Verizon’s new commercial is aimed specifically at ripping you off

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Cell phone companies often show hilariously inaccurate commercials (I need to talk about Sprint one of these days), and when I saw this Verizon commercial yesterday I laughed. Watch it and let me know what you think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzYOr-CeRCs

What’s the problem?

They say “the majority of people pay for data they never use“.

Then, “most people never use more than 5 gigs

“. The version I saw on TV said “2 out of 3 of people never use more than 5 gigs“, but the point is the same either way.

Then, they introduce a plan for 5GB for $55. The problem? There is no refund if you don’t use all of the data in a given month. And they say that “most people” won’t use it all. And now those people will all be stuck “paying for data they never use”.

Verizon illustrates a problem, then tells you exactly how they plan to rip you off with it. Brilliant.

As far as I know, Google’s Project Fi is the only one that gives you a refund for unused data. Verizon’s new plan isn’t too bad, but the promotion of it is simply awful.

Easy ways to find time to meet

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We’ve all been there. You’re trying to meet up with someone in person, planning it via email. It goes something like this:

  • “Are you free for lunch on Tuesday?”
  • “Sorry, I can’t, but I’m around Thursday.”
  • “No, my Thursday is crazy. How about Friday morning?”
  • “I already have a breakfast meeting Friday. Let’s look at next week.”

And on it goes…

Appointlet

For a long time, we at GreenMellen used a service called Appointlet to help with that problem. It allowed us to share a calendar for clients to use to find free to time meet with us. It worked great — they could view it at any time, find openings that matched up with their calendar, and click to reserve the time. It pulled data from our various Google Calendars to keep the “open” times up-to-date automatically.

The catch was that it was really only for one person. That “one” person in this case was a mixture of myself and Ali, using our four calendars (her personal, her work, my personal, my work). We wanted to get a bit more nuanced with our calendar offerings, and after much research we switched over to YouCanBook.me.

YouCanBook.me

It’s very similar to Appointlet, but allows for better mixing of multiple calendars. The difference is subtle, but very important:

Appointlet: If I added two people to a calendar in Appointlet, it would show times when either were available. This could be useful if someone needed to meet with “any member of a sales team”, but wasn’t helpful for us.

YouCanBookMe: If I add two people to a calendar in YouCanBookMe, it shows time when both

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are available. Perfect!

I’ve set up a dozen different scenarios in YouCanBookMe, so when a client wants to meet with us I can send them the exact calendar to meet their needs. For example:

  • Need to meet with Mickey and Ali to discuss your new website? I have one that looks at our collective calendars, and finds a 60 minute window with at least 30 minutes open on both sites of it.
  • Need to work with Ashlea and Mickey for training on your new website? I have one that looks at mine and Ashlea’s calendars and finds a two hour window with at least 60 minutes open on both sides of it (for travel, often).
  • Just need a quick chat with me? I have one that only looks at my calendar and finds a 30 minute block, with 30 minutes of either side of it.

The possibilities are endless. Once we send a link to a client, they see something like this:

They can simply click on any dark gray time to book that slot, or use the arrow at the top to move to future weeks. If any of us add something to our Google Calendar, that slot is immediately taken away and clients cannot book it.

Which one should I use?

If you’re just looking to offer time for yourself, then Appointlet will do the trick. If you need granular control for multiple people, then YouCanBookMe is likely the way to go.

There are certainly other great options out there, but these are two of the best.

What do you use to help let people book time with you?

Getting all of those contacts organized

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Contact management can be a pain. Most people will add some contacts from their phone, add some from their email, end up with duplicates and some missing info, and just have a big mess on their hands. We’ve all been there.

I spent much of 2016 trying to find ways to get things organized. I had switched to Google Contacts years ago (back when I still used an iPhone), largely so I’d be free to use whatever phone I want. iPhone and Android both work great with Google Contacts, so that was step one.

Even with that, though, I had kind of a mess. I had my personal Gmail contacts (which synced to my phone), my GreenMellen contacts (through Google’s “G Suite”) and then we also use ProsperWorks as our GreenMellen CRM, which had a separate set of contacts.

FullContact

The first piece I added was FullContact. It’s an online contact manager that happens to sync with Google. I had it pull in my Gmail and GreenMellen contacts so I could sort them out. It detected most of the duplicates, and fairly quickly I had things cleaned up.

