MackCollier.com

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Sunday’s #Blogchat topic – How to Respond to Negative Comments

Tonight’s (Sunday) #Blogchat topic will be How to Respond to Negative Comments, and we’ll be joined by TWO special co-hosts!  Helping us learn how to handle negative blog comments will be Bazaarvoice’s Chief Marketing Officer, Erin Nelson plus Bazaarvoice’s Social Media Manager Ian Greenleigh!  Please click the links to follow both of them on Twitter, and click here to follow them on Bazaarvoice’s blog!

As you know when we have co-hosts, we try to have more structure to the topic, and here’s how our discussion will unfold tonight:

1 – 8:00pm Central when #Blogchat starts, discuss what’s the best response to a negative comment.  How should you handle it, what tone to use, what to address, etc.

2 – 8:20pm we’ll discuss WHO should respond to a negative comment.  Should it be the bloggers, or is there circumstances where the blogger should route the complaint to an internal SME, etc?

3 – 8:40pm we’ll close by talking about if there are any situations where a blogging company should NOT address a negative comment?  What if the commenter is a ‘troll’ and purposely attacking the company?

So that’s the structure for our #Blogchat tonight!  And to help you prep for tonight, here’s a link to a post I ran last year where I shared some information that Bazaarvoice has found on the value of negative comments and reviews.  It was one of the most popular posts here last year and has some fascinating revelations!

See everyone at 8pm, Central!

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A Tale of Two Cities, And Their Aquariums

This post originally appeared on BMA on November 30th, 2005.  If you would like to read all the posts in the BMA series, click here.

Bernie Marcus can’t stop smiling.

The Home Depot founder is beaming as he enjoys the $250 million dollar gift he’s given the city of Atlanta, the newly opened Georgia Aquarium. And he’s not the only one to have visited the world’s largest aquarium. The aquarium was expecting 10,000 visitors for its opening day last wednesday, and officials believe they beat that number. Two million people were forecast to enjoy the attraction next year, and the aquarium may revise that number upwards as well.

The aquarium is the centerpiece of the city’s plan to reinvigorate Atlanta’s tourism efforts. “Atlanta has never been a major tourist destination,” Marcus says, “because there’s never been a major draw.” Marcus feels the Georgia Aquarium could become that ‘must-see’ destination that will turn on the tourism pipeline that city officials are hoping to develop.

Many experts are betting the addition of the world’s largest aquarium will be the magic bullet that the city has been looking for. And that has Atlanta’s city leaders very happy.

But 2 hours to the north, another city and their leaders are casting a very concerned eye to the south. While Atlanta is hoping the Georgia Aquarium will boost the city’s tourism dollars, the stakes are much higher for Chattanooga, where theTennessee Aquarium has literally reinvented the city. Once labelled as ‘America’s dirtiest city’ by former CBS anchor Walter Cronkite, the aquarium began a renassiance for the city when it was opened in 1992. Since that time, over 100 shops and restaurants have sprung up surrounding the aquarium, shifting the city’s image from being dirty, to being one of the nation’s cleanest and friendliest.

And it’s that image that the Tennessee Aquarium thinks will be its best weapon against the Atlanta Aquarium. While Chattanooga can point to the clean and friendly atmosphere downtown, these are the exact qualities that many visitors say Atlanta’s downtown area lacks. And these assertions weren’t lost on Marcus, who campaigned vigorously to end ‘aggressive’ panhandling by the homeless downtown, even to the dismay of some city officials.

Of course there’s also the costs to consider. A one-day pass for a family of 4 would cost you $57.90 at the Tennessee Aquarium, and $89.50 at the Georgia Aquarium. Add parking and you approach $100 for the day.

Still, it may not matter. The city will be bringing in several high-profile events to the downtown area, such as hosting the Sugar Bowl this year, the World of Coke exhibit, and starting in 2007, the city will host the NASCAR Hall of Fame. The city is hoping that it can bring in so many popular attractions that visitors will overlook the cost and atmosphere, to experience the area.

