Category Archives: Social Networks

Announcing!! Dave’s Review Service

A New, Important Service

I’m happy to make an announcement that’s been in the works for some time:  Dave’s Review Service.  The service will obtain for you a significant number of genuine, positive reviews from your real customers, as well as quality feedback about how your customers perceive your business.  As you know, reviews are important because review sites have become an important part of the buying process.  Today,  customers will find you on review sites before they come t your site; and if they don’t find you on the review sites they may never come to your site.

Why Do I Need This?

Yes, it’s true–prospects for what you offer may never get to your site, because first they’ll read review sites to narrow down to just a few candidates, and then they’ll visit the Web sites for only those candidates.  No matter where you appear in search results, you may be ignored if you don’t have plenty of good reviews.

As you’ve read in this newsletter and elsewhere, it’s important that review sites receive  only genuine reviews from actual your customers, and you must not incentivize your customers to write reviews.  Review sites are working hard to detect fakery, and they penalize miscreants severely when they find it.  Unfortunately, the filters they use to catch cheaters can also catch authentic reviews.

What is Provided?

The service provides you three crucial results:

  1. Genuine, positive reviews from your actual customers, on a variety of review sites that are relevant to your business
  2. Correct listings on relevant directories of local businesses
  3. Insightful feedback from your customers on their views of your business, in addition to what’s provided in the reviews

Dave’s Review Service provides you with genuine, positive reviews, on many review sites that are relevant for your business, from your real customers, using a proprietary method for obtaining those reviews.  These are real reviews from real customers, and they are all positive.  They will appear on many different review sites.  The strategy for obtaining the reviews and placing them on review sites is designed to minimize the chance that these genuine reviews will be erroneously identified as questionable by the automated filters used by review sites.

In addition, Dave’s Review Service works with over 150 sites that are directories of local services, and will work to get your site listed correctly on them.  You can expect to gain about ten of these listings per month, until you have a suitable number of listings (typically about fifty).

Whatever else you do–or don’t do–with Web marketing, Dave’s Review Service can bring you business now.

Does It Work?

The method used has been demonstrated to work with real businesses and real customers.  A psychologist’s overall rating on a healthcare site changed from a C before using the service to an A.  An apartment rental service greatly increased their tenancy rate after using the service.  This method works.

Review sites typically have a curation process that they use for reviews, so the reviews don’t appear on the review sites right away.  You won’t see the first reviews for a month or so after joining Dave’s Review Service.

Now you can use this method to expand your own business.  Starting today.

How Does It Work?

The method that’s used is a new invention, and it’s a trade secret.  It has been tested in use with real sites, and it has delivered results.  After you execute a non-disclosure agreement and become a client for this service, I can explain to you how it works.  Once you understand it, you’ll see that it’s evident that it will work.  It’s like a magic trick–the secret is simple.

There are several pieces of technology that are needed to carry out the method, and obtaining them would cost you more than the monthly price of the service.  In addition, you’d have the burden of operating it all.  I’ve made a significant investment in the service, and continue to build and refine.  So using the service saves you money and time, and delivers great results to your business.

Crazy Low Introductory Price

You can start reaping the benefits today.  There’s an introductory price of $200 per month.  You can’t do it for this price.

The Bottom Line

There’s little reason to not do this!  Get in touch for more information by clicking here.

Special Offer!

An extra special price is being offered through Yelp.  Take a look!

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Enhance Google Rankings with Google+

Google+ Matters!

You may not think Google+ is important–but it’s the third largest social platform and has more than 500 million monthly users.  And, of course, its parent is Google, about which we care a lot.

Even though Google+ doesn’t have the sheer population of Facebook, a survey reported in Forbes showed that Google+ users are more engaged, so a post on Google+ generates almost as much activity as a post on Facebook.

Start Posting

The most important step is to start posting on Google+.  If you’re not posting on this platform, you’re missing the opportunity.

About Your Posts

The usual rules about social media posting apply.  These three are crucial:

  1. Use headings to point readers to important sections of content.  If a reader doesn’t want to read the whole thing, a heading may get part of your post read
  2. Break up long blocks of text into paragraphs that appear to be digestible.  No one wants to wade into a huge block of text
  3. Use images, videos and graphics to illustrate your post and make it more interesting
  4. Include clear calls to action so that the reader is inspired to interact, to take action on the spot.  Google helps you do this by providing call to action labels.

