With the recent Facebook IPO and all of the hubbub about the company, I’m sure many small businesses are revisiting the question that they have asked themselves time and time again – ‘Do I need a Facebook page for my business’? I wish there was a better answer but really my best is, “It depends”. The good news is that there are a few questions you can ask yourself that can help you make your decision. To be honest, you can probably replace the term “Facebook” with any social channel such as “Corporate Twitter Account”, “Google+ Page”, “LinkedIn Business Page”, etc. Admittedly, I chose Facebook for the title of this post for SEO value.

If your reason for having a Facebook page is any of the following than I would say you SHOULD have a page

• Creating a local presence online where you can engage current and prospective customers
• Increase a brand awareness
• Create a resource to demonstrate a genuine investment in the area your business focuses on or the area where it exists
• You plan on constantly maintaining and monitoring the page
• A mechanism to drive traffic to a destination you own and control –  such as your website
• You want to promote your business in a healthy way and not let it take over your personal Facebook timeline

These are all good reasons to create a page and I would advise you to do so. Maybe start small and set it up yourself to get things up and running. Invite all of your friends and ask them to spread the word about your business and support you. You will quickly find your voice and then you can determine if you need some third party product or service to get you to the next level. It’s always smart to have a baseline reading though so don’t just jump into something like this. It may create unrealistic expectations if you do so. Plus you will want to understand everything that is out there and that will take time. Patience is key here. This page is not going to save your business or affect your sales over night. It’s Facebook, not magic.

If your reason for having a Facebook page is any of the following than I would say you SHOULD NOT have a page

• Sell stuff on Facebook
• My competition has one
• You want a turnkey solution that you can set up and walk away
• A substitute for your website
• Create a second means of spamming your friends and family with promotions and news about your business

Although I think Facebook will embrace social commerce more in the coming years if it continues to garner the interest it has over the last 6 years, it’s not there yet. Nobody is going to buy a house, car, or even a handbag off your Facebook page. There are very few pages that have any commerce element to them and those are custom made (to one extent or another) and expensive. There’s a reason for this – people don’t buy things on Facebook. There are far too many Facebook pages out there that are abandoned because people feel that they can just set one up and walk away. if you don’t intend to maintain it, don’t waste your time or the time of your network. It’s also not a website, your website is a website. If you don’t want to kill yourself putting a website up then set one up on WordPress. Website first, other things next. If a website is too much for you to handle then you shouldn’t even think about Facebook. If you want a website and all of these things you will want to consider hiring someone to do it for you – but you will still have to put in some time to creating content and maintaining it. There is no ‘set it and forget it’ solution here.

What does this mean to your business?

A Facebook page can be a really great tool to have conversations and inform people who care about your business about what you’ve got going on. Restaurants, bars, retail stores, real estate brokerages, accountants, and doctors are all excellent candidates for Facebook if they are prepared to be patient and maintain it. If someone writes on that wall, you need to respond. To ignore it will do more harm than not having a page at all.  Before you roll your eyes, you as an owner don’t have to do this yourself. You can hire a third party to do this but I wouldn’t recommend that. You are better off using someone within your organization. With a minimal amount of training an admin or other employee can monitor and maintain this and just alert you about important stuff – such as someone trashing you up on Facebook. You can deal with it then. You may have someone on staff that actually wants to do it as well. Pay them a few extra dollars to own that responsibility and you may find that you have tapped into a great new channel to cultivate new customers and retain your current ones.

-PH

The post Do I Need a Facebook Page? originally appeared on Phacient.

So I have a lot of friends that are real estate professionals – and by professionals I MEAN professionals. These people pride themselves on their work and reputations which – I have learned – is really all you have in this business.  It really bothers me that, as a whole, real estate people are not highly regarded. They are looked at negatively for their lack of knowledge, professionalism, and ethics – and for many, these stereotypes are well-founded. Which is why good real estate professionals really shine.

Having worked with so many over the last six years or so I am confident that I can sniff out good ones vs. bad.  So I deal with it. Today I am having a rough day as part of what I have going on is that I am looking for a new apartment in my neighborhood for my growing family. So I do what many do and from time to time I go up to Craiglist and see if I can find that one gem of an apartment we all dream about. We’ve all heard the stories of our friends who found some awesome digs up there. It’s the dream – at least around these parts.

