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Share Your Google+ Circles

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)
Tuesday, September 27th, 2011

Google recently announced they have added the ability to share circles.

A new “Share” link now appears when you hover over a circle on the Google+ Circles page. Clicking the link will let you add a comment and then share that circle with your friends on Google+.

Two things to note – 1) this only shares the members of the circle are shared, not what you’ve named the circle and 2) only the current members of the circle are shared. If you had new members to a circle, you will have to share the circle again.

Here is a short video from one of the engineers on the Google+ team showing how to share your circles

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Categories : Web/Tech
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Google to Biz Owners – Don’t Create a Google+ Profile Just Yet

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)
Thursday, July 7th, 2011

Google wants business owners to wait before creating a Google+ profile for their business. Here is a short video from Product Manager Christian Oestlien explaining why:

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Categories : Marketing
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Word of Mouth Still Dominated By Face to Face Conversations

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)
Tuesday, June 21st, 2011

Google recently teamed up with Keller Fay Group (a word of mouth and research company) to study the relationship between word of mouth conversation and the internet. Their study, based on 3,000 responding adults- concludes what most professional service providers probably already know – that the majority of word of mouth conversations still happens face-to-face (82%).

Does that mean that professional service firms should be ignoring social media and the internet? Of course not. As the study shows, the internet is the leading source of information that people talk about when they have their face-to-face conversations. I think this goes right to the heart of what I and others in Duct Tape Marketing have been saying for a while – those who learn to merge their online and offline worlds are those who are most successful using social media and the internet to grow their business.

The video below gives an overview of the findings from the study. Since Google is a partner the study, it will come as no surprise that they found search is more important than social media when it comes to driving business. I believe partners and business owners should focus on their overall internet presence rather than worrying about the distinction between search and social media outlined in the video.

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Categories : Marketing
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Google’s New Place Search

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)
Thursday, October 28th, 2010

Yesterday, Google announced Place Search – local search that organizes information around places. Place search returns the familiar map with the locations of your search results along with other relevant information from the web about those results.

Here is a screen shot my search for Kansas City Law Firms:

PlaceSearch

[Click on the image for a larger view]

Google will try to predict when you are searching for a place, but you can also select the Places option from the menu on the left:

Places2

For example, this morning if I search on “Kansas City Accounting Firms” is don’t get the new Places results. However, if I click on the Places option on the left hand menu, here is what I get:

KC_Accounting

We’ve been stressing the importance of local search for accountants, lawyers, financial advisors, and other professional service firms for a while now and it looks like it is only going to become more important in the future.

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Categories : Marketing Plan, Web/Tech
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Google’s new user interface

By Bill · Comments (2)
Tuesday, May 11th, 2010

You may have noticed some changes to Google’s search results page recently. The results page now sports a three column layout with the left hand column containing some colorful new icons.

google_icons The tools in the left hand column will help you drill down into your query results. Many of these tools are not new, they are just easier to find now that they are in the left sidebar.

Let’s see how this works. If I search for a pretty generic term like “golf”, I get about 308 million results. BTW, the result count is now under the box where you type in your search phrase.

If what I really wanted to do was search for golf equipment to buy, I an click on the Shopping icon to narrow my results. From there, I can narrow my results by category, price range, brand or store.

Maybe I wanted to read about golf. By clicking on the Books icon, I can view books and magazines about golf. I can also sort books by date if I want to get the latest advice available.

By clicking on the Videos icon, I can narrow down my golf video choices by the duration, quality, how recently they were posted, and source. Yes, the results contain results from sources other than YouTube.

And of course, if I want to go play golf, I can click on the Maps icon to find some local courses. This points out a change that should be of interest to anyone who markets professional services (or any other business) – all searches now appear to bring back local matches. If I search for “attorney”, Google detects that I am in Lenexa, KS and shows me the entries from Google Maps for attorneys in my area. This means that local search is even more important for local businesses. If you are not familiar with Google’s Local Business Center (LBC), you may want to check out this newsletter article about local search.

attorney_wonder_wheel Another great tool that used to be buried but is now easily found is the Wonder Wheel. The wonder wheel shows other keyword phrases that are related to the key words you searched on. This can be a great tool for doing keyword research or when you are searching for new\related topics to post about on your blog.

I know I haven’t covered all of the changes. Which new features are you finding most useful?

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Categories : Local Search Marketing, Web/Tech
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