“We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone,” the company said in a statement. “We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.”

If you haven’t heard about the new Google+ Your World, check out this article over at Venturebeat.com.  I’m not really sure this is a big deal at the moment, as Google+ adoption as slowed considerably, but, if it continues to gain mindshare, we could see another antitrust suit levied against the search giant.

What are your thoughts?

To go one step beyond simple search, let’s take a look at ways you can proactively deliver your message to prospective customers based on their geographic location:

1)  Twitter

I just read an article this morning about a local bakery, Sugar Coated Bakery, that has managed to thrive in this difficult economy even with the rising cost of ingredients like flour and sugar.  They have a Facebook page but no Twitter account listed on their site and I immediately thought of a product I read about last year, Baker Tweet, which enables you to scroll through your list of baked goods and Tweet when a new batch comes out of the oven.  Also, Advanced Twitter Search allows you to identify people based on their location, follow them and, hopefully, they’ll follow you back.

Give people the opportunity to friend, follow or like you in any way they choose and then make sure you keep the conversation going.

2)  Foursquare

I’ve written about Foursquare before and it has defined the location-based marketing space by proving the value of building a participatory community as opposed to the more conversational platforms like Facebook.  This is a solution where you can reward your best customers and build an army of evangelists simply by letting them take part in your success.

This is one of the best ways to build loyalty and generate repeat business from your most loyal customers.

3)  Location-Based Advertising

If you’re having trouble building a following within social media platforms, help may soon arrive in the form of location-based advertising from Twitter.  Wouldn’t it be great if you could reach your core demographic within 20 miles of your business with a very focused value proposition?  Foursquare has stumbled in their efforts to deliver location-based advertising options but maybe it’s a sign that their platform is best suited for DIY campaigns only.  Google just announced that Marissa Mayer has been promoted from VP of Search and User Experience to a new role focused on location-based services.

Three big players all vying for your advertising dollars.  Let’s hope at least one of them comes up with a solution that delivers.

Sentiment Analysis is a quickly growing data set that listing services are collecting and publishing, so, what are your options when dealing with negative feedback that finds its way into your business listing?

• If a review was posted directly to your business listing in Google, you can flag it and then you’ll have to prove that the post violates published terms and conditions.
• Are you able to identify the person who posted the negative comment?  If so, reach out to them, listen to their feedback and try to address their concerns.  Ask them if they would be willing to change or delete their negative review.
• Google suggests you contact the webmaster of the 3rd party sites if the negative review wasn’t posted directly to your business listing.  Some of these sites do allow you to post a “response from management” but that won’t show up in Google Maps.  (Google does not allow you to post this type of response)
• Google lists 5-6 reviews so  you can solicit new reviews from satisfied customers in an effort to push the negative ones off the page.  Be careful, though; too many reviews being posted in a short period of time will trigger spam alerts and hurt your ranking.

Obviously, it helps to have a solid customer support system in place and an easy process for sharing feedback directly with you so these types of issues are not broadcast to the general public.  Reputation management is an important aspect of your daily marketing life and should be treated as such.

To get started, visit each of these sites to determine if your business is listed and what people are saying.  Claim your business, manage the conversation and address issues as soon as possible.  You can’t make these sites go away so your best bet is to develop a strategy to make them work in your favor.  This is an yet another social medium that isn’t perfect and is continuously evolving and your strategy will have to do the same.

Click to see interactive online marketing ecosystem.

By now you’ve heard all the hoopla about Yelp having “long faced criticism that it gives preferential treatment to businesses that advertise with the company.”  Although Yelp maintains that there is no connection between the two, they did announce significant changes to the service this week.

Service providers like Yelp have proven how lucrative the local search advertising market is and Google is currently testing Enhanced Listings in Google Local Business Center that would allow business owners to create a unique, differentiated listing.  Google’s beta service currently offers the following:

• Add yellow tags to promote coupons, a photo of your business, and more.
• Stand out in local business results on Google & Google Maps.
• See your performance in your account anytime.
• Cancel anytime. Pay just $25 a month.

