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Google+ Business Pages and +1Buttons

December 7, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Google+ Promoting

Are you ready to spend even more time social networking?

How much of your mar­ket­ing bud­get and/or time goes to Social Net­work­ing? Most busi­nesses have some sort of pres­ence on at least Face­book and LinkedIn. And maybe Twit­ter and YouTube.

Google + per­sonal pro­files have been out for a while but it was another month before busi­ness pages were launched. It’s going to take some time before we can tell what kind of social networking/marketing share this new ser­vice is going take from Face­book, Twit­ter and LinkedIn, but it’s Google so we can’t ignore it. A piece of advice I read recently in an arti­cle at Mar­ket­ing Mag­a­zine UK is to not rush into build­ing a Google+  Busi­ness Page until you have a clear strat­egy. Makes sense… So of course we did the oppo­site and just went ahead. For us, it’s okay not to have a strat­egy because the whole point is to learn more.  We do agree with the advice though and sug­gest you set up per­sonal pro­file first to famil­iar­ize your­self with how it works.

There are plenty of resources about Google+ out there if you search. Many of the arti­cles are great but tech­ni­cal or long.  We decided to begin our explo­ration of Google+ by com­par­ing one of their new shar­ing fea­tures to Facebook’s. We were curi­ous about these and thought it might be some­thing you  be inter­ested in. What I am talk­ing about is the new +1 icons and g+ icons. We have them on our web­site home page side­bar if you would like to try them :-) . And the Google Plus but­ton below in this post works too.

There are sim­i­lar­i­ties and dif­fer­ences. The Google +1 but­tons that now appear around the Inter­net on Google searches and on web­sites are pretty sim­i­lar to Face­book like but­tons. If you click on one they behave the same way. If you are not logged into your Google account, Gmail for exam­ple, you will first be prompted do that and then your ‘like’, or ‘plus’ in this case is recorded for that web page.

Click here to connect with our Google + business pageThe new but­tons, like the one at the left, are called Google + Direct Con­nect but­tons. When you click on one, you will be taken to the owner’s Google+ Page. You can view their feed, share, ‘+1′  and ‘fol­low’ the same as you would a Face­book feed. So it’s sim­i­lar to hav­ing a Face­book icon on your site that con­nects to your Face­book pro­file. Our feel­ing is this is going to help your SEO efforts for being found in Google searches (maybe only in a small way but every lit­tle bit helps). It con­nects you directly to Google so it can’t hurt. Here’s an excerpt from a Web Pro Newsletter:

“Google+ has intro­duced a whole new realm of SEO pos­si­bil­i­ties based on get­ting found via Google’s own properties.

For one, Google ranks Google+ posts in search results, and they often appear on the first page.

The +1 but­ton obvi­ously helps your search vis­i­bil­ity cause. Google made it clear from the begin­ning that this would be a search sig­nal. If enough peo­ple like your con­tent enough to give it a +1, it must be good right? Why not bump it up in the rankings. ”

The more of their tools you use and inter­con­nect, the more vis­i­ble and eas­ier to find you will be in Google searches. Searchers will be able to find your + busi­ness page by using the + added to their search term. Here is how they explain it on their Direct Con­nect info page:

“Google+ Direct Con­nect lets you quickly nav­i­gate to a Google+ page (and even add that page to your cir­cles) when using Google Search. For exam­ple, if you searched for the query ‘+youtube’ or ‘+pepsi,’ you could be imme­di­ately taken to the YouTube Google+ page, or the Pepsi Google+ page, and given the option to add the page to your circles.”

So hav­ing a Google+ Busi­ness Page is another way for folks to find you and fol­low you. Start think­ing about it now, plan­ning for it soon, and it’s very impor­tant, we feel, to begin con­sid­er­ing what to name your Google + busi­ness page.

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Filed Under: General, Google, knowledge is power, SEO, sharing, Social Networking Tagged With: , , ,

Facebook Frictionless Sharing - Good or Bad Thing?

October 20, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Watching YouFace­book has been rolling out a lot of updates over the past few months. Their lat­est is by far the one cre­at­ing the biggest stir and most dis­cus­sion. It is described as ‘Fric­tion­less Shar­ing’ and changes how apps you have sub­scribed to inter­act with your Face­book wall.

What is Fric­tion­less Sharing?

When you visit a blog or web­site, if you’ve enabled an app access, FB (Face­book) can auto­mat­i­cally post their con­tent to your wall. No more click­ing the ‘Like’ but­ton. No more copy­ing and past­ing links. Depend­ing on the app and the set­tings avail­able, you will no longer have the of choice to share or not. When you visit their site to read an arti­cle, or lis­ten to a tune (for exam­ple) the arti­cle you are read­ing or tune you are lis­ten­ing to will be shared automatically.

Dif­fer­ent apps have dif­fer­ent set­tings avail­able and I have read that some allow more con­trol than oth­ers. Some allow you to turn auto­matic shar­ing off. Unless an app gives me this option, it will be deleted. Cer­tainly from a mar­ket­ing point of view there is enthu­si­asm for ‘Fric­tion­less Shar­ing’ with no wait­ing for ‘Likes’ and ‘Shares’ so many apps (I sus­pect) will not add the ‘off switch’ initially.