Uniqueness

It’s OK to go ahead and post content on Google+ that you are also posting on other social networks.  This will get broader exposure for your message.

The Bottom Line

Use Google+ to help your search results.

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Fake Reviews–The Noose Tightens!

Don’t Fake Your Reviews–New Developments

Readers of this Newsletter know that I’ve warned about the dangers of writing fake reviews for your own business.  I’ve told you that the review companies, who depend on the accuracy of their reviews for the success of their own businesses, are expending a lot of effort to find fake reviews, and they are exacting serious penalties when they find fakes–penalties that can damage or even destroy a business.

Now things have become even more serious.  As reported in the New York Times, New York regulators are now cracking down on deceptive Internet reviews.  Nineteen companies have entered into agreements to cease their misleading practices and pay a total of $350,000 in penalties.

The Investigation

Investigators working for the New York Attorney General posed as the owner of a yogurt shop in Brooklyn who wanted to acquire some good reviews.  They asked reputation management firms to cook up some favorable reviews.  Sadly, the reputation managers produced the fake reviews, sometimes offshoring the review writing to the usual places. 

It’s interesting that these firms also found review sites that had criticized their own fake review operations, and had their people write fake reviews stating that the companies didn’t write fake reviews!
One bus company, US Coachway, was receiving a lot of poor reviews.  The CEO, believing that the poor reviews were hurting revenues, hired writers and required his employees to write favorable reviews, even posting a five-star review himself on Yelp.  The company agreed to pay $75,000 in fines and stop writing fake reviews.

How to Get Good Reviews

The best way to get good reviews is to provide great products and service!  Then your customers will be motivated to give you great reviews.  You can just ask them, and you’ll get good reviews.
My clients have access to proprietary technology to automatically obtain large numbers of genuine, favorable reviews.

The Bottom Line

Treat your customers right, and ask them for reviews.  Don’t fake reviews and don’t hire others to fake reviews, and don’t incent your customers to write reviews.
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Yelp Tightens the Noose

Phony Reviews Get More Dangerous

If you’re a long-term reader, you know that I’ve cautioned you about phony reviews on review sites.  I’ve warned that phony reviews undermine the credibility of review sites, so we can expect them to work hard to identify phony reviews.  Yes, you may be smart, you may know how to do it, but you are playing with fire and it’s best to avoid phony reviews.

Yelp

Yelp claims to get more than 100 million visitors to its site every quarter.  Presumably, many of these people have come for help in a purchasing decision.  That’s a lot of influence for Yelp!  Yelp also says that they are serious about review quality and that they screen both automatically and manually for any non-authentic reviews.  Including incentivizing people to make reviews.
Yelp’s response when they believe they have found faked reviews is to put a consumer alert along with your listing, so that everyone who comes to see your reviews will see this as well:
The alert stays in place for 90 days!  How much damage would that do to your bottom line if it stayed in place for 90 days?
Just in case that’s not enough, the FTC is involved also, and has a set of regulations dealing with endorsements and testimonials.  So compensating reviewers and showing atypical results as typical are now illegal, in addition to potentially getting you in trouble with review sites.

The Bottom Line

Don’t write your own reviews, tell your employees to not review the company, and don’t give any incentives to your customers to review you!  And if you have posted phony reviews, consider removing them before they are discovered.  It’s OK to ask a customer to review you.  My customers have a way to ask only happy customers to review them, and that’s OK too.  But don’t try to fool people who are working hard to not be fooled, who will make you pay–really pay–if they catch you.  How did you like it?
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Apply TODAY for New LinkedIn Contacts App

New LinkedIn Contacts App

LinkedIn is launching a new Contacts app that has been made available to a few select users.  Apparently they are rolling it out gradually, and it is not available to all members yet.  It offers the opportunity to integrate all of your contact lists in a single place.  Do you want to use it?  Perhaps.  But just in case it’s very valuable, and just in case it rolls out slowly, now is the time to get in line to try it.

Just Click Here

Always on the alert for the latest and greatest, your hardworking Newsletter Staff has provided this button for you to click to request the new LinkedIn Contacts App.  Just click on the person below who is pushing the button for you:

LinkedIn Contacts App

The Bottom Line

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Embrace Social Marketing! It’s not hard

Why Social Marketing?

Yes, it’s time to start using social networking sites like FaceBook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Pinterest as part of your Web marketing.  Increasingly, Google considers links from these sites as part of your position in search results.  In addition, your customers and prospects use these sites, so it’s a good way to reach them with your message.

