Today is quite a day for Google+. The big news is that Google Apps users can finally use their business account to access the service. Here are a few other neat items.
A new “what’s hot” button:
“Ripples”, to see how posts spread:
“Creative Kit”, to have more fun with your photos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RipLoAUUDjc
All in all, it’s quite a day! What’s your favorite new feature?
One other tidbit from the web 2.0 summit — business pages are getting closer, but are more than “a few days” away. Google is said to be “overwhelmed” by the interest in business profiles and they’re working on getting all of the pieces in place for them.
The fact that Google said they’re coming “imminently” but “not in a matter of days” leads me to think they’re probably a few weeks out. I’m hoping we see them released before Thanksgiving.
In any case, I think it’ll bring a surge of traffic to Google+ as millions of small businesses sign up. Whether they stick around will be a big key to the long term success (or failure) of Google+.
While LinkedIn remains the best place to go online for job hunting and leveraging connections to help get your resume in front of the right people, Google+ already has a few things in place that can help take it a bit further.
Mashable has the full article, which has some nice (though rather basic) tips. They include:
Google’s Christian Oestlien
has just put out some more updates regarding the use of Google+ for businesses and what we can expect to see in the future.
Just a quick update on our Google+ test for businesses:
As you may recall, I posted an update last week on our policy towards businesses in Google+.
If you have not already, please be sure to submit your business for our test phase. You can apply to be a part of this test here: http://www.goo.gl/KR7z5 . We will be closing this form on Friday (July 15th) at 6pm PST. To the thousands upon thousands of businesses that applied to be a part: THANK YOU! We won’t be able to accommodate everyone, but your interest has got us very focused on accelerating our development plans.
+Dennis Troper (product manager for business profiles), myself and the rest our team will focus next week on selecting a diverse set of business partners for the test period. We will be communicating with these partners next week, and will let the world know who they are soon thereafter. Please note that we are still actively closing profiles that are being used by businesses today. Stay engaged on Google+ with your personal account and continue to send us your excellent feedback. We’ll continue to be very proactive in communicating with everyone around our plans for businesses.
Google’s Christian Oestlien has officially announced the support for businesses will arrive in Google+ later this year. You can read the full post here, but I’ll post it below for those of you still waiting for access to Google+.
We have been watching Google+ take shape over the last week and we’ve seen some really great companies get involved. But frankly we know our product as it stands is not optimally suited to their needs. In fact, it was kind of an awkward moment for us when we asked Ford for his (or was it her?) gender!
How users communicate with each other is different from how they communicate with brands, and we want to create an optimal experience for both. We have a great team of engineers actively building an amazing Google+ experience for businesses, and we will have something to show the world later this year.
The business experience we are creating should far exceed the consumer profile in terms of its usefulness to businesses. We just ask for your patience while we build it. In the meantime, we are discouraging businesses from using regular profiles to connect with Google+ users. Our policy team will actively work with profile owners to shut down non-user profiles.
Over the next few months we are going to be running a small experiment with a few marketing partners to see the effect of including brands in the Google+ experience. We’ll begin this pilot with a small number of named partners. If you represent a “non-user entity” (e.g. business, organization, place, team, etc.) and would like to apply for consideration in our limited program (and be amongst the first to be alerted when the business product launches) you can sign up here:
Please keep all of the feedback coming, we are listening and really appreciate the time everyone is putting towards helping us build a better social experience through Google+.
Two important things to note:
Also, here is a video of Christian explaining what they’ve got coming:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=at_azOmh69A
As it stands right now, Google+ is for people only — no businesses. In fact, Google has made it very clear that brands and organizations should not have a presence on Google+ at this point in the field test. However, business pages are coming soon.
Search Engine Land has the full details, but Google’s Bradley Horowitz made it obvious:
Let me be clear – and I’m sorry if this wasn’t obvious – we are not currently supporting brands, organizations, and non-human entities in the Google+ field trial. While we should have been clearer about this, there are some fields in the registration form (asking for a first name, a last name, an age and a gender) that indicate that.
Supporting these non-human entities is an obviously great feature – we have no allergy to it at all! It’s just not part of the system we are currently testing.
The field trial has limitations that I know are frustrating – ranging from lack of “obvious” features to inability to invite the people you most want to share with… We weren’t kidding when we said this was early and a test… and if the product leads to more frustration than you can bear, then that’s understandable and I promise that you will see fast and meaningful progress… and you can jump back in when we meet your bar for minimum viable functionality.
More importantly, Google’s head of Commerce, Jeff Huber, said the following in a comment on Mike Blumenthal’s blog:
And pre-emptively answering a question — yes, we will have (smb) business profile pages on Google+. I can’t announce a launch date yet, but we want to make them *great*, and we’re coding as fast as we can.
So they’re coming… eventually. Given Google’s rapid development pace so far, I expect we’ll see them fairly soon. I sure hope so.
I get spammy looking “refinance now” letters in the mail almost every day. I’m in the process of a refi, so I usually open them to make sure it’s not somehow related to that. Today’s letter wasn’t useless though — it had a great lesson inside. 🙂
It came from the office of “James B. Nutter & Company” and included a very “personal” letter. At the end was a very poorly printed fake signature from Mr. Nutter himself.
At that point, I thought I’d call them out on Twitter on the xerox signature. I know most of those companies do it, but that doesn’t make it right. It’s cheap.