Pri­vacy Concerns

If you do a search on ‘Fric­tion­less Shar­ing’ you will find many folks have pri­vacy con­cerns with this new fea­ture.  Their con­cern is this is a new even higher level of intru­sion of con­stant sur­veil­lance of our every move on the Inter­net. I per­son­ally share this con­cern and do not like the fea­ture even though as a busi­ness we could find ways to take advan­tage of it.

Let’s face it, we are being tracked around the Inter­net already with cook­ies unless we browse using stealth mode. Every­one wants to know our buy­ing habits, tastes, Geo loca­tion so they can serve us tar­geted con­tent. It’s like going to a mall where they know what you bought on your last visit, change the ‘On Sale’ item to attract you based on your buy­ing his­tory, greet you by name and ask you if you plan on hav­ing a Taco at the ‘Food Fair’ again this visit…

Mmmm… Cook­ies are Good!

Cook­ies are not inher­ently bad. They help us do many things more eas­ily on the Inter­net. It’s more about what a par­tic­u­lar cookie is being used for. Dis­cussing cook­ies more fully is beyond the scope of this topic but if you want to under­stand how much we rely on them, try turn­ing them off in your web browser pref­er­ences or select­ing the option to be prompted to accept a cookie instead of accept­ing them auto­mat­i­cally. Have fun try­ing to get many of your favorite sites to open! Dis­abling cook­ies will seri­ously dimin­ish your brows­ing enjoyment.

As I have men­tioned, there is a ton of Buzz about this if you search the term ‘Fric­tion­less Shar­ing Face­book’. This one at PC world was at the top of my search and I found it eas­ier to under­stand than many of the more tech­ni­cal ones:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/240592/facebooks_frictionless_sharing_a_privacy_guide.html

A few thoughts to fin­ish with

Bot­tom line is the best advice one can fol­low is to use due dili­gence prior mak­ing a deci­sion to  install an app or not.  Do you really need this app? What does it add to my life? Does it want to take con­trol of my web­cam and record me lip-syncing badly to Adele — Rolling in the Deep, then post to com­edy site?

More time worn and cliched advice… Read the fine print.

Last but not least. Log out of Face­book when you are brows­ing other sites. Doing so is no guar­an­tee FB is not watch­ing your every move, but at least it may not hit your wall.

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Filed Under: Facebook, knowledge is power, Tech, Tips Tagged With: , ,

Why Can't You Use The Fonts I Want?

July 17, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Often a client we are design­ing a web­site for wants a par­tic­u­lar font and we can­not use it. There are a num­ber of rea­sons why we may not.

1. The font is not licensed for web use.
2. Its a font that many peo­ple don’t have on their com­puter
3. We feel it is ill suited from a design point of view, for pro­ject­ing the pro­fes­sional image required for their suc­cess­fully mar­ket­ing their site.

Rea­son one is often a shock to peo­ple who assume any font they have on their com­puter is free to use for what­ever they want. Not nec­es­sar­ily so.

Rea­son three is based on our expe­ri­ence and knowl­edge of what works but in the end, we defer to a clients wishes. It is, after all, their site.

Rea­son two is the one we most often encounter and the hard­est to explain. The fonts we have on our com­puter are dif­fer­ent depend­ing on whether we are on a PC, Mac or Linux oper­at­ing sys­tem. Also they can dif­fer depend­ing on which soft­ware we have. For exam­ple, after we upgraded our ver­sion of Microsoft Word, we found we had a bunch of cool new fonts installed.

For a per­son to see a font used on a web page, it has to be installed on their com­puter or it is replaced by a generic com­puter font or the same type, Serif, Sans-Serif, etc. So if we use it on a web page, you will see the page fine, another vis­i­tor may not.

What a pain!

This font issue became a thorn in the side of web design­ers wish­ing to be more cre­ative on their pages as well a please clients, so workarounds were used. One such workaround is instead of text for a head­line, a graphic depic­tion of the text was used instead. There are down­sides to this, the biggest being the extra expense of cre­at­ing a graphic. Another workaround was to try and force vis­i­tors to down­load the font when they visit the site. This has down­sides as well, such as dis­con­cert­ing peo­ple with a down­load prompt when they arrive and degraded site per­for­mance. Intel­lec­tual prop­erty /licensing vio­la­tions was another poten­tial prob­lem with this workaround.

Over the years was very lit­tle progress in find­ing a solu­tion that sat­is­fied font design­ers, who deserve recog­ni­tion for their cre­ations and that worked with­out impact­ing the web­site user expe­ri­ence or load time in some man­ner. So we have been stuck with the same old safe fonts. The tried and true like Arial, Ver­dana, Times New Roman, Tahoma, Geneva and Geor­gia. There have been addi­tions to the ‘safe to use’ list of fonts but no good solu­tions to the prob­lem itself.