They have a lot of great features and it helps keep things cleaned up. They also have a mobile app, but I don’t use that. Since it syncs nicely to both of my Google accounts, I simply use the native contacts app on my phone and it works great. Anyone I add to Gmail or FullContact are automatically synced to both.

ProsperWorks

I mentioned above that we also use ProsperWorks. It’s a great application for keeping track of website leads, clients, etc. However, it doesn’t talk to FullContact so things needed to be entered in there separately.

Here’s a quick video that shows some of their features:

PieSync

Fortunately, PieSync comes to the rescue. It works behind the scenes and keeps things synced. It doesn’t talk directly to FullContact, but it can connect ProsperWorks and Google Contacts, which does the job for me.

Contactually

We also use a product called Contactually. It’s another business CRM, and a bit redundant when used alongside of ProsperWorks, but it has some other features we like. The main one are reminders — it’ll automatically remind me to reach back out to people if I haven’t contacted them in a while, and it does a nice job of that.

Putting all of that together leads to this. It looks messy (and it is), but it works wonderfully. I typically add new contacts directly to FullContact, and within minutes they’re in every system.

Add Everyone

Because I have this system humming now, I use FullContact a lot. When I get new contact information, whether it’s a business card from a meeting, an email from a prospect, or even just some new info from a friend, it goes in there. That means I always have everything I need on my phone, and if I get a call from an unknown number I can be 99% sure that it’s a telemarketer.

Pricing

The downside is that all of this isn’t free. Google Contacts are (which is why you should be using them now), but the rest each have some small monthly fees:

  • FullContact: (pricing) Their basic version is free, but only holds up to 1000 contacts. The premium is $8.33/mo and works great.
  • ProsperWorks: (pricing) They start at $19/mo/user and that will do most of what you need.
  • PieSync: (pricing) They start at $5/mo, but I’m on the $19/mo plan so it can handle multiple connections and more contacts.
  • Contactually: (pricing) They start at $39/mo, which is the plan we use.

It’s rare that you’d need both ProsperWorks and Contactually, and many of you likely need neither. Get your stuff into Google Contacts, use FullContact to help organize and sync it, and things should work well for you.

What do you currently use to manage your contacts?

Your Google search results are a big part of your brand

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Years ago I was talking with a woman named Carol about personal branding in search results. Her philosophy was to focus on one platform (LinkedIn) so she could “avoid having too much info about her show up online”.

It makes sense at first, but the problem with that approach is that when someone searches for her on Google she only controls one of those spots in the results — the other nine are websites that reference her name but are completely out of her control. I encouraged her and I encourage all of you to do your best to control the entire first page of Google for your name.

Here is roughly what shows up when you search Google for “Mickey Mellen”. The results will be slightly customized for each user, but should look something like this:

The results?

  1. Our company website.
  2. Team info on our company website.
  3. My LinkedIn profile.
  4. My Twitter profile.
  5. Some image results. I have less control over those in terms of making quick changes, but they’re all good.
  6. My Facebook page.
  7. My SlideShare page.
  8. My YouTube page.
  9. My Google+ page.
  10. My Medium page.

Aside from the images, if I needed to change some info about me online I could update all of those pages (and therefore the entire first page of Google results for my name) in a matter of minutes.

John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing says that “Page One on Google Is Your New Business Card“, which I agree with completely. In that post he says:

when it comes to reputation and review management, the best defense is a good offense.

Even if you’re not going to use them right away, claim your name on the top social media websites. Add a nice photo. Update your profile. Make sure you own the top of Google to the best extent possible to make sure that when people look you up online they’ll see the message that you want them to see.

People have always been afraid of the effects of new technology

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I find it amazing how many very old quotes can sound like they were first said yesterday. When I was a youth pastor around the year 2001 and people tried to tell me “how awful kids are today”, I loved this quote from Socrates (somewhere around 400 B.C.):

The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

The point was that “kids today” aren’t any worse than kids from centuries ago — they’re just being kids! Socrates also famously warned against writing because it would “create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories.” Today it seems the opposite; getting people to write more would be a good thing.

Information Overload

There was Conrad Gessner, who described how the modern world overwhelmed people with data and that this overabundance was both “confusing and harmful” to the mind. His concern was not technology was we know it, as he died in 1565. Rather, his concern was the overwhelming amount of data due to the printing press.