Except, “James B. Nutter & Company” aren’t on Twitter.
So I tried Facebook. They aren’t on there either, but plenty of people were talking about them. In one particularly interesting page, we learn the following:
Nutter’s response? Silence.
Odds of me ever possibly considering doing any kind of business with that company? Zero.
Staying out of social media doesn’t mean that people won’t talk about you
— it just means that you won’t hear it and you can’t do anything to fix it.
I talked about this four years ago, but feel it’s worth mentioning again.
If you ask most someone: “Tell me about your church“, they’ll usually reply with something like:
Our church is full of God-loving people, we’re friendly to new visitors, we have wonderful music, we have an excellent pastor, we have a passion for missions, etc…
On the flip side, how often do people answer like this?
Our church is covered on three sides with red face brick, and on the back side with HardiPlank siding. We have Chelsea Green asphalt shingles on the roof, and we’re hoping to re-surface the parking lot soon.
The answer is never! When you talk to people about their “church”, they know that you’re asking about the congregation. However, so many church sites feel the need to feature their building as the primary image on their home page.
I Googled for local churches to find an example, and came across Holy Family Catholic Church. Not to pick on them, but they do this worse than most. They have eight different pictures on their home page, and none of them have a single person in them! In case they (hopefully) change that in the future, a screenshot is on the right.
I saw another site that featured rotating images of their church sign and all of the cute slogans they put on there. While I’m sure the congregation thinks it’s neat, it’s not helping very much with a first time visitor. I doubt a non-believer ever came to a church because their sign said “Stop, drop and roll doesn’t work in Hell“.
The solution is very simple; just put some smiling faces on there. Rotating images are great too, but be sure that it’s not just a black hole for non-Flash browsers (such as the iPhone and iPad).
That being said, I think it’s important to have photos of your building on the site. In fact, most churches should devote a section to “our facility”. There are two reasons for this:
Just be sure to put that somewhere off the home page (typically in [About Us] –> [Facility] or something like that) and you’ll be fine. Use that valuable space on the home page to start giving people a sense of kindness and personality about your church.
Just about exactly a month ago, I went out and purchased an AT&T Microcell. AT&T reception in our house is awful, and I’m not in a position to switch to Verizon. Therefore, the Microcell seemed like a good choice.
If you’re familiar with the Microcell concept, it’s a small device that uses your internet connection and essentially creates a cell tower in your house. I set it up in our office and now we have full 3G bars through the entire house! My wife and I both have iPhones, and friends have used various other 3G phones. They all work very well with the Microcell. You can read more about it on AT&T’s site.
Cost: $149 to buy the unit. If you want, you can sign a contract for $14.95 month for an individual ($29.99 for a family plan) and minutes you use via the Microcell don’t count toward your monthly minute caps. It’s a neat idea, but we’re always under our minutes anyhow so we didn’t do it. $149 and we were out the door.
Installation: Simple, but buggy. It’s not hard to set up, but you need to wait 90 minutes for it “configure itself”. After a few hours it was still failing so I had to call AT&T. There’s a GPS inside the Microcell so they can make sure you only use it from your house. Somehow the coordinates they thought I should have didn’t match with the Microcell, so it would never connect. Once they fixed it over the phone it worked great.
Adding Users: For a person to be able to use it, you need to add their number to the system. It’s easy to add one, but you’re limited to 10. I’d like to just add all of my AT&T friends and be done with it, so when they come over they’ll get full bars. Sadly, I need to swap them out from time to time. Seems pretty silly to have to do that. The idea behind this is to prevent your neighbors from leeching your signal, which makes sense. Still, why a limit of just 10? Also, it’s worth mentioning that only four calls can be made simultaneously on the device. I doubt that’ll ever be a problem for us.
Issues: AT&T brags about a seamless hand-off if you leave your house mid-call. It’ll transfer your call from the Microcell to the nearest tower without a hiccup. That may be true, but our data connection gets messed up whenever we leave the house. It’s a few minutes (or a reboot) before data will work again. Kind of a pain.
Bottom Line: If you have AT&T cell phones in your house and have bad reception, get a Microcell! It’s a shame that you need one, but it does the job. As a friend said: “You need to switch to Verizon. I don’t need anything special from them to get cell reception in my house.” It’s true. I hate that I had to pay AT&T $150 to fix their pathetic network, but now I get great reception with my phone and I’m happy I did it.
We recently got a puppy for our girls, and so we’ve been spending some time at PetSmart. I’m not overly familiar with the layout of the store, and it’s a big place, so signage is important. PetSmart fails badly.
They get the big layout right — large sections, color coded by pet, so you know where to go first. Good start. I see the giant green “DOG” sign and head that way. Once I’m in there, I see a bunch of aisles with green signs, so I start looking for the one that would have something to do with training pads for the puppy to pee on. The end caps all have nice large signs that say “dog”. All of them. There’s probably 20 aisles of dog stuff, with signs on both ends, so that’s 40 “dog” signs and nothing that really helps. Here’s a pic I grabbed:
If you look down the aisle, they have a few signs that kind of stick out, but they don’t help very much. I’m already in the very clearly defined “dog” section, so why not use those endcaps to give more detailed information. I’m thinking supermarket style would work best, with a short list of the main items in that aisle (“food”, “toys”, “leashes”, etc).
All in all, this seemed very poorly thought out.