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10 Valuable Aspects of a Successful Homepage

Posted by admin on September 16th, 2011

By Terri Seymour
The homepage of your website is often the landing page and is critical to the success of your online business. When people land on this page, you have just a few seconds to capture their interest. This page will be a giant factor in your conversion rate which is the ratio of visitors that respond to your goal action. This goal action can be subscribing to your newsletter, signing up for your ecourse, ordering your products, etc.

Your homepage needs to contain certain elements to be successful in raising your conversion rate. Read the list carefully and check to see if your homepage meets all of the following criteria.

1. Color – The color you choose for your website can have a big effect on your visitors. The type of site you have should be a factor in the colors you choose. There are essentially two types of colors – cool and warm.

Browns, blues and greens are cool colors and can make you feel relaxed, calm and assured. These colors are good for sites pertaining to medicine, relaxation and other sites that have reassuring answers to your problems.

Yellows, reds and oranges are warm colors that bring out feelings of energy, excitement and happiness. These colors work well for exercise sites, sports sites and other energetic type sites.

Purple is a good color for fashion and jewelry sites. It emulates sophistication, royalty, and luxury, but it is also feminine and romantic.

2. Clutter – How does it make you feel when you walk into a business that is messy and full of clutter. It doesn’t exactly bring out the confidence in said business. Your website is the same way. You don’t want it to look like a junk-filled mess! Keep it simple, clean, consistent and easy to follow. Don’t fill your site with flashing banners, junk ads or fancy hard to read font.

3. Header – The header you use for your homepage is very important. You have just a few seconds to “capture” your visitor and the header can be a vital factor in achieving that goal. Make your header professional, short and to the point. You want the header to get the visitor to want to know more about you and your products/services. The header should outline in a few words what the benefits of your site are in a way that will make the visitor stay longer. Color is also a consideration.

4. Ease of Navigation – Another critical point to consider is how easy it is for people to navigate your site. Does your site feel like a maze with doubts on how to get from here to there? Visit your site as a customer and take note on how easy it is to navigate and how well laid out and simple the page is. Is your menu easy to find and follow? Is the font easy to see and read? Does one part of the page flow into another? Are your links prominent and easy to find? Look over every aspect of navigation with an extremely critical eye because people will not stay on a site that makes them feel lost and confused.

5. Use Testimonials – Testimonials are invaluable to your site because they reassure the visitor by increasing your credibility thus allowing them to trust you and your products more easily. Sprinkle a few short testimonials on your landing page where appropriate and have a section saved just for some of your best testimonials. Use detailed testimonials as opposed to more generic ones. For example: “I love your product and will purchase more” is not as good as “Your product helped me lose 20 lbs in just 6 weeks!”

6. Contact Information – Nothing makes me leave a site faster than when no contact information or email address is found. This, to me, says the person does not want to be bothered with customers, questions or anything else. I wouldn’t ever do business with a website that does not provide complete and accurate contact info. More than likely, not many people would so it is extremely important to have your contact info prominently displayed on your homepage and every other page of your website.

7. Capture Visitors’ Email Addresses – Most of us are familiar with the phrase, “the money is in the list.” In a big way, this is true. Capturing your visitors’ emails allows you to keep in contact with them so you can build that ever important relationship that will turn them into customers. Most people will not purchase anything on a first trip to a website so by capturing their emails you can astronomically boost the chances of converting that person into a customer. You can put a subscription form on every page of your site and be sure to have one on your landing page. Building a mailing list will help you market your sales, specials, etc. and will also help you build a solid customer base.

8. Call to Action – A Call to Action is a specific thing you “order” your visitors to do. This can be done with a text link or graphic. For example: Clíck here for a free marketing ecourse. You are giving the visitor very clear and concise instructions on what to do. Sometimes your visitors need a little push to complete the call to action so you would use something like this:

Provide incentives to help your visitor make the decision to complete your call to action. Have just one clear call to action. Do not give you visitors too many choices because it will just result in confusion and indecisiveness.