The Craigslist Challenge

The problem with Craigslist, in case you don’t already know, is that it’s essentially the wild wild West. It is, for the most part, completely un-moderated. You can flag things for abuse or mis-categorization and they might be taken down but there are no real ramifications since you can always just set up another account if and when they suspend yours. It’s a true buyer beware environment. They have their issues but it works well enough, if you are a smart consumer, to avoid any real backlash and you can get a good bargain a lot of the time. I think, however, it may be time for Mr. Newmark to consider raising his fees – at least for real estate.

You Can’t Do Whatever You Want

The problem with using Craigslist for looking for a place to live is that there is a ridiculous amount of noise up there. In a climate where agents and brokers have to pay big premiums for ads on sites like Zillow, Trulia, and Realtor.com, I can see the immense appeal of Craigslist who charges minimal fees. There are several products out there that will actually plug into Craigslist and help real estate professionals leverage the platform to get their listings in there for everyone to see. And since the listings automatically expire the system stays pretty clean, right? No.

Actually all that does is motivate people who want to game this system to schedule programs like this to auto-repost their listings regardless or their status because the system just does what you tell it to do. What is a bit more frustrating is that users will post different variations of their listings in an effort to come up in other searches done on the site. Now, don’t misunderstand me here, you don’t need one of these systems to do this. In fact, you can just copy and past your ads up here the old fashioned way – it’s just much less efficient. And also, don’t assume that the goal of using Craigslist for real estate is to actually move a piece of property – it’s really used much more, in my opinion, to generate LEADS……that’ ain’t right. I can’t tell you how many times I have called on an apartment that has been listed moments ago to hear, “Yeah, we just rented that – but I have something just like it for 50% more money.” Heartbreaking.

And really, that’s not the spirit of Craigslist. It’s more about consumer empowerment and disintermediation. Consumers are not there at the pleasure of marketers up on this site. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. So when people such as me go up on Craigslist to find something, they expect that the people up there are at least TRYING to do business. Most everything I see up there for real estate is so poorly put together that it’s, quite frankly, offensive to a consumer.

Look What I Found

Below are some results from a search that I did for apartments in my area with a condition that I didn’t want to see any results from a broker that charged a fee. Hey, if I am going to find  a gem, wouldn’t not paying for it just sweeten the story? What’s supposed to be returned are rentals from owners and owner paid (OP) apartments. A funny thing about Craigslist is that they don’t charge owners to post their apartments in NYC, just brokers. Seemed like a smart idea at the time, right? Spoiler Alert: there are very few that I ever see in my result set that are no fee or by an owner. Most of them are by brokers that even say there is a fee – a direct violation of site policies but there are so many that do this it’s impossible to police them all.

Now, while I appreciate the ambition of brokers and, let’s be honest, sometimes you have to bend a few rules to get the job done, if I were going to bend rules I would want to do it in a way that brings more value than the folks I am up against and potentially pissing off. Just like it’s harder to kick an attractive underage woman out of a club, you don’t want to be the guy with the tape on his glasses and pocket protector that showed up with her. You will be hitting the bricks before she does. Take a look at some of these ads and tell me if you think any of these brokers put in the level of effort necessary to market a place to live by today’s standards. I pose the following questions to specific people:

• Brokers/Agents: How would you respond to your sellers/landlords that questioned you about how you are marketing their property after seeing these ads?
• Buyer/Rental Agents: How much of your time would be wasted with useless questions and qualification efforts if you put your ads in like this? How good could your leads be?
• Sellers: Would you pull your listing from an agent or broker that gave you this level of marketing acumen?
• Buyers/Renters: Is this an acceptable level of marketing effort that you have come to expect in today’s competitive real estate landscape? Would you even respond to any of these ads?

Click on any of these for a full screen look at the image

The Fancy Lazy Boy

The Man of Mystery

The Elusive Amish

Mr. Me Me Me

The DIY SEO’er/Recycler

The Diva

What this means to your business

To be honest, as long as Craigslist allows this stuff to keep happening, people will trust the platform less and less – and the traffic will reflect that. I’m not suggesting that they become all draconian about who can post and who cannot but perhaps there should be some mechanism in place to make it harder to break those rules and some sort of penalty for doing so. After all, rules without penalty are rules that cannot be enforced. They fall under norms and values and business is not one for considering those things.

What I recommend YOU do is take a look at who is posting things in a space you want to advertise in up on Craigslist and make sure your ads destroy theirs. If you are going to spend any money make sure it’s smart money. Invest in putting in some solid HTML code and host your own pictures. This will let you put them in anywhere you like in the add and do whatever you like with them. Good ads will waste less time, they will get you better leads and give you more credibility in that space. If you can brand your ads so that people know what they are getting within a second of seeing your ad (like maybe with your brand name in the title) then you are winning. They will trust your ads and they may even forward them to their friends to spread your efforts virally. Another nice little benefit is that you won’t end up on posts like this one making fun of anemic efforts in marketing.