Magazines will isolate you

In the 1700’s, the French statesman Malesherbes railed against the fashion for getting news from the printed page, arguing that it socially isolated readers and detracted from the spiritually uplifting group practice of getting news from the pulpit.

Stripping life from live music

In 1906, famous composer John Philip Sousa took to Appleton’s Magazine with an essay decrying the latest piratical threat to his livelihood, to the entire body politic, and to “musical taste” itself. His concern? The player piano and the gramophone, which stripped the life from real, human, soulful live performances.

The telephone makes you lazy

This one makes a bit more sense, though it was from 90 years ago. A survey conducted by the Knights of Columbus Adult Education Committee in San Francisco in 1926 asked “Does the telephone make men more active or more lazy? Does it break up home life and the old practice of visiting friends?”

The radio makes it hard to concentrate

This is another one that many of us can relate to, but it was almost 80 years ago. In 1936, the music magazine the Gramophone reported that children had “developed the habit of dividing attention between the humdrum preparation of their school assignments and the compelling excitement of the loudspeaker” and described how the radio programs were disturbing the balance of their excitable minds.

TV might hurt radio

The television caused widespread concern as well: Media historian Ellen Wartella has noted how “opponents voiced concerns about how television might hurt radio, conversation, reading, and the patterns of family living and result in the further vulgarization of American culture.” It was a quick turnaround from radio being the bad guy, to suddenly needing to be saved from TV.

VCRs will kill American film makers

This is undoubtedly my favorite. The music and movie industries have long made it clear that they hate new technology, even if they can make tons of money from it. Jack Valenti, the onetime head of the MPAA, made this famous quote in 1982 “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.” Of course, the VCR went on to help movie studios earn many billions of dollars over the years.

It’s gone on since then. MP3s were going to kill the music industry, until Apple showed them how to sell the files to make money. The internet was going to kill movies, until Netflix showed them how to use it to make huge money. Streaming music is the latest to try to “kill” the music industry, other than them paying billions each year in royalty fees. TechDirt does a great job of showcasing these kinds of stories, such as this one from earlier in 2016 that gets into details about how quickly streaming music royalties are growing.

There will undoubtedly be a new technology soon that will threaten to ruin the minds of your children or steal all of our jobs. Maybe it’s virtual reality goggles, or perhaps self-driving cars. Thing will continue to change and evolve, and while we need to be vigilant against some actual evil out there, most of these new technologies can help your minds and businesses if you’ll just let them.

What new technology do you think will have the biggest impact in the coming years?

Forwarders are good for everyone

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Given the somewhat unique spelling of my last name, people often have trouble typing in the correct website address for GreenMellen Media. As a result, we’ve purchased and configured a variety of misspellings to make sure people get to the right place.

Along with GreenMellenMedia.com, you can also find us at GreenMellen.com, GreenMelonMedia.com and GreenMellonMedia.com. Setting up the forwarders is fairly easy, but you want to make sure that they all resolve to the correct address (and not pretend to actually be loading the site from one of the typos). I explained the technical pieces for this a few years ago, so check that out and let me know if you have any trouble.

Email counts too

We’ve taken things a step further and have set up email forwarders for a variety of misspellings. You can always reach me at [email protected], but you can also reach me at:

But what about people that spell my first name “micky”? We have them covered too, as the following also will forward over to the proper account:

I also set up the same forwarders for the rest of our team, including their first name misspellings (Ali/Alli/Allie, Ashlea/Ashley, Brooke/Brook, etc).

2016-12-05_17-39-05We use the G Suite (Google Apps) for our email, so you can set up those alternate addresses (on your main URL) as “aliases” in there. For the other forwarders on the misspelled addresses, I just set those up as email forwarders inside of cPanel (since G Suite isn’t even aware of those domains, nor does it really need to be).

At the end of the day, I try to do all I can to make life easier for our visitors and potential clients, and you should do the same. Many of those addresses have been used by our clients over the years, and it’s so much easier to just absorb the typo and move on than it is to deal with bounced emails. Beyond that, I believe in posting email addresses on your site in plain text so that all users and devices can use them, and simply let your email system deal with the spam — Google is great at handling that and it makes things easier for everyone.

