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Join us Wednesday at 10PT/ 1ET for a Learn with Google webinar "Growing your Business and Engaging your Audience with Google+". In this webinar, we’ll provide a step-by-step guide for getting started on Google+. Topics will include new features, business success stories and best practices. Click here to register.

The Google+ platform provides a fresh canvas for building and strengthening your digital brand, tying into all the marketing you already do with Google. From launching a new product using Google+ pages to engaging with your community of enthusiasts over Hangouts, join our Learn with Google webinar this Thursday for a look at ways your company can build its brand using social. Sign up on our webinar page to attend: Building a Digital Brand with Google+ (Thurs, Dec 6, 10am PT / 1pm ET).

After the Hangout, we’ll host a live Q&A with members of the Google+ team to answer questions about building a brand with Google+. RSVP on the Google+ Event page and add your questions as comments on that page.

With more than 100 monthly million active Google+ users, the time is right to focus on building your digital brand presence via the platform. Google+ has seen a wealth of brands engaging with users in creative, interactive ways. In fact, brands created more than 1 million Google+ pages in just a few months. For instance:

• H&M: The retail clothing company, with more than 2 million Google+ followers, uses tailored content, images and video to bring its fashions and lifestyle to life on the platform. They’ve also utilized Ripples to identify their trendsetters and saw a 22% clickthrough rate boost after implementing social extensions in AdWords.

• Cadbury: The chocolate maker has reached a following of nearly 3 million users with a combination of creative posts, Hangouts on Air and even the launch of their Dairy Milk Bubbly bar. They’ve also installed the Google+ badge on the company’s web homepage, making it easy as chocolate to follow the brand.

Like the ideas here? Log on Thursday to learn more about how to create, capture and sustain demand for your brand using Google+. And if you’re going to miss this while you’re at SMX Social in Las Vegas next week, check back at the webinars page later for a recording of the webinar.

Posted by Becky Bowman, Google+ Marketing Team

Over the next few weeks, we’re offering five opportunities to learn more about Google+ for your business. We kick off with a Learn with Google Hangout on Air with bestselling author +Chris Brogan on November 5th at 10am PT / 1pm ET. Chris will cover tactics for successful social marketing and discuss his new book, “Google+ for Business: How Google's Social Network Changes Everything.” RSVP for the Hangout on the Google+ Event page.


 Learn Chris’s recipes for how to grow and engage your Google+ community to build your brand and drive your business’s visibility and conversions. Hear about Chris’s own experiences helping companies succeed in their content marketing and social projects. Chris Brogan is a New York Times bestselling author, CEO of Human Business Works, and advises companies on marketing, business strategy, communications and more. If you have a question for Chris, leave your question as a comment on the Google+ Event.  

Boost your success with Google+
Want to learn more about using Google+ for your business? Sign up for our Learn with Google webinars. Here are some great upcoming webinars to help you get the most out of social for your business:

• Social Media Best Practices for a Successful Holiday Season (Wed, Oct 31, 10am PT / 1pm ET)
• Social that Adds Up: Performance and Measurement (Thurs, Nov 8, 10am PT / 1pm ET)
• Supercharge your Social Media Initiatives with Video (Wed, Nov 14, 10am PT / 1pm ET)
• Building a Digital Brand with Google+ (Thurs, Dec 6, 10am PT / 1pm ET)

Posted by Lindsay Rumer, The Google+ Team 

(post wording updated 8/20/12 @ 5:00 ET)

Join social media power influencer +Lynette Young for a look at ways your business can kick start its presence on Google+ in a Learn with Google Hangout on August 23rd at 1pm EDT/10am PDT.
RSVP for the Hangout on our Google+ Event page. 


Companies big and small are using social media to interact with customers and build digital brands. Even if your business wasn’t an early adopter of social, Lynette will guide you through ways to kick start this channel with Google+. In this hangout, she’ll talk through examples of businesses using hangouts, pages and unique content to grow their audience. As a Learn with Google program, you’ll also hear lots of tips and strategies you can use to build a community from scratch on Google+.

