“Sweet, Google’s rolling out its own improved version of Facebook. Wait, it doesn’t look like there’s anything going on for businesses with this. Wow, not many clicking on the +1 buttons. Hmmm, none of the cool kids are playing much here – guess we’ll wait and see if this thing grows legs.”

Today, 90 million users later, wait mode is over. Google+ is running on fresh legs – and beckoning us to join while the echo from the starting gun can still be heard.

Jury’s still out, you say? Don’t really want to hear it, as you’ve hit a good stride with other social media activities you must manage? If this aligns at all with your thinking, then now is the time to pretend you have been a bad salesman, and I am Alec Baldwin, who has been sent on a mission of mercy to help set you straight.

The New Necessity of Google+ for Business

Regardless of your experience with Google+, you may still find yourself needing to articulate, even justify (to yourself, your clients or boss), why attention must be paid to this effort.

The most significant reason to get your business on Google+ is simple: The quality and corresponding engagement around your search engine visibility stands to either noticeably improve or gradually decline.

At the heart of this lies the new “Search Plus Your World” algorithm (also referred to as “Search+”), which relies on data collected from logged in Google+ users. The output is search results that display/promote People and (business) Pages in Google+.

This is a bold direction for Google, delivering search results based on a new range of personalization signals that include elements of user engagement we’re familiar with in Facebook (comments, shares, likes – or in Google’s case, +1’s).

Yes, this is still relatively early-stage, but make no mistake. New patterns are being established for the long term. Now, more than ever, is go time.

2 Top Advantages of Google+ Pages for Business

Although related changes to search results were an easy prediction several months ago, there’s now plenty more visible evidence from recent Google algorithm updates that demonstrate the importance of Google+ practices effecting search results both inside and outsidethe Google+ environment.

To clarify on the significance of that last sentence, consider for a moment the work that goes into maintaining status updates and community response on an active Facebook fan page.

Can you get relevant, topical access to Facebook engagement via a Google search? No way. But guess what? You can’t on Facebook either.

Status updates/wall posts come and go. Got a post on your Facebook fan page that got over 350 comments? Cool, but too bad it’s here today and gone tomorrow – soon to vanish with no commonly known way for anyone to look for or happen upon it in the future.

Like Facebook, you’ll see updates from those you follow (Circle) in Google+. But unlike Facebook, the content in your Google+ posts may turn into highly ranked search results on Google (again, inside or outside the Google+ environment) – providing keyword and topic-relevant search engine visibility that improves based on your “AuthorRank” and content-specific engagement levels.

A second key advantage relates to how you can target your messaging and more directly interact with your followers, organizing those you follow into the circles (groups) of your choosing. Google+ has done a good job of enabling a fairly intuitive way to track and engage with segments of an audience curated by you.

Learning From Early Adopters

Perhaps the most valuable piece of advice I can share with you as a marketer who is just getting setup in Google+ or wants to learn more is to create a circle called “Google+ Resources”, then begin to add people and pages who are on the cutting edge of this subject matter.

A good first Google+ page to add would be Google’s own Google+ Your Business page. Toby Stein, the Pages and Mobile Community Manager for Google+, is great about referencing helpful articles and other expert resources in the field.

Recently, Gideon Rosenblatt created a circle that now has over 100 G+ influencers who have demonstrated various levels of thought leadership around social media in the context of this platform. You can follow all of them in the click of a button.

Additional Next-Step Recommendations

I’ve summarized some favorites here, many spelled out in greater detail on Mark Traphagen’s post regarding the “First 5 Things You Should Do with Your Google+ Business Page”:

• Optimize your page for SEO by completing the verification process, adding recommended links and being smart about keyword placement in your Introduction and Subtitle areas. Thanks to people like AJ Kohn, you can get a deeper understanding of this, and take a closer look at the Google+ anatomy from an SEO perspective, for both personal and business pages.
• Take advantage of the “Scrapbook” photos and text editing features to make your page visually appealing and consistent with your brand identity.
• As always, the quality of your content is of paramount importance. Post pictures and videos when possible. Make your first few posts very rich so new potential followers will be attracted by their first impression of what you’re putting out. Don’t assume what resonates on Facebook will also appeal to your audience here.
• Promote your business page by leveraging personal profile pages on G+, announcements/requests to follow on other social networks and by using the Google+ Badge on your web pages.
• Be thoughtful about how you segment your audience with circles, considering how you might post frequently and differently to targeted interests.
• Monitor your stream, and be intentional about +1’s, comments, and shares of your follower’s posts. As Traphagen notes, “such engagement seems to be more valued on G+ than on other networks, and will induce your followers to do the same for you.”