9. Always Proofread – Always proofread and proofread again to be sure you catch all typos, grammatical errors and so forth. Make sure all your links work and everything on your landing page is in working order and correctly done.

10. Analytics – Be sure to take advantage of your site stats and analytics. This information can be critical to making your page a success. Google Analytics is free and provides a great service for anyone who has a website. You want to see how many people are going from your landing or homepage to other pages of your site. And if they are not, try to find out why, so you can improve your homepage. Monitor your bounce rate, conversion rate and other valued information.

You just cannot throw up a website and expect to boost your revenue. You have to nurture, maintain and care for your site and always be improving it. Keep abreast of the latest trends, info and data and always be learning how to make it better. Your landing and/or homepage is critical because it often decides the fate of your site so be sure to make it the most efficient and effective webpage possible

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Social Media Marketing Tools – Putting Your Finger on the Pulse of the Web

Posted by admin on September 16th, 2011
Image representing MySpace as depicted in Crun...

Image via CrunchBase

By Enzo F. Cesario (c) 2011 BrandSplat             

Time makes a mockery of most predictions. Once derided as the tools and hobbies of hopeless shut-ins and intellectual ivory tower sorts, social media sites such as PayPal, Facebook and LinkedIn have become the home of an entirely new, powerhouse economy. Where hundreds of years of war and diplomacy have failed, social media marketing has succeeded in bringing people around the globe together in the pursuit of common interests and open markets. Social media marketing is the home of successful brand promotion and finding the right mix of tools to take advantage of it has become the defining issue of the modern brand.
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When people refer to SMM tools, they are discussing a host of applications and programs that allow real-time and long-term feedback on the performance of their social networks. This kind of information goes beyond the purely mechanistic approach of SEO and website performance, moving into the realm of genuine social engineering. Social media tools can track the number of times a brand is being mentioned across each network, compare traffic between networks, determine where the buzz is starting and which path it took to get from, say, Digg to Facebook. Knowing the focus of each of these tools and the best way to use them is the key to bringing all this power under control and using it to help promote a brand to its full potential.

TweetDeck

TweetDeck is an excellent platform for brands to manage social networks. A simple, efficient, all-in-one approach makes TweetDeck very useful for getting updates out quickly to a number of locations. TweetDeck supports Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, GoogleBuzz, LinkedIn and Foursquare, giving a user easy access to all of the major networks. Users can send out status updates to any or all of these at once, allowing unified messages to be spread in a single step, without the potential to forget one. However, it does have its limitations. Very heavy traffic to multiple accounts can slow down its efficiency, making it more of a startup and middleweight tool than a long-term solution.

HootSuite

Similar to TweetDeck in that it is targeted toward smaller businesses, HootSuite is an alternative tool that allows for several levels of customization. For starters, the basic package is free, and will support five networks of the user’s choosing. Currently available platforms include Twitter, WordPress, LinkedIn, MySpace, FourSquare, Facebook and PingFm. Upgrading to paid subscriptions allows additional networks to be included.

HootSuite really shines because it offers steady “streams” of information about each of the user’s networks, allowing the aforementioned real-time monitoring of web traffíc. If a particular network is flagging or performing particularly well, it will be brought to the manager’s attention. Further, HootSuite provides user bios and links to various users’ social networking profiles, allowing a brand to tailor its content to the needs of the market more efficiently. The information is a bit limited in the default package, but even upgrading to the $5.99 a month subscription brings a great deal more detail to hand.

Engage121

For larger businesses looking to make their mark in the social networking world, Engage121 offers a number of more powerful options. This is a program for professional social networking managers, because it is entirely customizable to the exact needs of a business. One of its touted features, for example, is the ability of a local office to examine, modify and approve messages from the central branch. In this vein, a generic message can be sent out about company directives, while allowing each branch to add or delete content based on the relevance it has to their own particular mission. Thus a large clothing chain won’t waste time sending out messages about their new swimwear line to their regional users in Alaska.