-PH

The post Why Craigslist Needs to Raise Their Fees – at Least for Real Estate originally appeared on Phacient.

People often argue about if agents are worth what they are paid, who is a good agent, what makes a good agent, and so forth. I’m not (for now) going to dive into any of these questions, but instead step back and try and determine how do we even go about setting up the discussion in order to answer those questions? The more I think about it, the more I come to believe that real estate agents represent a very unusual profession that sells a very unusual good which is why it makes comparisons and evaluation so challenging. If we are going to be able to answer any of the above questions, we need to first dive into the question of “what exactly is a real estate agent”.

In economics we learn about many types of goods and how, as a society, we should deal with and evaluate them. For instance, inelastic goods (those which demand is independent of prices) are often watched closely for abuse. Why do you think there is so much outrage over rising gas prices? Prices are going up and there is limited ability to reduce demand or substitute in another good. Alternatively we have goods which appear to be natural monopolies (utilities being the most obvious example) which is why in many areas the power and water companies are either heavily regulated or run by state commissions.

So how does real estate fit into any of this? Well, as it turns out, I cannot find a type of good to accurately describe the role of a real estate agent and the subsequent real-estate transaction. Real estate agents act as advisors (though not legally fiduciaries) but do not come to the table with objective knowledge. The closest I could find is something called an experiential good. This is a good where the actual experience of using the good is in itself the value. Think of a visit to the movie theater or going on vacation; you experience the value. However, with an experiential good you can evaluate the value of it as you experience it. You usually leave a movie theater knowing if you got your $12 worth.

When it comes to a real estate agent, your ability to evaluate their performance is limited. After you sell your house, you never know if you could have gotten another $10,000. Would the home have sold as well if you hadn’t spent $5,000 fixing it up before sale? Unfortunately we have no way to rerun the same home sale 50 times and answer these questions. There are some comparisons that can be made with law, medicine, and business consulting, but in general those industries deal with more common transactions and are heavily licensed, regulated, and monitored (back to the earlier point).

As someone who has been on both sides of the consulting table, I can say that one of the real challenges with such ‘professional’ goods is developing a valid metric of performance. Moreover, many existing metrics are prone to gaming. For instance there is evidence that, after the introduction of success rate reporting, surgeons becoming overly risk-averse in regards to the patience they will work on. Some typical ones used with real estate agents are of very questionable validity. Is time on market really a good measure? Any economist will tell you that a good that sells quickly is selling too cheaply. Research on the time-on-market and sale price of real estate agent’s own homes supports this (they are on the market longer and sell at higher prices). Is the raw number of homes sold a good measure? The number which sell within 3% of posted price? Buying agents getting more than 5% under list price?
I think what is needed is to begin a conversation around how to address this. We are in a situation where information is becoming increasingly available and can be leveraged to consider some complex questions. What evaluation criteria, both objective and subjective, can we use? How can we avoid building statistics that are so easily gamed? This is the perfect time to take a fresh look at an old industry in a very new way.

The post On the Need for Common Definition originally appeared on Phacient.

So I’m up on Facebook the other day

Have you noticed lately there are things in your Facebook news feed that are labeled “Trending Articles”? They are generally a small group of rolled up story/news links from popular sites like Yahoo or the Washington Post that your friends are “currently reading”. This alludes that they have shared this article with their Facebook friends online intentionally. I often will click on a link that one of my friends share if it looks interesting. This is how I found this and what inspired this post.

I tend to consume a lot of content through what those I am connected to share. I do this across the board on all my networks. Twitter is by far the most pure with regard to this, and then comes Google+ and LinkedIn and now bringing up the rear is Facebook. The other day, I clicked on an interesting link that looked something like this:

So it shows me that one of my connections has read this article and found it good enough to share it with their social world, right? Not necessarily. When I clicked on the link, I anticipated being taken to the article, maybe via redirect but resulting there nonetheless. This is what I actually got:

Now, I know what you are thinking, “What’s this app for?” Well, this could be the result of whomever you think shared an article installing this very app because this happened to them and they just clicked ‘Okay, Read Article’. There are three important things to note here:

It can access your information

By installing this app, you are essentially giving the creators of this app access to all of your basic info, the about you section, and a list of everything you have ever liked on Facebook. They can do with that what they like. They may use it to post other articles by you (see below), target you for ads, or even spam you via your email account you have listed on Facebook.