Search Results I See Are Looking Less Like Search Results You See

Despite the strong opinions in this post, and in hopes of convincing you I’m really not a Google groupie fan boy – I will acknowledge that Google’s changes, even with our ability to control multiple query settings, have continued to evolve in a manner that arguably supports the “filter bubble” problem presented in Eli Pariser’s Ted Talk.

Helen Brown recently referenced this, along with a statement I’m empathetically compelled to quote: “Just to do one search in Google the way I used to just last year, I have to turn off two things and turn one on. Every. Single. Time. This is progress?”

We face a slew of other issues and challenges as Google and digital marketing in general continue to evolve. For today, hopefully you gained something that will inspire your next action on Google+.

This is undoubtedly impressive, but what does this mean for your brand?  Should you be on Pinterest?

The short answer is yes.  Historically, most companies wait a little too long to dip their toes into a new social network to make sure that it’s going to last.  This leaves them playing catch up, and you don’t want to be late to this party.  At the very least you should secure your brand username before a squatter does.

The longer answer is maybe.  There are a few key considerations with how to allocate business resources that should always be considered before committing them to developing social media communities:

1.  Is your audience hanging out on this social network?

2.  Is your audience actively participating on this social network?

3.  What are your business goals that will be tied to your activities on this social network?

4.  What is your overall social media marketing strategy and how well does Pinterest fit in?

5.  Are “Pinners” already spreading your brand around Pinterest?  Type the following URL into your browser and replace “yourdomain.com” with your own web site: http://pinterest.com/source/”yourdomain.com” to follow and identify “Pinners” and boards that your brand’s content is appearing on.

Lifestyle brands benefit the most from Pinterest.  Currently 97% of Pinterest’s 1 million+ Facebook fans are women.

The current Pinterest user base is 83% female; 30% of whom are 25-34 years old, and 25% of whom are 34-45 years old.  These women are well educated with over 60% having some college experience, 19% holding Bachelors degrees, and 6% holding Graduate degrees.  They are more likely to live in mid-west states with 35% living in households with incomes between $25,000-$49,999, 34% living in households with incomes between $50,000-$74,999, and 14% living in households with incomes between $75,000-$99,999.

Therefore, if this is your target audience and you aren’t on Pinterest, you should open a new tab on your browser and request an invite.  Yes, Pinterest has had the growth mentioned above as an invite-only website.

If this is not your target audience, consider how your products and services can become attractive and valuable to this active audience.  Think about the lifestyle benefits and attributes of what your company offers and how your customers use your products or services to enhance their lifestyles.  If you’re not sure where to start, there are dozens of resourceful articles that can steer you in the right direction.  It would be a shame to not connect with all of these people who are having fun, sharing pictures and videos, and driving traffic to retailers.

Whether is the allure of a new network, or real apathy with Facebook and Twitter, a lot of people are ready to tackle the learning curve of a brand new social network.

We’ve created a quick video tutorial to help explain the basics for the new Google+ user. Enjoy!

A few weeks ago, Paul Adams of Google put out a truly insightful analysis of our online social spheres. He explores how our online connections differ from our offline ones, how we identify friends (as opposed to connections), who we are truly able to keep tabs on, and how all of these things collide in the online space. He argues that targeting people based on perceived influence ignores that we are most connected with roughly 3-10 people who we truly trust. Based on this, it could better serve brands to focus on the breadth of marketing messages, and not individual influencer outreach, to actually impact the end consumer.