However, it has to be stressed once again that Engage 121 is not a tool for beginners. The sheer number of options can be daunting to put in the hands of an inexperienced manager. It’s best to give it to someone with a great deal of skill under his or her hat who can provide a specific plan of attack for using this tool.

General Thoughts

As a broader consideration, there’s no reason to limit oneself to any one of these applications, or indeed any of their competitors. A sound SMM strategy might, in fact, use several programs at once, either to get multiple sources of information or to test out which works best for a given company’s needs. Then as the brand grows and needs grow, the manager can move up to more robust software and applications that better service the needs of the company.

Above all, remember the axiom that these tools are based on the need to promote communication between brand and audience. They are not meant to reduce the users of the network to data that can be analyzed and directed – these are people with their own minds and agendas, who will respond in kind if they feel slighted or taken advantage of. Instead, they should be used as a way to get information about what people want to talk about, and to build a brand’s reputation.

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Three Ways to Avoid Disastrous Customer Service

Posted by admin on September 13th, 2011
NEW YORK, NY - DECEMBER 16: Citibank employee...

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

“The company clearly understood the market,” writes Barbara Bix at MarketingProfs. It had created a new product with all the right features and benefits, one that was earning rave reviews for its performance. “The name was short, crisp, and evocative. The logo was memorable. The promotion was compelling, frequent, and consistent.” Persuaded of its usefulness, Bix made an immediate purchase.
But there was a problem: Unable to install the product, she called the customer service number and spent several hours on hold as her issue was passed from manager to manager. Finally—a full 24 hours after her installation ordeal began—a service person authorized to fix the problem did so with a few taps on the keyboard.
By then, however, the damage was done. “Due to a series of post-sales mishaps,” notes Bix, “the company had counteracted months of well-executed marketing investments.”
To protect your brand from similar harm, she has this advice like this:
Test all aspects of delivery before going to market. Bix’s problem was simple: The authorization code she received with her purchase didn’t match any in the company’s database—a glitch that should have been discovered and resolved before the product went on sale.
Don’t direct customers to an FAQ page. There’s a good chance they won’t find the answer they actually need, and this will only fuel their frustration. Phone support—ideally 24/7—is what they want. “Many customers will forgive product failures if they can reach an empathetic support person who remedies the situation,” she says.
Empower employees to take corrective action. Why didn’t a frontline customer service rep have the code Bix needed? Bringing supervisors into process only served to add unnecessary complexity and irritation.

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Deceptive Marketing: A Necessary Evil for Search Marketers?

Posted by admin on September 12th, 2011
Google Appliance as shown at RSA Expo 2008 in ...

Image via Wikipedia

By Jill Whalen

A few years ago, I read a good article by Canadian SEO Melanie Nathan called “The Reciprocity Link Building Method” in which she outlined a technique she sometimes used to build up high-quality links for her clients’ websites. The gist, as I understood it, was to first find a website that would be good for your client’s site to link to. Then you’d click around to see if any of their current links were broken (went to dead pages or sites). If you found some, you’d use this information as an opening to start a dialogue with the site owner or webmaster, and eventually mention your client’s site as a substitute for one of the broken links. I thought it was a very clever idea, a great way to make contacts in your client’s industry, and a win-win for everybody involved.

We Convert Your Website Visitors to Customers

More recently I saw another article on this topic by Nick LeRoy, a search marketer in the Minneapolis area. Nick talked about the same basic technique Melanie had mentioned, and added a real-life example email he had used. In his example email, he mentioned to the webmaster that he had a favorite site from which he liked to purchase stuff for his son on birthdays and holidays. Nick again mentioned “his son” in a follow-up email, saying that he liked the products at this particular website because they made his son think.

All sounds good so far, right? Except that Nick doesn’t have a son!

