You might notice as you setup your business page on Google+  that you don’t have to verify you’re the business owner. Google Places requires telephone verification to ensure ownership of the business but this wasn’t included in Google+.

Why? Great question. I think we’d all like to know.

This means that ‘name squatting’ is entirely possible on Google+ unless you’re a global brand (and Google likes you). The only recourse at this time is to go ahead and create an ‘official’ presence for your business on Google+ by creating a company page.

Google has made it easy to create a business page by giving us a wizard style tool. Even though there are a few screens, it’s really just a two-step process asking for very basic information. Creating your business page on Google+ will only take you about 5 minutes.

Before you start…

You’ll need to decide if you’d like to be listed as a ‘Local Business or Place’ or as a company before you make your page. The only difference I discovered is that a ‘Local Business or Place’ links the page to a Google Place page and requires the business phone number. Creating a ‘Company’ page does not link a Google Place page and requires a website address for the business to get started.

Now, just follow these two steps.

1. Pick a Gmail account & login

Claiming your brand or business page on Google+ requires a Google account. If you don’t have one, you’ll need to create a Google account.

2. Create the Page

Visit http://plus.google.com/pages/create to make your page. Before you begin, you will need to decide if you’d like to be a ‘Local Business or Place’ or a ‘Company, Institution or Organization’.

When I elected our company to be a ‘Local Business’, our Google Place page turned up in the search results. I chose our Google Place page and it was linked to the new Google+ page (confused by the naming scheme yet?). If you don’t have a Google Place page, you’ll be prompted for the information to create one.

Creating a page is quick and simple, no matter which choice you make, due the wizard style process. You’ll add relevant information about your company like the company tagline, logo, etc. The process is straight-forward and self-explanatory. A lot of the information is optional. So, if you don’t have a copy of your logo handy — this can be done later.

The last page of the setup process prompts you to promote the page. If you’re electing to come back to this later, wait to promote the page. You can always do this later.

Now, you can integrate it into your marketing mix as it makes sense. When you decide to integrate Google+ into your marketing, be sure to checkout options for integrating Google+ into your website & blog including the badges. Giving people the ability to share content via Google+ will create more visibility for your business.

Post Automation

We haven’t yet seen tools that let you automatically post to the page like other social networks. Google just recently released an API for Google+ so we’re expecting to see post automation solutions soon.

Finding Your Google+ Pages

A couple of weeks after you make your page, you might find yourself wondering how to locate it in Google+ (like I did). In the left sidebar, you’ll see a drop-down that lists your pages. When you click on the page name, posts are made from the page instead of you.

Assigning Page Admins

Google+ now supports multiple admins for pages. You can add other profile managers, if needed, using their email address. This is found under ‘settings’.

Deleting a Google+ Page

Of course, you can always back out of the whole deal and delete your page.

Do you know the top 3 metrics to measure?

For most companies, the website’s highest purpose is to bring sales leads. If it’s not performing on this task, take a look at the following top three metrics for success.

• Total number of website visitors vs. visitors that become leads or buyers
• Close rate of sales leads
• Average order value

The number of metrics available for a website is daunting and trying to track all those numbers will distract you from real success. Instead, narrow your focus to metrics that will drive the business forward.

Is your website bringing more customers to your door?

By using the metrics mentioned, you can easily track the performance of your website and overall Web presence. If your metrics are trending downward, what is driving the change?

If traffic is at expected norms but interactions are down, you may want to review and update the product descriptions or offers on your website. If traffic has decreased, where are your previous visitors going? You may find you have a new competitor, visitors are finding more relevant content somewhere else online or your online market space has changed.

Are You Falling Behind?

When was the last time you reviewed your online competitors? The online marketplace changes quickly. It’s smart to complete this every 4 to 6 months or when your metrics significantly change. One way to do a competitive review is to search on your most valuable keywords and review both the search results and advertisements. You may discover new competitors or that existing competitors are gaining ground.

Simply put, it was expensive and hard to justify.

Device detection wasn’t 100% reliable. When a new device came to market, code had to be updated to support the new device. In years past, browsers on mobile devices were so different that there was no reliable way of creating a consistent user experience. Mobile was cost-prohibitive to most businesses because of it’s complexity and maintenance costs.

Now, things have changed.

Over the past year, designers and engineers have started to adopt responsive web design which includes fluid widths, scalable images and adjustable layouts that remain consistent across all platforms. Using a collection of tools and techniques, a single website design is created with varying layouts for different screen sizes to target the various mobile devices while still supporting the traditional desktop web. The layout and positioning of page elements change fluidly, based on the viewer’s screen width, resolution and browser capabilities instead of simply detecting the device.