With the Tennessee Aquarium claiming that 25% of their current visitors come from the Atlanta area, the success of the Georgia Aquarium, and Atlanta’s ability to change its downtown image, could eventually decide the fates of both cities. For now, city leaders in both areas will have to play a very nervous game of ‘wait and see’. Rick Nall, VP Marketing, Chattanooga Convention and Visitors Bureau: “I feel like, and I feel like many others in the community feel like- probably the (Georgia) aquarium will have some impact, we just don’t know what it is.”

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How to Measure the Success of Your Blogging Strategy

Quick: What’s the goal of your blog?

You can probably answer that pretty quickly.  Maybe you want to build awareness, or establish thought leadership.  Or maybe you want to generate leads or sales.  Or use it as a customer service platform.

Now comes the stumper: How do you measure the success of your blogging strategy?

This is where most blogging companies trip up.  They know WHAT they want to accomplish with their blog (more awareness! more leads!), but they don’t know how to measure if their efforts are successful.

And here’s the ‘bad’ news: It’s not always easy to determine if your blogging efforts are working, but it’s worth making the effort to try to figure it out.

Let’s take a very simple example, a company that’s blogging strategy is to use the blog to build its awareness.  If you ask this company how it judges if its blog is ‘working’, it would probably say that it looks at the number of comments it is getting.

On the surface, this makes sense.  If a blog is getting a lot of comments, a lot of people must be aware of it, right?  But what happens if everyone comes to that blog, leaves a comment, and…..that’s it?  So every new post has a lot of comments, but how will more comments alone raise the awareness of the blog?  To a degree, it will.  Because as people leave more comments, they will generate more visits, and more pageviews, etc.

But while the company wants people to leave comments, they would also love if these people would also share the post with their networks.  Ah-ha….so now we have TWO ways to measure success: Number of comments, and number of times the post is shared. The sharing could be ReTweets, it could be Facebook Shares, Stumbles, etc.

Which then opens another can of worms, WHICH method of sharing is preferred?  Let’s say your company isn’t really active on Facebook or StumbleUpon, but you are on Twitter.  So for your company, you’d prefer RTs over Stumbles or Facebook Shares.

So now we have two ways to measure the success of our strategy to use our blog as an awareness-building tool:  Number of comments, and number of ReTweets.

But wait a minute…you know, it’s great when people comment on your blog, and you love it when they RT your posts.  But it almost seems like a waste to have them do that, and then leave your blog without taking something with them.  What if you offered free white-papers for download?  Those would benefit your readers, PLUS help establish your authority and thought leadership, which would prompt your readers to share the white-paper with their networks, which would boost your awareness!

So now we have THREE ways to measure the success of our strategy to use our blog to build awareness of our company:

1 – Number of comments

2 – Number of RTs

3 – Number of downloads of our white-papers

Now we’re getting somewhere!  The next step is to prioritize these actions.  If you could only have a visitor perform one of the above three actions, what would it be?  You would probably say you’d want your readers to download your white-paper, followed by RT your post, then comment on your post.

So then the most important success indicator for your blog is number of white-paper downloads, followed by number of RTs, and number of comments.  With these goals in mind, you then need to think about how you not only create content that moves readers toward performing these actions, but how you organize your blog as well.  And your calls to action!

But that’s a post for another day, as I don’t want to bog you down with too much.  The point is, when we started, the only way we knew to measure the success of our blogging strategy was to ‘get more comments’.  Now we have THREE different metrics that we can measure, and we have those metrics prioritized.  From this, we can continue to flesh out our measurement process and make it more effective.

So when the boss asks if the blog is working as an awareness-building tool for the company, which answer is better:

1 – “I think so, we get comments on almost every post!”

or….

2 – “Absolutely! Comments are up 23% over the previous quarter, RTs on Twitter are up 37%. Additionally, we had 237 downloads of our white-paper last month on the blog, a 12% conversion rate!”