I made the following comment on the post:

“Nick, I didn’t know you had a son (as per the emails requesting a link). If indeed you don’t, are you suggesting that people create a trust relationship with these webmasters by lying to them?”

Lots of comments ensued, which I encourage you to read over at Nick’s site. For me, what he did was certainly not ghastly, but the situation does bring up a ton of questions.

Was it necessary to lie? Isn’t that sort of thing exactly what gives marketers in general (not just search marketers) a bad reputation? Couldn’t he have done things exactly as he did without the lie?

I contend that he could have.

Nick claims that telling the webmaster that you’re looking for links on behalf of a client has less of a success rate for securing the link. It would certainly be interesting to test that theory, and it may very well be true. But even if you get fewer links out of it, that doesn’t justify lying in any aspect of business–or in life. (Are they really two different things?)

Lying in any form is deception.

Even if it’s just a tiny white lie. Even if it gets you more links. Even if it gets you more business. Even if it makes you look better in the eyes of your boss or client.

Which brings up another point: As the boss of someone using this technique, how would you feel about it? If your company culture is one of honesty, then any form of deception within your business should be a no-no. I can tell you that if I found out that an employee of mine did this, I would be very disappoínted in them and explain why we don’t use deceptive practices. I would also wonder why I had to explain such a concept to an adúlt.

And what about the client?

Did they know that their search marketing company was using deception in order to obtain links? Is their company culture such that it’s not a problem for them? Or did they not even know exactly how their links were being obtained? If you’re being deceptive on your clients’ behalf, one would hope that you get their permission and written sign-off so it doesn’t come back to haunt you at some point.

Personally, if I hired a company to perform a service for me and they did it in a way that involved any form of lying, I would wonder what else they were doing that was deceptive. Were they overcharging me? Did they even have the skills they claimed to have?

Not to mention the unsuspecting webmaster on the other side who gave out the link.

How would they feel later to find out they were duped? Would they have a bad taste in their mouth for not only the marketing company, but for the company they were linking to? What if they felt so duped that they decided to go public on social media with the information? How would the client like the technique if they ended up with a reputation management nightmare?

Surely I’m being dramatic here, because we’re only talking about a little white lie. But does the size or color of the lie make it any less deceptive?

And we are talking specifically about link building here. There’s a reason that I dislike it and don’t do it. As far as I’m concerned, link building in and of itself borders on being a deceptive practice because it’s usually done to secure a fake “vote” for a website. It’s an industry that shouldn’t exist, and wouldn’t exist if Google didn’t place so much weight on links. If it weren’t for that aspect of Google’s algorithm, we’d have website owners giving and getting links for the right reasons, with a lot less deception (and payment) going on behind the scenes.

We can debate ethics forever and néver come to a consensus because they are often seen as situational. What might be unethical in one situation might not seem so unethical in another situation. Certainly, life-or-death situations are not the same as marketing ones. If a lie is going to somehow save someone’s life, then by all means, please lie your head off!

But marketing isn’t a life-or-death situation.

Lying and deceiving to seek someone’s favor is generally agreed upon by most cultures as being wrong.

This is not a “black hat vs. white hat” issue.

It has nothing to do with hats. When it comes to search marketing, I don’t care what techniques you use or what methods you use to gain more targeted search engine visitors. I don’t believe that there are techniques that are more or less ethical than others. I don’t care what Google puts in their Webmaster Guidelines, because there’s no reason to need to know. If you fundamentally understand that all Google cares about is that your website isn’t being deceptive in some manner, then you can’t run afoul of them. They have to know that they can trust the information contained on your site and the information that you provide to Google. Nothing more, nothing less.

So many ethical conundrums come down to one simple question:

Is it deceptive or not?

I worry about search marketers who believe that deception is a necessary part of their job if they are going to get results. It’s not only incorrect, but a sad commentary on our industry and perhaps our world.

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What Will Google+ Business Pages Look like? Top 10 Features We Want to See

Posted by admin on September 8th, 2011
Image representing YouTube as depicted in Crun...