Lynette Young is a digital media specialist helping entrepreneurs and businesses put social ideas into action. She is the founder of Women of Google+ and CEO of Purple Stripe Productions. Kari Clark of the Google+ Marketing team will moderate the conversation with Lynette and other social media specialists including:

• +Esteban Contreras from +Samsung
• +Kip Wetzel from +Comcast
• +Ricky Cadden from +RadioShack

We hope you can join us to begin using G+ for your business. If you have a question for the panel, leave your questions as a comment on our Google+ Event.

To get yourself geared up for the hangout, check out the two newest Google+ business case studies. Toyota Global has been engaging its Google+ community with content of the latest car models and a hangout with a Toyota engineer. By incorporating Google+ badges on its website and YouTube channel, the car manufacturer has grown to over one million followers. In the education space, ES Corporation is teaching English lessons in hangouts. Using social extensions, the business also saw a 46% increase in click-through rate on search ads.

Posted by Lindsay Rumer, Google+ for Business

Our goal at Google is to get you the most relevant results as quickly as possible. But relevance is about relationships as well as words on webpages. That’s why we recently started to include more information from people you know—stuff they’ve shared on Twitter, Flickr and other sites—in Google search results.

Today we’re taking that a step further, enabling you to share recommendations with the world right in Google’s search results. It’s called +1—the digital shorthand for “this is pretty cool.” To recommend something, all you have to do is click +1 on a webpage or ad you find useful. These +1’s will then start appearing in Google’s search results.

The +1 button will appear next to each search result

After pressing the +1 button, you have the option to undo the action immediately

Say, for example, you’re planning a winter trip to Tahoe, Calif. When you do a search, you may now see a +1 from your slalom-skiing aunt next to the result for a lodge in the area. Or if you’re looking for a new pasta recipe, we’ll show you +1’s from your culinary genius college roommate. And even if none of your friends are baristas or caffeine addicts, we may still show you how many people across the web have +1’d your local coffee shop.




The beauty of +1’s is their relevance—you get the right recommendations (because they come from people who matter to you), at the right time (when you are actually looking for information about that topic) and in the right format (your search results). For more information about +1, watch this video:




So how do we know which +1’s to show you? Like social search, we use many signals to identify the most useful recommendations, including things like the people you are already connected to through Google (your chat buddies and contacts, for example). Soon we may also incorporate other signals, such as your connections on sites like Twitter, to ensure your recommendations are as relevant as possible. If you want to know who you're connected to, and how, visit the “Social Circle and Content” section of the Google Dashboard.

To get started +1’ing the stuff you like, you’ll need to create a Google profile—or if you already have one, upgrade it. You can use your profile to see all of your +1’s in one place, and delete those you no longer want to recommend. To see +1’s in your Google search results you’ll need to be logged into your Google Account.

We’ll be slowly rolling out +1’s, starting in English on Google.com. If you can’t wait to start seeing +1’s, we’ll soon let you opt-in to the launch by visiting our experimental search site. Initially, +1’s will appear alongside search results and ads, but in the weeks ahead they’ll appear in many more places (including other Google products and sites across the web). If you’re an advertiser and want to learn more about how the +1 button works on search ads and websites, visit our AdWords blog.

We’re confident that +1, combined with all of the social content we’re now including in search, will mean even better, more relevant results than you get today.


Posted by Rob Spiro, Product Manager

Last week, YouTube and SEMPO hosted a social marketing panel, "How to run a successful social campaign," for SEMPO's San Francisco and Los Angeles working groups. The panel featured speakers from YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Athena East, and highlighted the unique products available to marketers, and best practices for executing measurable, impactful social advertising strategies.

Derek Gordon of Yield Software was there, and shared what he learned in his Mediapost Search Insider column.

Cross-posted from Agency Ad Solutions Blog

Posted by Heidi Spector, Google Retail Team

The retailers we talk to are all "interested" in social media, but they are often unsure of how to integrate it into their marketing or e-commerce initiatives. Today we'll look at a few examples of how retailers are using social.