I know who I would be giving a raise to! 😉  When you are trying to measure the success of your blog, give some thought to the actions that you want readers to take on your blog, then find metrics that tie back to those actions, and measure them.  That will also help you create content and an experience that encourages the type of behavior/actions that you want your readers to engage in.

But it all starts with rolling up your sleeves and putting some actual thought into what a successful blogging strategy is for your company.  It will take a lot of work, a ton of trial and error, but it’s worth it.

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The Three Pillars of Modern Customer Communication

My first recollections of getting ‘online’ are in the late 1980s, and local electronic BBSes (Bulletin Board Systems).  These were basically where someone would turn their computer into a network where others could call into it with a modem, and we could chat with each other, post messages, etc.  Extremely basic functionality, ‘graphics’, etc, and again, reserved to a very small local packet of people.  The great thing about BBSes was you got to meet local people, and we’d occasionally have ‘meetups’ which of course was the forerunner to the Tweetups we have today.

As the late 80s turned into the early 90s, those BBSes started linking to one another.  I could get on one BBS, and go to a special forum and see messages from another BBS in Denver.  Then the messages we were leaving there, would be sent to the BBS in Denver.  So a very crude form of online communication and network beyond just the one BBS was developing.  Of course, CompuServe had been around since the early 80s, and then Prodigy in the early 90s, and of course AOL in the mid 90s.  These ‘online services’ marked a way for people around the country, and even around the globe, to more easily connect with each other.  The internet itself was becoming more widely used, and websites started popping up like Kudzu in the South.

Which began to mark a change in how people got their information.  No longer did you have to watch CNN to get the latest news, now you could go directly to CNN’s website and get the latest news at a time that was convenient to you.  So as such, we began to talk about news, events, and companies online.  We still didn’t have the best tools to organize and connect with each other, but still, word of mouth was no longer reserved for the offline world only.

Then around a decade or so ago, blogs started popping up among the early adopters.  By 2004 and 2005, blogs were becoming more well-known, and growing in popularity by leaps and bounds.  By 2007, Technorati was tracking over 70 million blogs.  In 2006 we got YouTube and Twitter, and a year later the ‘social media kids’ discovered a social networking site that had already been popular on college campuses for a few years called ‘Facebook’.

As social media tools gave us the ability to quickly and easily create and distribute online content, we began to hear a debate about which was more important: online ‘word of mouse’, or offline word of mouth?  The ‘social media’ camp often argues that social media is the ‘wave of the future’, and that every is headed online.  The people that favor offline word of mouth will point to studies that suggest that 90% of word of mouth still happens offline, and that it trumps social media.

To me, this debate over which is ‘better’, ‘word of mouse’ or ‘word of mouth’ misses two key points:

1 – Both online and offline conversations and experiences feed INTO each other.  Look at your own experiences: How often have you been with friends and discussed something you read online?  Or how often have you gone on a trip, and taken a ton of pictures that you shared with your friends on Facebook as soon as you got home?  The line between our offline and online experiences is blurring.  We can no longer separate the content and conversations we have online with those we have offline.  For most of us, they are feeding into each other, and as a result, both our online and offline activities are richer.

2 – Mobile is greatly accelerating the blurring between online and offline.  Remember the title of this post is the THREE pillars of modern customer communication?  Mobile is the third pillar.  Think about what’s on your smartphone, on mine right now I have an app that lets me access Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, even my WordPress blog if I want.  Add in a camera, a video player, and I have all the tools necessary to link the online content that I and others create, to the offline world that I am in right now.  Note above how I mentioned you could take pictures from a trip then upload them to Flickr when you get back home?  With the proper mobile device, you can cut out the middle man, and take pictures right there, and immediately upload them straight to Twitter or Facebook, all from your smartphone.

The line between what is our offline and our online experiences is blurring and will soon disappear.  It’s pointless to think about which one of these three is the most important, as each is feeding into the other.

Look at this picture.  In terms of this post, Online or Social Media would be the locomotive.  It pulls the load behind it, which is Offline Word of Mouth.  Sometimes the load gets enough momentum that it can even push the locomotive.  They both work together.  But the tracks are mobile.  Mobile makes it much easier for the locomotive to pull the load, and for the load to move because it has the nice smooth tracks under it, instead of a rocky and uneven terrain.