Image via CrunchBase

Ever since the soft launch of Google+ in late June 2011 rumours of the release of Google+ business pages have been rampant. Predicted release dates have come and gone, many impatient businesses have gone ahead and created Google+ profiles (designed for individuals) for their businesses; only to have them removed by Google shortly thereafter.
 
Right now the best way for businesses to get on Google Plus is to create a profile for someone with high standing in the company. Take for example Mashable CEO Pete Cashmore who has been added to 175,000+ circles (at the time of writing this). He’ll be sure to use that influence to grow Mashable’s Google+ Brand Page when it goes live.
So, what do we want to see in Google+ Business Pages? Read the rest to find out!
Google has a major opportunity on their hands, even if Google+ doesn’t reach Facebook-level numbers, Google+ Business Pages are still likely to be featured heavily in search results, which means they will definitely be seen! We’ve put our heads together to give you our top 10 features Google should include in the launch of Google Business Pages. 

1) One-to-One Communication Between Brand & Customer
We can already do this with Twitter through @replies and direct messages, but on Facebook there’s no easy way for a page owner to send a message to an individual. This would prove immensely valuable for customer service matters that are better handled in a private, rather than public forum.

2) A Backend Dashboard With Integrated User Analytics
Wouldn’t it be great to see something more advanced than Facebook Insights? We’d love to see integration with the existing Google Analytics Dashboard. Another key feature would be the ability to identify influencers based on their activity and social reach. Having a list of targeted influencers and being able to foster key relationships on a one-to-one level will give social media managers a new way to grow and service their communities.

3) Social Advertising Based on User Analytics
Just like Facebook allows you to advertise and attract fans, so too should Google+ allow page owners to target fans and add them to their brand circle(s). Google+ will have to be careful to not saturate their page with ads in the early phases, as it stands Google+ is free of any sponsored advertising. As people begin using Google+, AdWords integration will inevitably follow, opening yet another new frontier for advertisers.

4) Multiple Fan Circles
Imagine being able to segment your fans into separate groups and drive specific messages to them. You could have one circle for casual fans who’ve become part of your circles and another for hardcore fans who +1 and comment often. This could potentially spur community activity, if for example you wanted to be added to a brand’s elite circle and gain access to special offers, you may start engaging more. This is similar to some recent Klout promotions we’ve seen, but with a clout that’s focused around the “fan” and your brand – not just the fan and all of social media.

5) A Robust API
Whether Google+ Business Pages will coincide with the release of an API (Application Programming Interface) remains to be seen; it would certainly get the development community excited. Being able to add geo-location data and integrate other Google services like YouTube prove very promising for any brand that wants to make their Google+ Business Page stand out.

6) Google Places Integration
This is a big one. Google places is not without its issues, and it’s a natural fit that Google+ Business Pages will have some overlap with Google Places – if not replace them outright. If Google chooses the latter strategy, it will end up populating Google+ Business Pages automatically; there is already some evidence that suggests this. Whichever path Google decides to take hopefully it will give brands more control over what content is a part of their page, rather than just populating everything automatically and giving users little room to control content.

7) On-Site Reviews
This follows with Google Places integration, except it would allow for an area on Google+ Business Pages where reviews can be read and written. We’ve already seen a lot of review integration into Facebook with tabs and recommendations and it’s likely that Google+ will follow suit.

8) Customized Design
Definitely not the full fledged approach of MySpace, but somewhere between a Facebook landing page and a Twitter background. If the new YouTube enhanced channels are to give any indication, we’ll see customizable backgrounds with linkable areas. A drag and drop front-end would also be a great option for brands to customize their layout and do more interesting things with their design. If Google+ could open up design capabilities to those of us who don’t know how to code, the creativity of the business pages will quickly surpass Facebook, where people still need to know code in order to create a landing page.