Will Google face the same scrutiny as Yelp?  We’ll have to see how this plays out but, if Google can collect $25 per month from a large percentage of small business owners, there’s a good chance we’ll see this rolled out in the near term.

The bottom line for businesses, especially “local” businesses, is to be aware of all these feedback sites and to monitor your reputation regularly.

Make Sure Images Help "Tell The Story" To Search Engines

Always be optimizing. This is the mindset required to drive and strengthen your online presence to the point where you are always “found” wherever people are searching for your keywords. This includes prospects who are searching Google Images.  You have to view images as additional mechanisms for delivering your keyword content.

Believe it or not, images do more than simply make a blog post more appealing to the eye. They actually allow you to include additional “search engine friendly” content within your images that compliments your overall page/site SEO goals.  Once you implement this process in your overall routine, you’ll see it become more and more automatic over time.

Content management systems (CMS), like WordPress, Joomla or Drupal help automate the process of optimization and keep you from having to write any html code yourself.  If you are actually writing your own code, the syntax is very straightforward and you can learn more here.

The main theme here is to treat images like the rest of your content and make sure you do the following 3 things:

1. Give your image a descriptive title.  As soon as you download an image from a service like iStockphoto, change the cryptic file name that looks like 08948istockphoto23bizimage.jpg.
2. Make sure the body content and image content are consistent and working toward the same target audience.
3. When possible, choose content that is very popular at this moment in time and somehow relates to the information you’re presenting.  See my post regarding Susan Boyle.

Just remember that content is still king and there’s no excuse for missing an opportunity to boost your exposure/rank with the search engines by delivering the most optimized content possible.  If you’re posting images on your websitesite/blog, you must now add “image optimization” to your regular operating procedures.

Hey, what’s a raining Sunday morning without a little REGEDIT action, huh? I don’t know who’s ultimately at fault here, so I’m giving both Microsoft and Google red cards for childish behavior and losing sight of the needs of their customers. Luckily, I have a customer generated fix.

This is a quick tech support bulletin for small business owners who, like me, purchased a Droid because they use a wide array of Google services like “sync” and figured going with a Google-based mobile device was a no-brainer. As soon as I upgraded to Windows 7, I was greeted by “Could not connect to Microsoft Outlook: error -2147467259″ and the Microsoft “Help Center” link was dead.

So, I went to the Google forum and was able to find the following solution: (not specifically for Windows 7)

1. Close Outlook.
2. Click on the windows button (extreme left bottom corner of the taskbar).
3. Click on ‘Run’.
4. In the ‘Open’ box, type ‘regedit’ (without the quotes).
5. Click on the ‘OK’ button.
6. In the ‘Registry Editor’ window, click on the ‘+’ sign next to ‘HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT’.
7. Search for the ‘TypeLib’ entry under ‘HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT’ registry key.
Note: Keep pressing the ‘T’ key on your keyboard until you find out the entry ‘TypeLib’.
8. Expand (Click on the ‘+’ sign) the ‘TypeLib’ entry.
9. Under ‘TypeLib’ search for the entry ‘{00062FFF-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}’ and expand it by clicking on the ‘+’ sign.
10. You should find an entry with the number ’9.3′.
11. Right click on the entry ’9.3′ and choose ‘Rename’.
12. Rename the entry from ‘9.3’ to “DoNotUseThis9.3″.
Note: If you do not find the ‘TypeLib’ entry in step #9 above, do not rename any other entry.
13. Close ‘Registry Editor’ window.
14. Open Outlook and check if you are still getting the same error message.

I can’t offer any guarantees but it worked for me. Good Luck!

