presentation of slides so attendees would have quick access to read, participate, and amplify the social discussion taking place around the event and the #SocialContent hashtag.  

So, what to do without twitter?  The hosts noted the irony and valiantly pointed users to the question pane to encourage Q&A, referred folks to HubSpot’s LinkedIn group, and really stressed that the interactivity could still be had.  To that end, the question pane was pretty active throughout - more active than the majority of webinars I’ve sat in of late.  Also, mid-way through the presentation, HubSpot swooped in on Google+ to poke around for questions and feedback.  That G+ post was however met with the echoes of social media silence.  

Ahh, poor Google+.  It upsets me how empty it feels most of the time.  It has a ton of potential.  With that said, I gave up on it too until recently where I’m trying my best to give it a fair shake again.  

Google+’s recent revamps to the iPhone and iPad mobile apps have been outstanding.  It’s quick, responsive, and truly a beautiful app on either device.  The mobile apps have been enough to encourage me to log in more frequently and post & contribute more… which is about as good a compliment you can give a social network’s mobile app - that it actually manages to improve user adoption and engagement.  

But still, Google+ is a touch on the barren side.  However today, it was my personal saviour.  

Google+ To The Rescue

My registration confirmation email didn’t include a link or even a suggestion to add the event to my calendar.  Without the nudge to book my time, this morning it wasn’t on my schedule and I had completely forgotten it was to happen.  Add that twitter was down and I didn’t have the various tweets from HubSpot, Salesforce and their throngs of fans filling my stream to jog my memory, I was a no-show waiting to happen.  

However, a little while back, I got an invite to attend the event from HubSpot on Google+. At first I thought it was superfluous, or maybe even an example of mis-targetting (as I was already registered to attend).  But, figuring it would be a good event to share via Google+ to help spread the love for HubSpot and Salesforce, I marked myself as attending.  

To my surprise, at 12 noon after having completely forgot about the event and went about my day, my Google+ mobile apps and Google Calendar all screamed at me to tell me the event was starting.  

Apparently just announced a little while ago at Google I/O, Google+ Events are seamlessly integrated with Google Calendar, and provide a way to share and promote events and also provide a social space to discuss and engage with attendees in Google+.  I feel guilty for not having my finger on the pulse with this earlier.  This is as compelling as any reason to give Google+ another whirl… especially if you’re a marketer promoting events. 

Google+ Events was news to me, but more importantly welcome news.  With it, I was able to join the event in progress, and absorb some great information on tactics for growing subscribers, creating content calendars, common challenges to B2B lead generation in social media, and just soak up the general awesomeness of Salesforce and HubSpot.