9) Content Managed Landing Pages
Picking up from where number 8 left off, a landing page you can design and update with a content management system would mean that page owners would be able to make changes to their landing pages on the fly. If it were an inline CMS (with front-end editing) that would be even better!
10) Contest and Coupon Integration
Running contests directly on Facebook requires third-party applications, we’d love to see Google+ create easy ways for brands to run contests and give away coupons. These promotional methods foster engagement and create long lasting bonds between brands and their loyal followers.

In Conclusion
So there you have it, these are our top 10 predictions or our wish list, if you will. Bring on Google Plus business pages, we’re ready

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3 Common Search Marketing Mistakes You MUST Avoid

Posted by admin on September 7th, 2011
Relationship between trade marks and brand

Image via Wikipedia

Search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search marketing can be highly effective traffic drivers for your website. They can be a core aspect of your marketing mix. For some companies, Search can even be responsible for driving the vast majority of revenue.

So, how can Search potentially hurt a business, and actually do more harm than good?
If you haven’t built a rock-solid marketing foundation for your business first, Search could be driving prospective customers to a poor experience. In these scenarios, Search would be creating a crowd of people who dislike your brand, meaning you’ve lost them as prospects – both now and in the future.

To fix this and ensure your Search initiatives are teed up for success, avoid the following three common mistakes in launching Search campaigns:

Mistake #1: Launching Search with Weak Branding
What does your brand represent? What differentiates you from the competition? What’s your positioning in the market? Is your brand “likeable” among your target audience?
You think of Apple, and you think it’s a great brand. Now, think of your own brand. Is it a great brand – or just OK? Is it clear who you are and what you stand for? Are you likeable and relevant to your target audiences?

Building a strong brand – one that really sells – is important. With each incremental visitor that you touch with your brand, you must ensure a great experience or you risk losing customers (and possibly even your reputation). With solid branding, the business results from your Search efforts will improve dramatically.

Mistake #2: Launching Search in a Silo
Some companies dive head-first into Search, believing it to be a magic pill. However, Search is a capture mechanism, and typically only serves as one step in the overall marketing funnel. If you ignore the other steps in the funnel, you’re probably going to under-perform, no matter how exceptional you are at Search Marketing execution.

In other words, even if your Search efforts are driving traffic, you still need to be a good marketer, period. Consider:
How are you building awareness?
How are you generating word-of-mouth?
Is your messaging attracting the right audience, at the right time?
Have you explored everywhere you need to be, online and offline?
Have you integrated your marketing across channels, vehicles and customer touchpoints?
Have you nailed the close – have you given potential customers every possible reason to select your company’s products or services?

Are you doing enough cross-selling, upselling and post-sale marketing…

Mistake #3: Launching Search with a Weak Website
Is your website the ugliest thing in the universe? Is it hard to navigate, with a frustrating “maze” of information? Is “inconsistency” the only thing that is consistent about your site? If so, it’s time for a site overhaul.

When assessing your site, look at your website’s conversion rate. If you need a microscope to find that number, you’re not ready for Search. Why invest money in driving traffic to a site that’s underperforming? Instead, first focus on conversion optimization, ensuring that you’re matching your visitors’ needs. Once you know that your design, messaging and calls-to-action will lead to boatloads of conversions, it’s a great opportunity to invest your time, energy and money on Search.

Remember, Search Marketing can drive a great deal of traffic to your site and conversions for your business. However, you need to first build the right platform for your Search initiatives so that campaign results will effectively propel your business forward.

By Tom Shapiro

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Google+ Reviewed

Posted by admin on September 5th, 2011
Illustration of Facebook mobile interface

Image via Wikipedia

By Jacob S Strandlien (c) 2011

Social networking has grown steadily in scope and importance over the last decade, and over the past few years, Facebook’s position as the top dog of social networking services has been solid and unquestioned. Enter Google+. Google’s attempts to step into the realm of social networking have been plentiful and almost undeniable failures, but Google+ is undoubtedly their strongest showing yet, and has the best chance of success. It is growing steadily in popularity, but how well does it work and what sets it apart from its competitors?