It can post on your behalf

Yes, you too can enjoy the benefits of content being posted to your timeline without ever having to log into Facebook. You may have never read that content or even agree that it’s good enough to share but that’s another story. This gives the app the authority to post at will. It’s unlikely that they would do much of that but it’s happening more and more. Whenever you see one of your friends sharing content that you are surprised by, check the source on the bottom of the post. It’s probably an app doing that.

By default, those posts will be public

You can control who sees this content. I think this is one of the terms and conditions of developing apps on Facebook but it also gives you more incentive to install the app. Maybe you only want your friends and family to see that you are recommending articles from High Times but not any of your coworkers. Yeah, they’ve got you covered. Alternatively there is an option for only you to see what you’ve posted via the app just in case you are the type of person to browse your own timeline. Wow, after reading that last sentence I realize this really makes no sense except that you can keep them from spamming your friends but still mine your information in the background – a clear benefit for you…..

I gotta be honest, this all really turns me off. The reality of the situation is that when I read something online, there are any number of ways to share this directly to any of my many social channels by simply clicking a chicklet or a button and then I have the option of personalizing the share with a serious or snarky comment. WHY exactly would I want to give that option up to let an app mechanically share this content? Most people wouldn’t.

What does this mean to your business?

The thing is, there is a level of security involved here since you don’t know what that app is going to share. Maybe it’s an article touting one of your competitors. Essentially, this is allowing these “news sources” to serve ads for their content (and potentially something you absolutely don’t want) on your timeline. With those two ideas in place, I have to ask you this: “Would you let anyone (competitor or not) put free ads on your website?” If the answer is yes then please stop reading and copy this image to your computer and post it in the sidebar of your website IMMEDIATELY. No time to waste!

If your answer was no then we are in agreement. This is a bad idea. Here’s what you can do to stop this from happening to you:

1. Don’t install these apps. No matter how awesome the headline looks, you know what their game is so don’t fall for it. Seriously, I know  you want to read that Justin Bieber article right now but you must resist. Do yourself a favor, go directly to the news source and simply look on the home page. Odds are you won’t have to search the site. It will be right there in your face.
2. Go to Facebook.com and access your privacy settings:
   
3. Then scroll down to ‘Ads, Apps and Websites’. How apropos that they lumped these together since these particular apps focus on all three of these. Click ‘Edit Settings’
   
4. Then you will see a section called ‘Apps you use’. In reality these apps are using you but I digress. Click ‘Edit Settings’
   
5. You’ll see all of the apps you have installed on your Facebook account. WARNING: You may have A LOT of them if this is your first time on this screen. Chances are you have installed an app or two to sign in or access certain places on the web and you didn’t even consider that these apps now had the keys to the house, if you will. If you recently were concerned about an app maybe having been installed, you will see that at the top of the list so editing/deleting it will be very easy. I’d also recommend you scrolling through the whole list and deleting apps you haven’t used in more than six months – especially if you’ve maybe stopped using the sites/services associated with those apps. This is pretty common and there is no reason to give those apps access to your activities now. Maybe you were a big Farmville player last year and quit cold turkey? Well delete that app – or Zynga will be mining your info.
   

After it’s all said and done, you have to keep your eyes on this stuff. Remember, these platforms are free so they are going to look for every way possible to monetize the only thing that you are giving them – your data. If you know of any apps that are particularly sneaky or maybe some things that apps are capable of that I haven’t listed, by all means mention them below.

-PH

The post The Ugly Side of Facebook Apps originally appeared on Phacient.

The New Phone is Here! The New Phone is Here!

I know, it sounds like a scene starring Navin R. Johnson but I just can’t help it. I got a new phone –finally. I’ve been tormented by a jail broken iPhone 3GS for longer than I care to admit to. In Apple’s defense, they don’t make their phones to be jail broken but in mine I don’t like the way they make everything so proprietary or harvest every penny they can out of their loyal customers.  No concessions, no extras, nuthin’. So when Google announced that they were finally releasing the Galaxy Prime Galaxy Nexus in the US, I was thrilled. It’s no secret that I am a huge fan of Google. What I thought I was excited about was an unlocked phone, not being tethered to any carrier and working on any GSM system in the world – and I still am. I thought that having a pure version of Android and running the latest version of the OS (Ice Cream Sandwich) while getting updates directly from Google was what would really make me happy – and it still does. But what I think it really comes down to is that if you want me to adopt something all you have to do is sprinkle a little Google on it – and it’s true. I am a fan of Google.