And Do You Listen to Them?

This is a scenario that is somewhat contrary to the way we build connections on Twitter. Twitter is not comprised of our inner circle. We are likely to have multiple degrees of separation from some of the people we follow. Paul points out that proximity is more important than perceived overall influence, so hitting multiple people with fewer connections may be the best way to influence the end user. We trust those with close proximity to us more than we trust those who have “influence”, which would suggest that examining Facebook connections is a greater indicator of a sphere of influence.

Trust vs. Influence

Here’s a question, though: Is there a difference between people who influence us and people who we trust? And if there is, how might you hone product or brand outreach based on that?

Klout, the current hot influencer score, takes into account number of followers, importance of followers, reach of information and velocity of information, among other things. It does not, however, take into account quality of information or impact of information. I may retweet Lance Armstrong, but I’ll likely buy a bike shoe that my boyfriend loves. So are there types of information that spread better through influence, and types that spread better through trust?

Identifying Many Kinds of Influencers

A recent review of our  influencer outreach here at Room214 led us to determine that, in entertainment, we were dealing with two types of influencer: the Identified Influencers and the Eager Masses. Under these two separate strategies, we’re reaching out the the people who have big voices and spread through Influence, as well as smaller individuals who are simply excited about entertainment products and spread to friends through Trust . In one, we hone and personalize. In the other, we give access to many people who, through their simple passion, have the ability to spread the word.

Every industry is different, but I think it’s important to start to acknowledge the importance of the voice of the everyday (and often quite passionate) consumer.

At the risk of paraphrasing, she basically indicated the importance of optimizing web pages is going away. If you consider how referral traffic is migrating from search engines to social networks, I’d say it’s easy to agree.

Of course, what we are seeing is search engines staying relevant by indexing social content. Case and point: I do a quick search on Google for “iPad” – and what do you know: My friend and business partner, James Clark, shows up on the first page of the search results.

Wow, over 48 million results, and his mug comes up on the first page? Yes, because Google is now recognizing and leveraging the relevance of social connections.

And although the optimization of web pages may be bearing less weight, I’m not throwing out the baby with the bath water (ugh, I used that phrase). Keywords, for example, remain foundational to online visibility from both a topical search, and monitoring perspective.

There is a great deal more to the social search discussion recently written by Brian Solis. One of our (Room 214′s) responses has been to create a formal Social Search Optimization program for our customers.

What are you doing to optimize for social search?

It’s not a surprising statement, either. What is interesting, however, is that this statement is becoming relevant for consumers in all age brackets. 78% of consumers say they trust peer recommendations. We’re all easily influenced by each other, meaning that information sharing in social media is very valuable.

Enter this:

What you are looking at are screenshots of Google Buzz mobile. Not only can I see who near me is buzzing, I can see where they are. If someone is in a location I’m heading towards, I can see what they are saying. In this case, one person has just told me that the Florentine’s at a local coffee shop are more expensive than at CU Business School.

Real-Time Reviews

As more people adopt buzz, the aggregated conversations in one location can paint an incredible real-time picture of what is happening around you, based on the opinions of other people. Is your favorite restaurant out of their nightly special? Did someone have terrible customer service at the running store you’re headed to? All of this information is immediately accessible, in addition to being timely and relevant.

Large User Base

Geo-location services are by no means new. Consider, though, that Gmail’s active monthly user base is rumored to be around tens of millions (compare that to Foursquare’s 350k and MyTown’s 1mm total users). Add that to the fact that buzz is an opt-out rather than opt-in feature, and we’re likely to see a much higher adoption rate.

It’s Google

I’ve had a few debates about this since Buzz launched Tuesday, and I continue to argue this: A lot of people use Gmail. Through Gmail, a lot of people who aren’t early-adopters have tried out new Google products like docs, calendar and wave. Because these people have an established trust for what Google can bring into their lives, they’ll be willing to try out Buzz, much more so than they’d be willing to try out a similar product from an unfamiliar company. And as our designer Andy Stone pointed out, Google’s “Do No Evil” policy has also helped build trust within a distrusting consumer group.