The hierarchy of attention; or, why we hate your robocalls

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Today in Georgia we have a handful of runoff elections, and our phones have been ringing off the hook with robocalls from some of the tighter races. The two men running for the Senate, Jack Kingston and David Perdue, have each robocalled our house more than a dozen times. It’s crazy.

The problem is that a phone call, by nature, is requesting our attention right now. The various types of communication break down about like this:

Snail mail

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If you send someone a letter in the mail, you’re saying “I want your attention sometime in the next few days“. I’m certainly not a fan of junk snail mail, but it’s a minor annoyance at worst.

Email

If you send someone an email, you’re saying “I want your attention sometime in the next few hours“. Granted, some people take days to respond to an email, but I think the expectation is to hear back within a matter of hours. Most social media messages tend to fall into this group, though some may slip into the next one.

Text message

If you send someone a text message, you’re saying “I want your attention sometime in the next few minutes“. The beauty of text messages is that you can wrap up what you’re doing before you reply. It’s a quick way to communicate, but allows a small buffer of time to wrap up previous tasks.

Phone call

If you call someone on the phone, you’re saying “I want your attention right now“. In other words, you’re being asked to drop what you’re doing and talk to them immediately. This isn’t always bad, though. Most of our clients email us for changes to their websites, but if something drastic is going on (server problems, etc), having them request our immediate attention is completely appropriate.

This is why robocalls feel so awful. A politician is saying “stop whatever you’re doing, whether it’s work, dinner with your family, hanging out with friends, etc, and give me your complete attention”. Worse, they’re not doing the same for you! They’re wanting to you commit some immediate time to them, simply to listen to a recording of why they think they’re great. It’s infuriating.

It’s important to keep these basic ideas in mind when dealing with other people. Granted, some prefer one medium over the other regardless of urgency, but in general these seem to line up rather well.

What do you think? Are robocalls really that insulting?

Getting to inbox zero

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Reading Time: 4 minutesGetting your inbox completely cleaned out is something that many people find daunting, but in reality it’s not too bad once you get started.  It can actually save you quite a bit of time if you can keep it at zero (or at least close to it).

At GreenMellen we all work to keep our inboxes as close to zero as possible, so we can respond quickly to new issues and have a clear view of what’s going on with everything.  We don’t always get to zero, but it’s rare for any of us to end the day with more than a few emails still in the inbox.

Where does it go?

It starts with having a place to put everything.  If you’ve read David Allen’s book “Getting Things Done“, he simply calls it a “trusted system”.  You need to have a place to put tasks and information so that you can get them out of your inbox.  In our case we use Evernote for jotting down info, and Teamwork for managing tasks, but there are many great options for both.

Merlin Mann, who we’ll discuss shortly, works to turn emails into “dead husks” as quickly as possible.  Get the information out of it that you need (calendar date, photo for a website, etc) and then get rid of the message.

Archive them

Cleaning out your inbox doesn’t necessary mean you need to delete everything.  While you certainly and (and should!) delete a ton of the emails that you get, you can hang onto as many as you’d like as long as you get them out of your inbox (and therefore out of your mind).

In the two accounts shown on the right (both at zero in the screenshot, though not always that clean) I have a total of 174,412 messages archived in the “all mail” sections, and another 2,461 that I’ve deleted in the past month.  People get scared that inbox zero means they need to throw everything away, but there is no problem keeping emails for reference if they’re tucked away properly.

Send & Archive

Just over four years ago Google released a small add-on for Gmail called “Send & Archive” that I raved about.  I argued back then that the one little button could save you nearly 24 hours per year!  The vast majority of my 174,412 archive emails have been sent there using the “send & archive” — that is literally hundreds of hours that I’ve been able to save and put toward other tasks (writing blog entries, working on client projects, playing with my kids — whatever I want to do).

Forget the folders

I’ve never really set up many labels (folders) in Gmail, but at my previous job with used Outlook (shudder!) and I had a huge fancy list of them.  In the video at the end of this article Merlin will discuss why that’s bad, but it’s similar to the “send & archive” above.  If you can save just a few seconds per email, it can add up really fast.

In my case, I created a new folder each year called “archive2013” and put all of my inbound email (that was worth keeping) in there.  I would have done a single “archive” folder, but Outlook has issues with folders that get too large, so splitting them by year helped.  Instead of wasting time trying to decide which folder to put a particular email into, I simply tossed it in the archive folder and moved on.  It’s not as fast as Gmail’s “send & archive”, but certainly saved me a lot of time.