        Photo Credit: IBM

Am I as bad as the Apple fanboys I make fun of?

Kind of but not really. I don’t buy into everything that Google does blindly and so impassioned. Seriously, people who are Apple fans will buy anything that even smells like Apple. There are things Google has done that have upset me and that I didn’t agree with.   I do however approach my love of Google with great fervor and for good reason. They are amazingly successful and can almost be considered the Anti-Apple. Apple charges you as much as possible for products and services that they maintain control over while Google appears to give it all away for free and is open-source about things like Android. But hey, I do love Google. And what’s not to love? I’ve noticed my computing and mobile life just get better and better the more I’ve injected them with Vitamin G.

It just works

Remember when you used to have different programs to manage your calendar, email, contacts, mapping, and documents (word processing, spreadsheets, presentations)? Remember all of the conflicts with format and software you had to deal with? You may still use separate programs today but if you do your life is harder. Much of the reason why life is better with Google is that it just works. Some of this is because they just make things simple. Another reason is that much of it is up in the cloud and syncs to your local devices. In any case, IT JUST WORKS. It may not always have all the features you are use to but you can access it from ANYWHERE and it works the same from any computer. Google is essentially making hardware easier to use and agnostic. My love affair with Google can probably be best summed up by this video by Lamarr Wilson:

So back to my phone

So yeah, the whole reason I wrote this post. I picked up the new Samsun Galaxy Nexus that has just been released in the US. I have to say, it’s fast, sexy and, yes, It just works. I’ve never handled any phone ever that can compare to it – not even an iPhone. The functionality is great but also practical. There is very little fluff on this device and has most of the great Google-isms that we have all come to know and love integrated into the OS. The only issue I have had is that my carrier isn’t quite ready for this phone and is having trouble with their systems fully recognizing the hardware but that will be sorted out in a week or so. But the big reason all of this great stuff is possible and I am in love with it is that it’s a Google product. No contract, no carrier handcuffing, nothing. I bought the phone and I can do with it what I wish. In a word, FREEDOM. So my obsession is well founded, in my opinion. This device gives me everything I could want – and then some. I’d recommend it for anyone – especially with a price tag of $399. I was happy to spend the money – and I don’t say that a lot.

What does this mean to your business?

Well, there’s two takeaways you should glean from this love fest. First, Google can probably make your business operate more efficiently and at a lower cost so you should either research them yourself or talk to someone that knows plenty about them to figure out what fits and how to implement it. I know a guy if you need one. The second thing to take away from all of this is that you should listen harder to what the consumer wants. They are the tides while you are simply the port. All the great marketing in the world can’t help you if you are not delivering what your customers want and your competition is. At the end of the day, they have the money that you want so you have to make them happy to part with it. And the beauty is, what they want is subjective. You just have to figure out what the largest segment is that you can provide satisfaction to and you win.

What are you doing to listen to your customers/partners? What could your vendors and competitors do better?  These things should keep you up at night. Yes, they are that important.

-PH

The post Am I Obsessed? A Fan? Or Just Right From The Beginning? originally appeared on Phacient.

Even though Google+ is in its infancy, they had the insight to build in a few Easter eggs for us true nerds to figure out and play with. Many of us have been observing that one of the nice things about the platform is that is actually has the ability to be used for blogging. While Facebook sort of tried this with Notes, it never really took off. One of the reasons for that, in my opinion, is because it was only capable of plain text. While Google+ isn’t quite ready for full on HTML 5, they have given us a few formatting tricks that we can use to dress up our text.

Bold

Bold your text by doing the following:

Placing an asterisk on either side of your text like this: *this text will be bold* and it will look like this: this text will be bold

Italics

Italicize your text by doing this:

Place an underscore on either side of your text like this: _this text will be italicized_ and it will look like this: this text will be italicized

Strikethrough

You can throw a strikethrough on your text by doing the following:

Place a simple dash on either side of your text like this: –this text will be struck- and it will look like this: this text will be struck

Getting Fancy

You can combine some or all of these formatting  tactics to get more out of them. A cool observation I had is that you don’t even have to keep the modifiers in order. You can put them in any order.  Here’s a pretty extreme example:

This update will look *a lot* more clever tomorrow morning. I am curious to see if anyone will come back to it and _POSSIBLY_ comment on it. I am pretty certain that Google will roll out some enhanced features to enable Google+ to become _*an actual blogging platform*_ but first they will have to give users a way to -actually- _*EASILY*_ format their text and lay it out in an -_intuitive-_ *-logical*- quick way to make sure it looks good. There, I -_*DECLARED*_- said it.

and it shows up like this

This update will look a lot more clever tomorrow morning. I am curious to see if anyone will come back to it and POSSIBLY comment on it. I am pretty certain that Google will roll out some enhanced features to enable Google+ to become an actual blogging platform but first they will have to give users a way to actually EASILY format their text and lay it out in an intuitive  logical quick way to make sure it looks good. There, I DECLARED said it.