How to Get Started

Consider where your prospects and customers are.  For busy people enmeshed in their careers, LinkedIn is where many of them are.  After hours, lots of us spend time on FaceBook.  Everyone shares videos from YouTube.

Decide on one social platform to reach your prospects and customers, and create a presence on it.  LinkedIn and FaceBook will let you establish company pages.  Be active in posting, not just commercial messages, but other types of content that are interesting to participants that indirectly support your marketing message.
Make a single person responsible for social network posting, and make sure this person understands your marketing message that’s to be conveyed, if indirectly.  Don’t leave the job of posting on social networks to all sales people or everyone in the company.  The result of that approach is an incoherent message.

The Bottom Line

Getting started with social network isn’t hard and it has considerable benefits.  It needs to be be an organized part of your Web marketing campaign.
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Yelp Outs Review Cheaters!

Yelp Punishes Review Purchasers

As evidence that review sites are threatened by false reviews and are starting to police their content, we have a story from the New York Times.  Yelp depends on consumer critiques; in fact, that is Yelp’s primary value offered to visitors.  So they are concerned when companies try to manipulate their own reviews.  Recently they set up a sting operation and successfully caught eight companies hiring people to write favorable reviews.

What Yelp Did

A Yelp employee posed as an elite Yelp reviewer and sought to be paid for reviewing on Craigslist.  Several companies took the bait.  The fees ranged from $5 to $200 for a favorable review.

The Penalty

For three months, the Yelp profile pages for these companies will feature an alert that says “We caught someone red-handed trying to buy reviews for this business.”
In case that’s not enough, the erstwhile detective on the left will appear in this charming graphic along with their profile.

But That’s Not All

Yelp runs a variety of filters to identify suspect reviews.  They currently detect one in five as suspicious, and place it on a secondary page, where few site visitors will see it.  The reviews that are shown most prominently are those that are placed by reviewers with a long history of Yelp reviews.

The Bottom Line

The companies that operate review sites have only one thing to offer:  the credibility of their reviews.  Anything other than a genuine opinion of a real customer is seen by these companies as a mortal threat to their business.  The smart thing to do is to stay out of this struggle, and don’t try to con these companies, who have a lot of resources to apply to this problem that they take very seriously.
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Fake Online Reviews

Fake Online Reviews

Today the consumer often checks out reviews of our product or service on the Internet before buying.  We also know that our competitors may be placing negative reviews of us on review sites!  So it’s logical that we should write our own positive reviews so that we have a chance in this dog-eat-dog world.  Shouldn’t we?  Maybe not!  Read on.

Caught In the Act!

A best-selling author of mystery books, R.J. Ellory, was caught writing fake Amazon reviews of his and other author’s books.  He praised his work lavishly and savaged other authors’ works.  He has published an apology and is disgraced.  Other authors have also been accused of the practice, which in literary circles is called “sock-puppeting.”

Legacy Learning Systems sells guitar instruction DVDs.  They decided that a great way to increase sales was to hire people to write positive reviews of its courses in various sites that carry reviews.  It worked!  The company has $5 million in sales so far.  However last year the Federal Trade Commission assessed a fine of $250,000 to settle charges of deceptive advertising.

The FTC has issued endorsement guidelines, that provide these three principles:

  • Endorsements must be truthful and not misleading;
  • If the advertiser doesn’t have proof that the endorser’s experience represents what consumers will achieve by using the product, the ad must clearly and conspicuously disclose the generally expected results in the depicted circumstances; and
  • If there’s a connection between the endorser and the marketer of the product that would affect how people evaluate the endorsement, it should be disclosed.

Ongoing Research

Recently a Cornell Ph.D. student used detecting fraudulent reviews as his dissertation research in computer science.  He had 400 fraudulent reviews written, and had a panel of people compare the fraudulent reviews with 400 genuine reviews.  They did no better than chance at picking out the fakes.  But his program was successful 90% of the time!  Several computer firms contacted him about his research; Google asked for his resume!  So any capability that’s in place today to detect fake reviews will only improve.  Dramatically.  And soon.

Aside from this, the major on-line companies have issued statements that they are devoting substantial resources to this problem.  Yelp even posted a somewhat vague description of its review filter.  It’s clear that the fake review that works today (or worked yesterday) may get caught tomorrow.