Using responsive web design, variations are made to maximize the space available on the screen for a better user experience for each device. For tablets, consideration is also made for vertical versus landscape viewing.

What It Looks Like

iPhone Size

Desktop Size

The Boston Globe is the poster child of responsive web design at the moment. Take a look at how the layout changes based on the screen width. The first image is the Boston Globe website, resized for a phone device. The one second  is the desktop version. By loading the website and resizing your browser, you’ll see responsive web design at work.

Notice how the elements on the web page fluidly move to support the changing size of the browser. You can see how one design can support the varying sizes of internet-enabled device screens.

What does the future hold?

At Knowmad, we’re understandably skeptical when it comes to new web design fads and trends because we’ve seen a lot of fads come and go over the last 10 years which makes it easier for us to recognize that responsive web design isn’t a fad. It’s here to stay.

We’re even implementing responsive web design in our own website redesign project that is currently underway.

Responsive web design a much-needed, fundamental shift for the web design industry. It will become a new ‘norm’ just like print styles for web pages.

If you’re considering redesigning a website in the near future and you’re not yet considering mobile, add responsive web design to your list of requirements. For existing websites, it’s possible to refactor designs to support responsive web design. Contact your designer and ask about mobile support.

Mobile continues to grow by leaps and bounds. Even in the B2B market, we’re finding that buyers that prefer to research are using mobile devices for their research activities and a growing number of marketing emails are opened on mobile devices. Considering that emails typically drive readers to a website, it’s critical to the performance of your online marketing to ensure your website is compatible to mobile devices.

The Marcom awards competition recognizes outstanding creative achievement by marketing and communication professionals. There were over 6,000 entries from throughout the United States, Canada and several other countries in the 2011 competition.

Here are the results.

Mallard Creek Polymers
Award: Platinum
Category: Website/Corporation

Johnson C. Smith University
Award: Gold
Category: Website/Educational Institution

Gantrade Corporation
Award: Honorable Mention
Category: Website/Corporation

In our industry, we most often see content theft in e-commerce, blogging and publisher websites but it can happen to any website. This isn’t intended to scare you, just to let you know that it’s a common issue and there are a few routes available to protect your investment in online content. In addition to qualified legal advice, other web publishers are a great source for ideas on how to protect your content by learning about their methods.

We’ve also observed that, in our business, the issue of plagiarism is best handled by providing our clients with options so they can find a method that works best for them. Recommending a specific solution would expose us to certain undesirable liabilities. Ergo…

Our Important Legal Disclaimer

We can’t give legal advice; we’re not attorneys, laws change and each situation differs. You should consult a qualified attorney and the US Copyright Office if you have questions about copyright protection and to review any process created for plagiarism or copyright infringement protection.  We are providing information about common industry practices and not information about applying the law to a specific set of facts.

Now, let’s discuss the issue at hand.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act

There is a law on the books that helps you protect your online content. It’s called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, signed into US Federal law in 1998. In Subsection 512(c)of the Copyright Act, this law limits the liability of hosting service providers by requiring a process to respond to copyright infringement claims.

This subsection works in favor of publishers, as well as service providers, by requiring each service provider to implement a process to handle copyright infringement along with a designated internal agent to respond to infringement notices. A directory of agents is available on the US Copyright Office website so you can locate the contact information for a specific service provider.

Here’s the relevant part of the act in regards to our topic:
Upon receipt of a compliant notification of claimed infringement, a service provider must respond expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of the infringing activity, if the service provider seeks to receive the benefits of the limitations of liability contained in § 512(c). A service provider is not required by law to remove the allegedly infringing material, but upon receipt of a compliant notification will deemed to have been placed on notice of the allegedly infringing activity, and without the benefit of the limitations on liability contained in § 512, may face secondary liability for continuing to host the allegedly infringing material.

What are my options for protecting content?

There are a couple of options that we’re aware of to proactively protect online content. You can create and display a license with your content. Large publishers tend to create their own and have attorneys on staff. The rest of us are far more fortunate, in that we don’t need to have attorneys on staff. There are licenses freely available online, like the Creative Commons License, for the rest of us.

Creative Commons License

The Creative Commons License provides variations of stated protection. There’s a handy ‘License Chooser’ on the website to help you pick the most appropriate license. Once you have the license, place it on your website. For instance, you can create a license page and link it in the footer of your website so it shows on every page.

One of the most common variations of the Creative Commons license is called “Attribution-NoDerivs”, which states that others can redistribute your content commercially or non-commercially as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.

