YouTube and Life Restored

I discovered a few things this last week. Number 1 – don’t trust that the Google representatives know what they are talking about. Number 2 – I nearly lost 3 years of work and I had no way to notify my customer base what was going on.

I nearly had a total breakdown. I tried to keep it together, but the more I thought about it, the more I felt completely helpless. I kept thinking, “Was it my fault? Should I have questioned the rep more intensely before hitting the ‘remove’ button?”

Here is what happened. I’m trying to get a handle on how I look out there on the great wide web of information. If you googled “Porcelynne,” what comes up is my store in Redlands that is marked as “Permanently Closed.” Thats what started it all. I didn’t want my customers googling my company and seeing that I’m closed.

So I attempted to fix it. For some reason, I was initially unable to change the address on the google listing to the location of my new headquarters, aka Florida. I added a new location and it showed up perfectly here in a search, but my customers in California and the west coast still saw that I was permanently closed. This prompted the merge of my locations.

What I had failed to realize was that when I set up my listing 5 years ago, I registered it as a “brand” account. Anyway, that feature is no longer offered with Google, which is probably why the Google rep was clueless, but I digress. The Brand account linked to my YouTube.

With the help of Google, I was instructed to delete the California location with a guarantee that the YouTube would be relinked to the new location. Well it wasn’t. The next day, I get an email from said helper “You are not eligible for a Google My Business listing.” WHAT???

Over the course of 5 days, I emailed them 40 times, commented on their twitter and facebook pages and sent additional messages to everyone I could get a hold of. The answer from everyone else, “He told you to do what? He shouldn’t have told you that.” I’m like, “Yeah, I know that know. Can you fix it?”

To make a long story short, YouTube is fixed. I will never ever trust a Google rep like I did. And, by the way, my business is still showing up as “permanently closed.” So much for trying to get anything done this last week. I have a new set of videos to release, but those will wait until next week. I am currently working on an “Update” video.

This whole ordeal made me realize I need a better social media presence. I had been fighting it for several years, but now that my time isn’t being sucked dry by a retail storefront, I think I can manage it. I finally set up my Facebook page, and linked Instagram to both Facebook and Twitter. So I can post to all three at once.

Stay tuned for tomorrow. I will be unleashing a contest to win a $50 gift certificate on my website.