Social Networking, Google Style

Google has a long, tumultuous, and mostly unknown and ignored history with social networking. The following is a rundown of their previous attempts.

Orkut: As far as I am aware, this is Google’s earliest and (until now) most successful attempt at a social networking platform. It didn’t ever gained much popularity in the United States, but it is huge in Brazil to this day, and it also has a following in India and other various countries.

Open Social: Launched in 2007, it’s not technically a social network in and of itself. Open Social is Google and MySpace’s attempt to create a common programming interface that can be applied across several social networks, allowing programmers to easily integrate these networks into websites and other applications. This has largely been drowned out by Facebook.

Friend Connect: Launched in 2008, Friend Connect was Google’s next attempt at a Facebook or MySpace style social network, but it took the approach of using various open standards (including Open Social) to create this network across different types of accounts and websites. I had not even heard of it until I started researching for this article.

Google Lively: This was Google’s attempt to create Second Life style 3D environments that could be installed onto any website, where users could log in with their personas and interact with each other. It only lasted for a few months before it was discontinued in 2008.

Google Wave: This was a communications format that was intended to combine features from e-mail, message boards, and social networking schemes to enable a conversation-style information exchange (or wave) that could include various type of media added by various networked contributors. Google has basically abandoned the project, but it still exists under the name Apache Wave.

Google Buzz: A social network that has been integrated into Google’s e-mail service, Gmail, since 2010. It allows people to share information with one another in a social networking format right inside the Gmail interface. Ironically, Google Buzz has barely generated any buzz at all.

Circles

Circles are the core concept of Google+, and the key feature that sets it apart from its competitors. Anybody you wish to communicate with goes into one or more of your “circles”, or groups of people you know. You can have a circle of friends, a circle of co-workers, a circle of family members, etc, and nobody but you can see what circles you have or who is in them. Then when you write a status update, you also choose which circles to share it with. This makes privacy a breeze, a fact that sets Google+ firmly apart from Facebook, where privacy settings are terribly complex to manage and seem to change every few months. Even better, when you’re setting up your personal information in Google+, there is a place in every field to specify with which circles that information is shared. For example, I have my phone number set up to only be visible by friends and family, but I have my profession set to be visible by all my circles. It’s a snap. Then when you go to look at status updates that others have posted (which is in an interface similar to Facebook in basic appearance), you can filter the information by circles with just one click. It works extremely well, and you can color me impressed.

Hangouts

Another unique feature in Google+ is the concept of a hangout. A hangout is basically a video chat room, where you can invite friends and talk freely amongst each other. Webcams are becoming very widespread, and are even built into laptops and netbooks. It sounds great, but it is not without its setup. To even get started with hangouts, you are asked to download and install the “Google Voice and Video plugin”, and then you have to find a fríend who is on Google+ (and is in one of your circles) who is willing to do the same thing. However, once you’re done with all that, the streaming video seems to work flawlessly so long as you have a good internet connection. Even through the limited resources of a netbook, I didn’t run into any hiccups. Once again, I’m impressed.

Missing Features

With all of its clean look and smooth operation, there are some features that are conspicuously missing from Google+. Most notably as of the writing of this article, Google+ lacks any way to set up an account for a business or organization (called “Pages” on Facebook). In fact, Google is actively taking down standard user accounts that are set up for organizations. They claim that they are working on some sort of platform for business accounts, but demand is high, so they risk alienating new users if they take too long. Another conspicuously absent feature is a way of setting up an event, or any sort of calendar entry for that matter.

Conclusion

Google+ is definitely a top-quality effort by Google to break into the social networking field, but only time will tell whether it can topple Facebook from its position as top dog in the pack. For my money, though, it has a good chance. It doesn’t have all the features yet, but with its clean interface, simple no-brainer privacy, and fun methods of interaction, I highly recommend checking it out.

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