Click Image to View Interactive Online Marketing Ecosystem

Several weeks ago, Chris Brogan wrote about using mind mapping to collect his thoughts and organize information for blog posts, speeches, etc.  I did some research and found a product called MindMeister that has allowed me to create a graphical representation of the online marketing universe.  Since there are so many communication tools/services/platforms available, I’ve decided to break it down into bite size pieces starting with the easiest and most cost effective way for you to begin promoting your business online.

Blogging

The most powerful tool in your “let’s get found online” arsenal is a blog.  The top six blog platforms are listed in the graphic above with the most popular being WordPress.  ( I use WordPress for my blog and also as the Content Management System for my website)  I think WordPress is the best platform simply because of the seemingly endless supply of useful plug-ins and widgets that extend its functionality.  But, regardless of the platform, the most important advice I can offer is to make sure you choose a self-hosted solution. (see my post from Friday for more details)  And, finally, here are six reasons why your business needs a blog:

• Boost your organic rank (by consistently reiterating your core message and keywords)
• Position yourself and/or your business as THE subject matter expert(s) which increases your “authority” with the search engines.
• Start conversations with prospects, customers and peers by posting thought provoking advice, stories and anecdotes.  Believe it or not, blogging is very much a two way street.
• Firmly establish and manage your online reputation by consistently sharing useful information with the very people who are searching for you online.
• Your site visitors can choose to subscribe to your blog and receive the information in a way that suits them best – via email, straight RSS feed, or within their favorite feed reader.
• The only cost you incur with blogging is time.

Start the Conversation + Maintain Consistent, Quality Content = Acquired Authority and Trust

Real time data lets you react to changes in your traffic as they occur. For example, if you had an article that hit the front page of a popular site like digg.com, you would see the traffic spike in Small Biz Insight immediately, along with links back to the sources sending you the traffic. Knowing this, you could make changes to your site or to the article itself to take advantage of the situation.

If instead you relied solely on a service like Google Analytics, it would be up to 24 hours before you even knew about the traffic, and by then it would be too late to do anything about it.

Here is a partial list of the real time information available to you in Small Biz Insight:

• Customizable dashboard
• Filtering and segmentation
• Twitter analytics
• iPhone version
• Goals and conversions
• Campaign tracking
• Support for Google Analytics tags
• Information on each individual visitor

There are two versions of Insight available – Self Serve for $9.95/month and Managed for $19.95 which will include customization and reporting services.  If you’re interested in learning more, please send us an email at info@thesmallbiznest.com or call us at (800)277-1187.

Bing automatically served this result based on the geographic location of the searcher.  This is really very intuitive since local search has become a large percentage of total activity on the big three search engines.

I would have to visit http://maps.google.com to get a similar result from Google and if I were to start at the main Google search bar, http://www.google.com, I would have to use the “long tail” search phrase, online marketing business near shirley, ma, to finally get the following result:

It’s very frustrating that Google Maps and Google Search are two separate entities and there isn’t a way to configure the presentation of results.  Using Bing, I can choose “all results” or “local results” from the left menu pane.  At the very least, Google needs to add “Local” to the list of options like video, news, etc.

Alerts: Track any mention of your business, prospective deals or news on your competitors.  Create alerts for any word or term you’re interested in tracking, type of info (blog, news, etc.), delivery mechanism (email or feed), and set the frequency of notifications.  I find this to be most helpful for my clients to track potential business opportunities.

Local Business Center: This allows you to “claim” your business listing on Google and create a comprehensive overview of your business which should include your core message as well as as many of your primary keywords and phrases.  Don’t forget to include images – your listing will be much more compelling with a visual representation.

FeedBurner: If you have a blog, you should be using FeedBurner to make sure people can subscribe to your feed.  Subscribers can either receive your feed via email or view it in a “reader” as I will describe below:

Reader: A central repository for all of the RSS feeds you would like to follow on a regular basis.  Rather than going to 12 different sites to read your favorite blogs or follow news sites, you can point them all to Reader and quickly absorb your daily information dump.