Register with US copyright office

You can also register your content with the US Copyright Office. Although your work is somewhat protected even without registering, case history suggests the US court favors registered copyrighters, so it is probably in your best interest to register.

Here’s a good article about how to register copyright for online content with the US Copyright Office.

Best Practices

Put a copyright notice on every page and make sure it’s up-to-date. We typically put the current year in the footer. Some believe you should have a range of years.

How do I know if it’s been stolen?

Monitor your content online using services like CopyScape and Google Alerts. CopyScape offers free and premium products and the premium products aren’t very expensive. We use a service of theirs called Copysentry, which scans the web weekly and emails a report. The report tells me if our content is present on another website.

You can also use a script called Tynt to tag copied content with a link back to your website. This tool has a few purposes, including SEO and sending people back to your site when content is copied. This is great for scripted content scrapers and when people copy into emails.

It looks like this…

What do I do if my content is stolen?

Before moving forward, decide if it’s worth your time. If it is, then you want to ensure your content qualifies for copyright protection.

The first step is to contact the blog or website owner. Usually, just asking them to remove prompts positive action. If they don’t respond, you can send a Cease & desist email to them.

After contacting the website owner, you may decide to file a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaint with Google, asking them to remove the content from search results. You need to be able to prove you published the content first. One of the easiest ways to do this is to use the Way Back Machine, an internet archive tool.

Once you have a DMCA, you can send it to the hosting provider and ask them to discontinue hosting the website with the stolen content. You can usually find the Copyright Infringement Agent’s email via the US Copyright Office. They will either contact the website owner on your behalf or disable the account temporarily.

What strategies have you used with content thieves?

Unfortunately, it isn’t currently possible to legally collect this information using any web tracking software. Worse still, the anonymous data that can be legally collected about your web visitors does not reveal much in the way of identification.

This is because most web tracking software uses an IP address to look up contact information for prospective leads. An IP address is a number that identifies the network a visitor is coming from. It is legal in the United States to track IP addresses because they do not provide personal information. Because many computers can connect into one network, and many people can use the same computer, it is impossible to know who specifically is visiting your site.

The company name can sometimes be found based on the IP address for large corporations, but for smaller companies, visitors browsing from home, or mobile visitors, the IP address will most likely be associated with an Internet Service Provider, like AT&T or Time Warner.

In the small likelihood a company name owns the IP, these marketing tools just send you the CEO or business owner’s name—or no contact information at all.

So how can you know if your website is reaching the right audience? Opt-in marketing, in which visitors freely give you their information through a contact form, newsletter sign-up, or another special offer is the best way to know exactly who is visiting your site. To get the best results, don’t ask for too much information up front—start with just an email address, and ask for more information later.

If you’re still dying to know which companies are browsing your site, you can find that information for free, using Google Analytics online tracking software, by looking at the Network Service Providers information for Visitors. This report will tell you the name of the company that is associated with the IP (if available).

Thanks CBJ! We’re excited to be recognized for our work!

Congratulations to the other winners as well. We’re honored to be recognized with you.

Screen sharing is efficient

Screen sharing helps conversations go faster because we can both view the same thing simultaneously. This afternoon Tessa shared her screen to show me a few design options for a new banner campaign. Inside of five minutes, we had the new banner chosen and were ready to move forward. Email would have required more back-and-forth communication.

You don’t have to be a technologist to gain the benefits of screen sharing. You can use it anytime you want to show or see something on someone else’s desktop to make a conversation more effective.

How else can you use screen sharing?

We’ve used screen sharing to collaborate on documents instead of Google Docs, delivering designs to our clients, collaborating with team members and sales presentations. There’s no limit to use. For us, the key is that it has to make the exchange more efficient and not get in the way of discussion.

Join.me

Join.me is free up to 250 viewers and is compatible to mobile devices as well as to traditional desktop/laptops. The paid version supports meeting scheduling and international conference lines.

We’ve used a few screen sharing tools from Skype to webinar softwares. Which tool is your favorite and why?

We need your input to pick our new tagline.

As a business owner, savvy marketer, sales expert, follower or friend, you’re just the person we need to help us and it will only take a minute of your time!

Here’s the survey…(will open in a new window)

Seriously, I timed the survey. It takes just 1 minute.

It’s a gut test. Don’t over think it. I’ve included our purpose to help frame it for you.

Rank the ideas for our new tagline. If you really dislike an idea, don’t rank it. If you have an idea we didn’t think of, add it in the comment box.

Thanks in advance for your help and expertise!

Diona