The Bottom Line

If you post false reviews on your own site or if you hire others to do it you’re asking for trouble.  You’re inviting legal trouble for yourself and your company, and worse still is your potential loss of credibility with your customers and business prospects.  Don’t think that you’re so smart you won’t get caught–remember that the jails are full of people who once said exactly that.  There are methods for getting honest good reviews from real customers.  There’s no need to take the risk of embarrassment and even legal sanction.  This is a short-cut that you should not take.

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EdgeRank Can Make You Invisible on Facebook

EdgeRank

Google has its PageRank, and Facebook has EdgeRank.  If you’re using Facebook to market your product or service, some knowledge about EdgeRank can be helpful, so that your posts on Facebook will be seen by your friends.

Why EdgeRank?

If your Facebook newsfeed showed all possible stories from all your friends, you’d be overwhelmed.  So FaceBook uses a formula to decide which stories appear in each user’s newsfeed. They show you the stories with highest EdgeRank.  If your posts on Facebook have low EdgeRank, very few people will see them, so you need to consider EdgeRank issues.  According to Facebook, they publish about .2% of the stories they consider.  That means that each user sees about 60 out of about 30,000 possible story candidates in a day.

In order to decide what to show you, Facebook considers whose profile pages you visit and how often, who you message and who messages you, which News Feed items you’ve clicked on in the past, and other factors about your behavior.  The success of their approach is demonstrated by the number of people who log in every day.
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How It Works

Facebook hasn’t disclosed the details of the formula for EdgeRank, and no doubt if they did disclose it the disclosure would soon be obsolete, since it’s constantly being changed.  Howeer, at a 2010 F8 developer conference, there was some discussion of the operation of EdgeRank.
If you have an object in your News Feed that you interact with, you create what Facebook calls an Edge.  The Edge has three parameters:
  1. It has an affinity score between the viewing user and the item’s creator.  If you send a lot of messages to the creator, then you’ll have a higher affinity score that for someone you never contact.
  2. Each type of Edge has a different weight.  One would expect a comment to have more weight than a like, for example.
  3. The older an Edge is, the less important it is.  So there is time decay of importance.
To calculate EdgeRank for an item, just multiply these three factors for each Edge and add up all the scores for the item

The Bottom Line

Publish content on Facebook that draws people in, that they want to interact with.  In addition, interacting with people you want to have see your posts is a good idea, perhaps even a message about an upcoming post to increase your affinity to that person.  In addition to your “message” posts you might consider occasionally sending a post that has no message, that is intended just to get people to interact with it.
If you like this newsletter, please check out Web Marketing 101 , our guide to Web marketing.
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New Service–Dave’s Credible Reviews. Your comments, please

Need for a Dependable Review Service

I’ve been looking for a long time for something that would allow my clients to put reviews on their sites that would give credibility to the reviews–so that readers would know that they had not been changed by the site owner–but would also allow the site owner to choose whether or not to display a review.

Requirements for the Service

Amazon provides a good model for the sort of reviews I’d like to have.  A reviewer assigns a number of stars and writes a brief comment.  The review is then “moderated” (as it is at Amazon) by company personnel and appears on the site.  It should be handled technically so that search engines will see the content of the reviews and index them.  The reviews should be stored on the site being reviewed, to avoid depending on an external site to deliver content that is accessed frequently.  The site owner should be able to prevent a review from being posted, but should not be able to edit the reviews.

A site that users the service would be allowed to post the DCR logo, that links to an explanation of how DCR provides assurance of credible reviews.

Service Development

The first steps toward development of this service, to be called Dave’s Credible Reviews, have been taken.  The reviews will be stored on the site being reviewed, in an encrypted page, so that they can’t be changed by the site owners.  New reviews that are entered will be stored on a separate page on the site, separately encrypted.  When the site owner wants to look at reviews, they are presented in clear text, and the email address of the reviewer is provided so that the moderator can contact the author for more discussions or even to solve problems that are reported.

The Bottom Line–It’s Up To You!  Comment Please

The first design work has been done.  This is a business that could be launched soon.  Would you please click on this link and answer a few questions about Dave’s Credible Reviews?

Survey on Dave’s Credible Reviews

If you like this newsletter, please check out Web Marketing 101 , our guide to Web marketing.

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Don’t Forget Reviews

Today, a Web-savvy prospect who is ready to do business with you is very likely to look for relevant reviews of your company and its products and services before making a decision to do business. So it’s crucial that you pay attention to reviews and take action so that you have good reviews.