Voice: You have to sign up for an invitation to use this service and it can take several weeks before you hear back.  Google Voice is a virtual local phone number that you can forward to any cell phone or land line you choose.  Two really powerful features are 1) your voice mail messages can be routed to your email address as an attachment and 2) your voice mail messages are transcribed on the fly and also delivered as an email or SMS.

The really nice thing about using these services is that they’re from a single vendor so they can be accessed and managed from one central dashboard. Take the time to evaluate these tools and you’ll have more time to focus on your core business responsibilities.

Google Analytics had always lacked the ability to take a more granular look at data and be able to slice an dice information on the fly.  According to the announcement on Google’s blog, GA has now become more powerful, flexible and intelligent:

Engagement Goals – Measure user engagement and and branding success.

Expanded Mobile Reporting - Track mobile websites and mobile apps.  Initial release will support tracking of PHP, Perl, JSP and ASPX sites.

Advanced Analysis Features – Remember when Microsoft introduced pivot tables in Excel?  This type of functionality was added to GA last year and now, you can filter the rows in a table based on different metric conditions.

Multiple Custom Variables – You can now define and track visitors according to visitor attributes, session attributes and page-level attributes.

Sharing Segments and Custom Report Templates - You can share the URL link for a report with anyone who has an Analytics account and a pre-formatted report template will automatically be imported.

Analytics Intelligence (I can’t wait to try this feature) – This feature is based on a new algorithmic driven intelligence engine.  The gathered information will generate alerts when there are significant changes in the data patterns of your site metrics and dimensions.

Custom Alerts – Set your own alert criteria and identify delivery mechanism.

Google continues to enhance the most powerful FREE tool on the internet and business owners should do their best to take advantage.

Ping and FriendFeed allow you to distribute your “microcontent” across all social networks and, now, Bing (and, yes eventually Google) will index not only the text of the tweet, but the link content as well.  I’m not sure if there will be an adjustment required by users based on how the information will be presented but there didn’t seem to be an issue when Google added images and video to their search engine.

This is pretty powerful stuff for a small business owner and should allow them to expand their online presence without significant effort.

Hello, my name is John, and I’m addicted to Google…

Now I understand why.  Jessica E. Vascellaro wrote an interesting article in this morning’s Wall Street Journal outlining the failure of this once promising marketing tool.  She sites the lack of tracking mechanisms as the reason for the plug being pulled but also pointed to the lack of interest on the part of radio station owners.

I don’t see it that way.  Nobody knew about the service!  The only reason I knew about it is because we were a big Adwords client and were allowed to kick the tires a bit.  I was planning on using the service as a compliment to the other inbound/outbound marketing services I offer to my clients.  I was also planning on using toll-free phone numbers and landing pages to track the success of campaigns.  So what if the Google dashboard didn’t currently offer such functionality – you know it would inevitably be developed or purchased.  Look how companies like ReachLocal track “local” online advertising campaigns.

The Internet giant dropped the ball by making Google Audio the best kept secret in company history.  Any business in this country could have had 1) access to professional voice talent to record spots 2) access to national, regional and local markets and 3) the ability to break down target audience by a complete set of demographic characteristics.

I love the radio guys who say, “we would have sold it on our own”.  That’s not true.  Google was paying a minimum on inventory whether it was sold or not.  Why were the radio guys complaining about the so called discounted pricing being introduced by Google?  $500 for a $1000 slot is better than $0, right?  That attitude worked out well for the newspapers.

Finally, the Google Audio service offered a CPM of slightly more than $1 which I challenge anyone to beat in any medium.  It’s a shame the recession came along and swept away what could have been a very effective marketing platform, at least for me and my clients.

Goodbye Google Audio – we hardly knew thee.

Google did announce yesterday that they’re no longer selling advertising space in newspapers so let’s hope they don’t do the same with Google Audio.