Kill the lists

Despite my huge number of emails, I really work hard to keep the flow as light as possible.  In particular, I use the “unsubscribe” button quite a lot on newsletters.  If the newsletter doesn’t have an unsubscribe button (which is a pretty shady tactic), I simply “mark as spam” and move on.

Use mobile

While I hate typing emails on my phone, and rarely do it, is’s a phenomenal device for keeping the inbox in a manageable state while I’m out of the office.  If I get 20 emails while I’m out, delete 10 of them, archive 3 of them and reply to 2 of them, that means I come back home with an inbox of 5 instead of an inbox of 20.  It’s beautiful!

Set up filters

Most email clients allow you to set up automated “filters” to move certain messages to specific folders.  While you know I don’t like folders, I do keep a few around for filtering reasons.  My favorite is my “social” folder, where all social notifications land.  A few times a day I’ll peek in there to see what’s going on, and it helps keep my inbox tidy by pushing all of that stuff immediately to the folder instead of my inbox.

Have a party

Randi Zuckerberg (sister of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg) recently posted an article on LinkedIn with some of her tips to getting to inbox zero.  Most are similar to what I’ve shown above, but a unique one is an “inbox cleaning party”.  Get together with friends and work through those overblown inboxes together.

Merlin Mann – Inbox Zero

Though it’s nearly six years old at this point, the “inbox zero” talk that Merlin Mann gave at Google back in 2007 remains my favorite video for tips and techniques for managing your inbox.  It’s nearly an hour long, but well worth your time.  Find an evening, skip a TV show, and watch this instead.

Like I’ve said, we’re certainly not perfect.  Things pile up and can get out of control at time, but if you have the right systems and techniques in place then getting back to zero feels much less daunting.

How is your inbox looking right now?

Marlow’s Tavern, meet Gary Vaynerchuk

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Reading Time: 4 minutesLast week, I saw a speech that Gary Vaynerchuk gave to a bunch of RE/MAX realtors on the topic of social media engagement and it was quite awesome.  Here’s the video if you care to watch it:

Watching it inspired me to pick up Gary’s latest book, “The Thank You Economy“.  Awesome book, highly recommended. The folks at Marlow’s Tavern really need to read it.

As a general rule, we enjoy Marlow’s.  They have a few locations near us, good food, and solid service.  Tonight we took our babysitter out there for her birthday, but the evening had a few minor issues, and I think they could really benefit from having more of a “Thank You” approach to business.

No birthday desserts

We made sure to mention that today was our babysitter’s birthday, because we knew that Marlow’s did the little free cupcake dessert like most restaurants.  Nope, not anymore.  “Some people lie about it being their birthday, so we can’t do that anymore.”  Uh-oh.  Really?  Did that surprise them?  Of course some people will lie about it — that’s why you give them a cheap cupcake and not a free steak. We had three adults and two kids, with a total bill of $78, and they’re concerned that they might give away a $3 dessert that isn’t legit?

While you certainly need to watch out for people taking advantage of you, this just seemed really shallow.  Companies that do customer service the right away (like Zappos) just focus on treating their customers like rock stars, and don’t worry so much about potentially giving up $3 every now and then.

My food was SLOW

It was remarkable.  The other four people in our party got their food fairly quickly, but I didn’t.  So I waited.  And waited.  And waited.  We’re guessing it was 10-12 minutes before my food arrived, which is crazy for a place like that, but things happen.  However, I still don’t know what happened.  I got a quick “sorry ’bout that” when they brought it, and that was it.  It was clear they didn’t care about the issue a single bit. A much better approach would have been like what Scott Stratten had happen at a hotel a few years ago; he had a very bad breakfast, but they apologized and explained the problem and he was much happier as a result.  Here’s his full write-up of that experience.

I decided not to press the the issue with them, just to see how they’d handle it.  Simply put, they didn’t.  No apology from anyone, no deduction on our bill.

(Speaking of the bill – $2.50 each for kid’s drinks?  Wow!)