Things are finally improving…

Over the past few years, hosted font ser­vices have emerged and are pro­vid­ing a much needed dash of flair to the web by over­com­ing the issues I have out­lined here. Depend­ing on the ser­vice, you need to reg­is­ter and pay a fee but most have a lim­ited free level or some fonts that have no licens­ing fee. Here is a list of few of these services:

http://www.typekit.com/

http://www.webtype.com/

http://www.fontdeck.com/

http://kernest.com/

The best news for last…

There are many more and new ser­vices com­ing online all the time… But the one that is mak­ing a big splash right now is from…

Drum roll… You love me, you hate em, you can’t live with­out em… Google. Yes, they now have a great new font host­ing ser­vice. It’s easy to use [for us tech savvy web devel­op­ers] and all the fonts are free. Some restric­tions may apply such as lim­it­ing use to only the web with print projects not allowed. It’s best to check each one.

 

You still might not be able to have the exact font you want on your web site, but at least now there are some jazz­ier options to pick from that you know are safe/legal to use. What we rec­om­mend is, if they want some­thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent on your site, hop on over to Google Web Fonts at http://www.google.com/webfonts and pick a few.

We sug­gest you test them using the para­graph option tab as well as the sen­tence option. You want to see how they will look in dif­fer­ent sit­u­a­tions. The selec­tion isn’t huge yet but will likely grow over time and as I men­tioned, the ser­vice is free. Pick out a few choices and send your web team [us hope­fully] the names and we’ll know what to do with them. It’s best to keep the final choices for the site  at two, but no harm in send­ing more to pick the two from.

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Filed Under: Google, sharing, Web Site Design

Do You Recommend A Service And Send An Affiliate Link To Your Client?

July 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Most busi­ness own­ers have signed up as an affil­i­ate for ser­vices they use and trust.  We have and do. 

When we have a client that needs a par­tic­u­lar ser­vice that we use, and believe in, we tell our clients of this ser­vice and pro­vide our affil­i­ate link (with dis­clo­sure) assum­ing that we will get a com­mis­sion for this offer­ing if they choose to use that service.

Do you do this and think you will receive commission?

Think again.

We offered an affil­i­ate link to a client for a ser­vice we highly rec­om­mend, and we use, which our client signed up for.  We dis­cov­ered we were not paid com­mis­sion and checked into it.  We were told:

If some­one clicks on an affil­i­ate link after yours then they get the com­mis­sion. <quote> last affil­i­ate link clicked is the one that gets the sale. <end quote>

This started me think­ing.  So, you rec­om­mend a ser­vice to your client.  You explain the ben­e­fits, also explain that it is an affil­i­ate link, and send them off. 

If they don’t sign up, so be it.  But if they do and you don’t get the com­mis­sion then what hap­pened.  Well here is some of my think­ing from the quote above.

If you rec­om­mend a ser­vice and the client wants to check on reviews well they can land on a site that has embed­ded affil­i­ate links (most don’t have dis­clo­sures).  Sup­pose they like the review and they click on the link of the ser­vice name. They may not even real­ize that their action of click­ing on a sim­ple link of the ser­vice name is going to delete your cookie. 

It sure never occurred to me,

So, do you offer affil­i­ate links to your clients and assume you will be prop­erly com­pen­sated for the refer­ral IF the client signs up for the service? 

Think again.

Likely you have lost in commissions.

What can we do?  Not sure there is any answer at this point but wanted to alert you to this issue.

If I find any answers I will post them here.  If you have any sug­ges­tions please share.

 

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Filed Under: knowledge is power, Marketing, sharing, Tips

Independent Business Owners Are Not Borg

March 24, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Resistance is futile...

Most peo­ple plan­ning an impor­tant event, such as wed­ding (for exam­ple), would never con­sider wait­ing until the last minute to book a caterer, rent tuxe­dos, buy a wed­ding dress, make arrange­ments for a florist or to book a recep­tion hall. Book­ing well in advance is advised and in fact, a must for secur­ing many pro­fes­sional ser­vices. They will not be avail­able otherwise.

The same is true when sched­ul­ing work with an inde­pen­dent busi­ness owner / entre­pre­neur that you have con­tracted to do work with.

If a client waits until too close to dead­line to advise need­ing the work done there can be a sched­ul­ing prob­lem. (This is where I get to the Borg part). Some­times there is an assump­tion that once con­tracted it is just a mat­ter of idling away in the back­ground await­ing ‘a command’.

Inde­pen­dent busi­ness own­ers / entre­pre­neurs do not work with a sin­gle client. Inde­pen­dent busi­ness own­ers / entre­pre­neurs can­not sit at their computer/phone/blackberry just wait­ing for work  None of us would sur­vive if we did this.

In our own busi­ness we pride our­selves at always do our best to ‘drop every­thing’ when it is an emer­gency and hav­ing a fast turn­around time. Even so, like other pro­fes­sion­als ser­vices, like your­selves, we need to sched­ule our work / your work. To keep our busi­ness suc­cess­ful we need a full sched­ule to prosper.

To all our suc­cesses —  (we will not be assim­i­lated :-)

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Filed Under: Entrepreneur, Independant Business Owner, sharing, SOHO, Tips, Web Site Design
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