What this means to your business

If you are a community manager or just the person that updates your Google+ business page from time to time, you will be able to use this trick to put lead and section titles on your posts and make them look a bit more like something your viewers will find on your blog. There are relatively few people that use these tactics so you will stand out almost immediately. It will build consistency in your content and you will be in great shape when Google finally rolls out a formatting bar like you have in your Gmail account.  Have you come across any other tricks or workarounds for formatting your posts? Share them below so everyone can take advantage of them and you will look like a rock star.

-PH

The post How Get More Out of Google+ Status Updates and Posts originally appeared on Phacient.

It’s me talking about Google again

I know I sound like a one trick pony when I write anything containing the name Google, but in my defense, they are a pretty amazing company. They are spread across so many things that it’s hard not to come into contact with them – constantly. So, to keep all of those that love to ‘chase the new’ happy, this post will touch on another service that is all the rage – Pinterest. Anyone that knows me knows I am not a fan of Pinterest due to the potential intellectual property issues that come with it. What do you expect? If you build a pin board and snip a piece of this article out and put it in there without properly attributing me, you have effectively done nothing less than stolen from me. If my words were an MP3 or a photograph it would be more obvious.

When you think about it though, what’s the biggest benefit of Pinterest? Isn’t it a place where you can go and see a nice visual display of useful information? I think so.  People have been caught up in the beauty of it all but I think the real usefulness is the utility. Something that seems great for all of your best chicken recipes can also be a great place to find all of my picks for your best mobile phones.  So I will concede that there is a utility to Pinterest along with some serious SEO value – if their systems can keep the links straight AND they can keep domains from blocking them. Yeah, that’s a problem.

What do you love?

So in the interest of clean easy utility, let’s take a look at Google’s version, ‘What do you love?’ It’s a simple question. Coincidently enough, the home page looks A LOT like Google.com. It’s amazingly clean and simple. There are NO intellectual property liabilities here since everything that’s served up are Google services that have simply been populated with your interest and returned results based on that. Now, the downside to this is clearly that it’s AGATH (All Google All The Time) but consider this. How would you normally find something? You’d GOOGLE it!

Google is not a person

Yeah, yeah, I know. You can’t replace human beings for finding cool and useful things. Google is just an algorithm that returns results based on what you ask it. NO! Search is changing and that stupid algorithm (at least in it’s current state) is going to be less important very soon. As people +1 things, they will get more weight based on what YOUR friends think is cool and useful. Social search will change the way we find things and consume content.  And I’m sure WDYL will be making use of that; they’d be crazy not to.

And as for humans finding things and populating them in Pinterest; there’s a flaw with that as well – how do they know what you like? One man’s treasure is another man’s trash. I rarely agree with the masses and I think on any given subject most anyone can. If my friends were exclusively pinning things for my consumption then that would be better but that will limit my world. With social search, all that opens up and you can have two and three degrees of separation with their respective weights.

What does this mean to your business?

This is all in its infancy so there is never going to be a better time to do this than now – before everyone else gets in on it. For what it’s worth, I did a search on my name today on both services and didn’t get any results on Pinterest but did get plenty on WDYL. Given, much of it wasn’t me for whatever reason but at least I got something I could use and refine from there. WDYL will get better and better. My prediction is that some will use it instead of Google.com. How can you take advantage of this? Well, for starters you can +1 every page on the web involving positive content about your business and yourself. Mentioned in the local paper? +1 it. Did an interview for another blog and the video is on YouTube? +1 it.  And don’t stop there. Encourage your customers and clients to +1 your website and anything they find about you. Maybe offer some sort of incentive if they +1 it and tag you in the comment when they do. When they do this, they are giving you access to their sphere of influence. They are also going to help to populate that search for your business up on WDYL.  Pretty powerful stuff.

-PH

The post Google’s Answer to Pinterest? originally appeared on Phacient.