Writing Your Own Reviews

There are a couple of ways to write your own reviews. You can set up review sites that appear to be neutral sites for reviews about a product category, neutral and then seed them with lots of reviews that are favorable to you. Or you can log on to review sites from different computers, even use an Internet cafe to get more computers, and write reviews that are favorable to your own business.
But be aware that savvy Web prospects are good at identifying fake reviews. Many prospects today look for the negative reviews rather than the positive ones: what sorts of complaints are made? Are they devastating or minor? So your positive reviews of yourself may be ignored. Even worse, every site that hosts reviews has a strong business interest in posting honest reviews, so every day they get better at finding phony reviews.

Why Not Write Your Own Reviews?

The most important reason to not write your own reviews is because it’s wasted time, it’s time that’s not put into building and running a quality business that treats its customers properly. The time and attention that goes into a campaign to get ever more fake reviews can be used instead to make your customers happier. If you make them happy, then you can ask them for reviews, and you’ll get lots of good reviews that will be apparent to anyone reading them that they’re genuine.

How do you get good reviews?

There are two ingredients:

  1. Make your customers happy. Of course this is your focus anyway. You want them to like your products and services, and you want their repeat business. Remind your employees who deal with your customers that they are talking to reviewers, that the success of the company–and their job–will stand or fall based on those reviews.
  2. Ask for reviews. Be in touch with your customers, and as you’re in touch, provide them a button to click to, say, Like you on Facebook or write a review. Or put a review button into your newsletter, asking your customers to review your offerings.

If you run a hotel, after each stay, send your guest an email thanking them for their business. And in that email, include just one button to provide some sort of review, and ask them to please click it. They’ll be pleased to get the email of thanks, and many will them make that click and give you a review.

What About Bad Reviews?

You will get a bad review. Take a look at any product reviews at Amazon–you’ll see that they even provide a graph of the number of stars and how many reviews have assigned how many stars. It’s common, for a good product, to have mostly good reviews and a few bad ones.
You should pay attention to reviews that you get, and if you can identify a person who wrote a bad review, get in touch with them and try to fix the situation. And then ask for a new, favorable review, or a change, if the site allows it. You’ll have created a happy customer who, in addition to the good review, will also now be recommending you to their friends.
Approach a bad review or any customer complaint as an opportunity to create a happy customer who will help the business. Treat the complaining customer as someone who has done you a favor by helping you improve–really, they have done you a favor–thank them for getting in touch with you and do a great job of solving the problem. Remember that there is no greater friend than a former enemy.

The Bottom Line

Reviews are important! Get good reviews by making your customers happy and turn complaints into more good reviews.

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Read Those Forums!

Pay Attention to Internet Forums

Yes, your Web site is important. But a lot can happen in Internet forums that can affect your business. Some of these reflect genuine problems, some are actually sabotage. Here are two actual examples.

I was given a reference by a client to a large company who is a major retailer in the Washington area. I talked to their “Digital Experience Manager” to arrange an appointment. Then, doing some research on the company, I started seeing poor reviews on some Internet forums. So I looked around for a while, and concluded that these guys were not the sort of business I could work for, and never followed up on the opportunity. Were I to advise them, I’d suggest that they follow up on all these forums, contact the complaining customers, and make them into happy customers.

For a client, doing a search on his product name, I found a forum where his product was being discussed critically, terms like “could not possibly work” were being used. So I joined into the forum, describing my happy experience with the product, that it really does work. I also suggested that my client join the discussion and talk about his own experience in inventing the product. He did so, and now this forum has favorable discussions about his product, with some participants now recounting their own positive stories.

When I purchased new windows for my home, I looked into various Internet forums for discussions about the window companies. I was surprised when I saw a huge amount of very negative commentary about the company we were considering, making them out to be nearly thieves, based on many accounts of personal experiences. I called the company and asked for personal references, visited the customers and inspected the installation, checked their records with local consumer protection, and concluded that they looked good. I’ve been completely satisfied with all aspects of the purchase, and must believe that these detailed first-person accounts may have been fabricated.

The Bottom Line

Don’t let bad news, true or not, injure your business! Conduct Google searches on your own company name and URL, and look for any comments about your company and its products and services. If a forum is going negative on you, join the forum and be friendly and present your side of the situation. If you can contact people who are dissatisfied, get in touch with them and turn them into happy customers. It’s possible to have a great Web site that tells a terrific story, but if someone else is doing a good job at telling the opposite story you can be hurt.