It’s Social

Now the medium that we (or at least, I) need most on a daily basis to communicate is directly connected with a sharing function that isn’t tied to a type of content (ie Yelp for reviews, Foursquare for tips and frequency). Buzz is just thoughts.  I, for one, am going to share, and I’ll share whatever is on my mind. Freed from the constraints of types of reviews, I think we’ll soon be seeing a geo-tagged map of candid consumer thinking.

Good, Bad, Viral

This is great for the way your brand engages with individual consumers. Fast Company already took a look at user-targeted advertising through Buzz. You may soon be able to target individual consumers based on very individual habits, an act which can help build relevant and meaningful relationships, one person at a time. It also means you need to monitor and play an active role in the buzz (Buzz?) going on around your company. You can respond to any comment that is public, so any time your brand shows up on a map, you should be there to discuss. More importantly, you should be there before the discussion starts, letting us know what’s going on in your kitchen, your factory, and your main conference room.

Take, for example, Bonnaroo’s decision to let individual bands announce their presence in the 2010 lineup (along with individual announcements through MySpace). It took resourceful individuals to piece together the entire lineup, and the news spread like wildfire. What if you had a single person in your brewery Buzz about your latest creation, rather than announce it through press release? Which one would spread faster? Which one would spread organically?

Google Buzz has the potential to create huge buzz, both positive and negative. So get to using it. I am.

Direct from the Google Help Center, here’s what the ads look like: Mobile ads contain two lines of text, with a limit of 12 or 18 characters per line, depending on the language in which you write your ad. Your destination URL appears on a third line if you choose to enter one. If you select the option that allows customers to directly connect to your business phone, a Call link will appear next to your destination URL. You can also set daily budgets and establish scheduled marketing messages.

The big advantage could be for advertisers looking to draw in local customers. For example, people who are on the road traveling and looking for a restaurant, hotel or service. David Utter from WebProNews.com commented on Google’s strategy: “We know that Google and its competitors have been actively engaged in a battle for dominance in the local search arena. It makes sense to corner the mobile search market for advertising if possible.”

Businesses purchase the ads through the Adwords interface, and must have either a mobile web site for pay-per-click ads, or a toll-free phone number for pay-per-call ads.

Now that mobile phones are fully integrated into mainstream America with over 200 million subscribers, mobile phones are and will continue to be an important place to deliver advertising.

With Google's new Link Unit feature, you can place links to ads on your site without displaying the ads themselves. This provides a less obtrusive way to earn money from advertising on your website, and potentially a more relevant path for people to locate topic-specific information.

Why is this kind of thing important? Just ask someone like our good friend, Tim Carter, from askthebuilder.com who clears $30,000/month from Adsense revenues alone. There is also a growing population of companies from India who have come to rely on Adsense revenue to make up eighty percent or more of their entire operating incomes. Any advantage Google can offer to increase click through rates is a good one.

I’ve been talking to people about companies like Umbria for several months now, all in the spirit of using tools that collect the kind of data that can help predict the future (as opposed to simply summarizing the past). Now, we are beginning to see this topic talked about more in main-stream news circles. If this isn’t the future of Marketing, I don’t know what is.

If you are a mall-loathing online shopper like me, you’ll enjoy Google’s new Checkout feature which simplifies the check out process, enabling you to purchase from many stores with one login – no more entering the same info each time you buy, and no more having to remember different usernames and passwords for each store.

Google’s official blog entry explains how Google Checkout works with Adwords, offering online stores a more complete solution to attract customers and process sales. When Checkout is combined with Adwords, a small green shopping cart icon appears next to the display URL in the Adwords ad text (see picture). Now if I have a super-easy-to-use Google Checkout account and see that little green icon in the ad text, you bet I will be more likely to follow that link than one without this functionality.

As the creation of effective Adwords ad text and display URLs has become a science, it will be interesting to see if you will have the ability in to split test ads with the icon vs. without. Overall the set up process was painless and the checkout/purchase history interface is very google-esque – simple, clean, and uniform – I’m down.