Get "Buy" with a Little Help From Your Friends
My wife always wants a second opinion on purchases and shopping with friends gives her the instant feedback she craves. Is it the right color, fit, price point? Does the item connect to the occasion, the person or the season? As an online retailer, you might ask yourself what slice of the roughly 98% of your traffic that is not buying from you today is abandoning their purchase because they need a second opinion. Consumers say that word of mouth is still the number one influencer in their apparel (34.3%) and electronics (44.4%) purchases (Retail Advertising and Marketing Association/BIGresearch Study, November 2008). What we consider "word of mouth" has evolved to take on new forms - IM, email, mobile text messages and Facebook updates all represent the blurring reality that is word of mouth. For example, last week I bought a gift for my daughter by following a link a friend posted via Facebook. I never "talked" with my friend about the product, but rather used his experience as credibility to make the purchase. As retailers, you should be asking yourself how you can foster these kinds of interactions. TechCrunch highlights how Vans Shoes is using technology from their agency Fluid to improve conversion rates, by allowing Vans.com users to instantly request feedback from their Facebook friends and instant messaging buddy list. According to the article, "If you see an item you like while browsing a retail site, you can request feedback about a product from your friends by pushing information about the product (such as images from clothing, links to products, and movie clips) to your Facebook status update." I noticed other retailers like Zales.com incorporate this functionality within their customer reviews. This is not necessarily revolutionary given that social features like "email to a friend" have been around for some time, but it certainly dovetails nicely with the utility and popularity of tools like Facebook and instant messaging.


Twitter Service, Twitter Deals, Twinkle
Do you have a new product to announce, a promotional offer, or are you temporarily out of stock of a popular item? All of these issues are great use cases for maintaining a Twitter account. NoTurnOnRed.org has aggregated Twitter feeds from multiple retailers so you can see what they are doing (examples include American Apparel, Diane Von Furstenberg, Zappos, Home Depot, etc.). In addition, Google just announced the availability of a new Twitter ad format, allowing marketers to take their tweets (Twitter messages) and target them to useful audiences on our content network. You can learn about how Intuit used this unit during tax season here. Twitter users are often mobile since the service easily connects to phones and the nature of tweets are only 140 characters, easily read via a mobile text message. In thinking about mobile and Twitter, I came across a service called Twinkle, which works in conjunction with Twitter, that would allow retailers to send tweets to audiences that are traveling anywhere from 1 to 1000 miles from their store locations (Note that service only supports the iPhone and iPhone touch - demo video is here ). Imagine a luxury or electronics retailer in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles looking to communicate a store event with the hundreds or possibly thousands of iPhone/iPod Touch users looming around their stores. If you want to read about more great Twitter tools that are possible for your website, here is a good Top 10 List. Also, here are two shameless plugs to see how Google is using Twitter, http://twitter.com/google, and how the Google Retail team is using Twitter - http://twitter.com/googleretail.


Overwhelmed by the Latest Social Media Buzzwords and Trends? Start with Customer Reviews
The most basic and perhaps highest impact "social app" is one that has been around for awhile - product ratings and reviews on your retail site. I am amazed at how few major retailers employ this technology and I keep hearing about the obvious benefits to conversion rate and quality assurance for retailers that do. According to a recent survey from Avail Intelligence, "over 36% of respondents rated recommendations, reviews and customer generated wish lists as the most useful aspect of an internet shopping site." Many of you may have noticed that Apple has been running both print and TV ad campaigns around particular themes related to applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch ("apps" for students, small businesses, etc.). As an iPhone user, I was taken with a print ad about saving money. There were two apps that sounded interesting to me so I went to the App Store on my iPhone and looked them up. Both applications had customer reviews of under 3 out of a possible 5 and the comments were on balance negative and well articulated, so much so that I immediately pulled back from spending the $0.99 on one app. You can call me cheap, but customers were questioning privacy controls associated with this particular app and I wasn't willing to risk a dollar in exchange for putting personal data at risk. I applaud Apple for being one of the poster children for customer reviews and trust Apple because the shopping experience on their site was implicitly transparent. They provided an honest forum, I felt more informed, and I will absolutely continue to shop their store in the future. For any retailer, the fundamental question has to be, how can we serve our customers better and more profitably? Customer reviews provide a treasure trove of data for you to become more informed about quality issues or service issues. Complaints are a fact of life in any business, especially in retail, but what customers judge you on is how you respond to them when there's a screw up. Customer reviews represent a fantastic opportunity for you to be more nimble and responsive in an increasingly competitive environment.

Posted by Brian McDevitt, the Google Retail Team