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Don’t Forget Social Networks

Today we see that Facebook is getting as many visits as Google! This means that social networks can make an important contribution to your Web marketing program. But what’s the right way to use them? In this issue I set out some ideas on how to get started making use of social networks in your Web marketing campaign.

Customer Service Matters

Customers share their views of your business using social networks, so the first way to succeed with social networks is to pay attention to your customer relations. An unhappy customer who uses social networks can tell many other potential customers about a bad experience. So a first step is to do a Google search for your business name, read what’s on social network sites, and if it’s negative, engage the complaining parties in a friendly dialogue and solve the problems.

Make Your Web Site the Center

Your Web site has (or should have!) an attractive, concise yet complete presentation of your business proposition. It should also have a lot of information about your offerings. So it’s a logical central point for your social media campaign. What you want to do from social network sites is to bring visitors to your Web site so that they see the message you have to deliver.

Start with Facebook and YouTube. Create a presence for yourself there, including videos on YouTube, and direct visitors to your Web site. And on your Web site, be sure to put a link so that visitors can give a Facebook indication that they like you as well as a link to your YouTube presence.

The Bottom Line

Social networks can bring you high-value links that improve your search engine ranking as well as valuable visitors. Don’t ignore them!

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Social Media Really DO Matter

Do Social Media Really Matter?

This is just a quick note to share with you some significant evidence about the importance of social media. I think it really answers a question that I hear regularly: do social media matter? There’s a recent event that brings this into perspective, I think. If you are not paying serious attention to social media as part of your Web marketing, this should persuade you.

Groupon

You’ve not doubt seen Groupon. Nationwide, in many markets, they have huge mailing lists. Every day they send out an offer of a significant discount in a local area. It might be a cooking class for $25 instead of $90, or it might be a big discount on merchandise. You buy the deal from them, you get a coupon, and take it to the merchant to collect on the deal.
You may have looked at these deals and decided that the discount would be too expensive, and you don’t want such price-conscious customers anyway. But just consider all the people who see the offer and don’t respond–the Groupon offer amounts to an endorsement that your product or service is something that’s worthwhile, that people buy it at the regular price. And think about how many people are exposed that implicit message!
The clincher for me was that recently Google tried to buy Groupon, and Groupon’s management rejected an offer from Google of SIX BILLION DOLLARS! What does that tell you about their expectations for how many people they can reach, how much business they will do? How confident to you have to be in your business prospects to turn down an offer like that?

The Bottom Line

The real insiders, who are running the social media companies, who know what’s happening, have enormous confidence in their future growth. If you’re not using social media in your marketing now, start thinking about it. Visit Groupon, Yelp, FaceBook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Living Social and deli.cio.us and develop a strategy to use these businesses to put your value proposition in front of buyers.

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Google Goes Social

Google’s “Plus One” Goes Live

Google has taken a page from the social networks’ book and introduced a way for their customers to provide feedback on search results–and now Web sites!–that they like. What this means to us is that visitor opinions of our sites will now be shared with others as part of Google search results. Sites with favorable comments will obviously get more visitors, so it’s time to take this seriously–right now. This Newsletter describes Plus One, why it matters, and what you should do about it.

What It Is

Within search results, and now on Web sites, Google offers the opportunity for visitors to indicate they like it by clicking a Plus One icon. Doing so, for now, will provide feedback as part of Google search results for other visitors.

Will Google use Plus One results as part of search ranking criteria? They haven’t said so. But Google is facing increasing pressure from social networks to use human opinion in some fashion in search rankings. And a new competitor, Blekko, has started with the express goal of using searcher opinion as a factor in ranking, in reaction to complaints about the quality of Google results.

If you don’t put Plus One on your site and your competitor does, then your competitor could end up outranking you in Google results–and your competitor’s site would be found instead of yours.

How to Use It

Google gives you some Javascript snippets that you add to the page that you want visitors to endorse with Plus One. Then they click Plus One, and you’re endorsed.

If you’d like to try it, click here to visit my home page. The Plus One icon that you click is on the bottom of the page in the center. Try it (actually please please try it) and you’ll see what your site visitors will experience.

Then go to Google Webmaster Central Central for instructions on how to put it onto your own site.

The Bottom Line

Don’t waste time. Put Plus One on your site today. Get the edge on your competition. It’s free. There’s no reason not to do this, and significant reasons to do it. Now.

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