Twitter

With those in mind, I did a little digging when I got home.  They’re pretty solid on Twitter (@MarlowsTavern), so I poked around for a while.  The content they push out is solid, but their conversation skills are weak.  They reply to some comments, but it appears to be at random.  Just in the past week:

  • Jennifer asked whether a dish at Marlow’s was gluten free.  A few days later, she got a reply from them — yes!  Excellent.  So she replied back asking if they had a gluten free menu, or how they should request gluten free products.  Crickets…
  • Robbie tweeted that he was taking his wife to Marlow’s for her birthday.  A quick “congrats” would have been nice, but they simply let it go without comment…
  • Another user tweeted to rave about their Sunday buffet.  Again, no reply.

Seriously, businesses need to build true fans to be successful and here are people actively telling their world about your restaurant — and you ignore them?

Google Place Pages

How about their Google Place pages?  They have a handful of locations, so I just checked out a few of them.  I found these two gems rather quickly:

The response from Marlow’s, as expected, was silence.

Google+

Needless to say, they’re not on Google+ yet.  Not that I can really fault them for that (it’s new, smaller than Facebook/Twitter, etc), but people are already talking about them on there…

Website

Since they’ll probably be reading this, I’ll toss in a few suggested website tweaks as a bonus.  Their website is really pretty solid (many restaurants have dreadfully awful sites), but it could use some adjustments:

  • On your front page, you have a link to your “to-go” menu.  Seems like people might often be in the car when they call for that.  And the menu is a PDF?
  • In the footer, “copyright 2007”.
  • Also in the footer is the “designed by” garbage.  Don’t leave that on there.
  • Your canonicalization is a bit messed up.
  • “Follow us on Facebook”.  Don’t you “follow” people on Twitter and “like” them on Facebook?  People get confused enough, so don’t switch them up for no good reason.  I’ve never liked the words “follow us” anyhow, because it implies that “you should follow us and we’ll send you a bunch of crap”.  I’m glad the Twitter widget (which you have on your site) says “Join the conversation” instead, as that sounds much better.
  • Your Entertainment page encourages people to visit you on MySpace, which you haven’t updated in about two years.  Can’t blame you for the lack of updates, but you should probably remove that link.

It just takes time

Social media can be difficult for some businesses.  If you sell toilet plungers, it’ll take some work to come up with a creative campaign.  For restaurants, though, it’s dead simple.  Just put in the effort, connect with your patrons, and prove that you really care about them.  I should also mention that their Facebook pages (like this one) seem to be managed quite well, so they’re not totally ignoring everyone.

At the end of the day, these weren’t killer problems for Marlow’s.  We certainly think less of them, no doubt, but we’ll be back eventually — they’ll just be a little bit lower on the list.

Everything you need to know about Google+ Business Pages

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Reading Time: 2 minutesGoogle finally unveiled their business pages a few days ago, and here’s what you need to know.

First, a quick “why should I create one?” video:

What are Business Pages?

They’re very similar to personal profiles, with a few key differences:

  • You cannot create an account for a business page; you create it via your personal profile (similar to Facebook).
  • You can create multiple pages from a single profile.
  • Each business page can only be managed by the profile that created it, so choose carefully the right person in your organization to create the page. Support for multiple admins is “coming soon”.
  • Pages cannot add users to a circle unless the user adds them first. This is an awesome anti-spam move by Google.
  • There aren’t any vanity URLs yet (like plus.google.com/pepsi), but those are presumably coming in the future.

Direct Connect

Tied to this release is a new feature called “Direct Connect”.  If you begin your Google search with a +, it’ll show brand pages that match the query in the auto-complete results, as shown here:

Over time, it’s possible that this could become a trendy thing to promote.  I can image someone like Pepsi having something like “Google +Pepsi” for more at the end of a TV ad.  If it does take off, it’ll be important to get your page listed there.  But how?

Badges

Today, Google released “badges” for business pages.  These allow you to add nifty widgets to your page, and people can add your brand to their circles directly from your website!  It’s pretty slick.

Even more important is the snippet of code that they have you put in the <head> section of your site.  This is there to prove that the page in question is really yours and will qualify you to show up as a Direct Connect option.  No word on how soon those will start appearing, but it’d be wise to get yours connected so you can show up in Direct Connect as soon as possible.  You can learn more about badges from this Google blog post.

Have you built a page yet?

Have you built a page for your company yet?  Leave a  link to it in the comments and show us your work!