All three work together to create something bigger than the individual parts.  Your company has to understand that your customers are likely going to use all three channels to get, share, create, and distribute content.  There’s no ‘winner’ among these three, they are all on the same team.

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Disney Cautious in Marketing The Chronicles of Narnia

This post originally appeared on BMA on October 30, 2005.  As a sidenote, this is probably my favorite blog post I’ve ever written.  If you would like to read all the posts in the BMA series, click here.

Paul Lauer has been down this road before.

His company, Motive Marketing, has been tabbed to organize and execute a faith-based marketing intiative for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. He performed a similar role for Mel Gibson’s The Passion of The Christ, orchestrating a church-based marketing campaign that helped make The Passion one of the highest grossing movies of all time.

For Narnia, he will perform a similar role, again reaching out to churches and designing ways for pastors to incorporate the Christian themes of Narnia into their teachings. Embracing churches was so successful for The Passion that many pastors actively encouraged their churches to see the movie as soon as it came out, creating enormous pre-release hype for the film. Disney hopes for a similar buzz leading up to the release of Narnia.

Lauer’s job should be even easier for Narnia, since the story behind C.S. Lewis’ classic is geared more toward children, meaning it will appeal to the entire family. But while Lauer’s task should be easier, the line between too much and not enough emphasis on Narnia’s Christian themes will be harder to navigate for Disney when marketing the film to the public.

With The Passion, the religious meanings were obvious. However, Narnia can either be presented as a straightforward fairy tale, or as a story inspired by the teachings of the Bible. “Many people put churchgoers and Hollywood on the opposite sides of the equation,” said Lauer. “But churchgoers are hungry for movies reflecting strong values — like ‘Narnia.”

Churchgoers, however, won’t be the only people seeing Narnia. And the question for Disney is will they risk alienating churchgoers by not emphasizing the Christian themes of Narnia, or would they offend the public by embracing the Christian symbolism of the story?

And it’s a huge gamble for Disney, as they have so much riding on the success of Narnia. With the studio in desperate need of a hit release, a solid showing for Narnia would also open the doors for a movie franchise that could rival that of the Lord of the Rings, or Harry Potter. It’s an opportunity that Disney is fully aware of.

“Everyone has his own take on the book, to which the movie is faithful,” said Disney’s VP of Publicity, Dennis Rice. “Rather than embracing any interpretation, we’re remaining neutral, adopting the Switzerland approach.”

Disney has also enlisted the aid of Lewis’ stepson Douglas Gresham, to make sure the film is faithful to his stepfather’s vision of Narnia.

“We never set out to make a ‘Christian’ movie,” said Gresham. “The book taps different veins in different people. If we overstressed what little symbolism there is, we would have thrown away the project.”

Which seems to be the correct path for Disney to take in promoting The Chronicles of Narnia. In writing The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Lewis’(a devout Christian) was wise enough to put the spiritual undertones of the story in plain sight, yet never forced them on the reader. Wisely, Disney seems to be taking the same approach in bringing Aslan and the White Witch to the big screen.

“This is a huge roll of the dice … ,” said “Narnia” producer Mark Johnson. “But the payoff could be enormous.”

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Want me to speak at your event plus hold a LIVE #Blogchat?

Almost ready to start the LIVE #Blogchat at the Marketing Profs B2B Forum

In the past few months (really ever since SXSW) I’ve heard from many event organizers that they were interested in having  a LIVE #Blogchat added to their agenda.  And as you can see here, there’s currently four LIVE #Blogchats scheduled for the remainder of 2011.

Now as I am working with event organizers to bring a LIVE #Blogchat there, I am facing two issues:

1 – A lot of event organizers know of #Blogchat on Twitter, but aren’t sure what a LIVE version of the chat would look like.  They aren’t sure exactly what they are getting.

2 – Both at SXSW, and at the B2B Forum last month, when the LIVE #Blogchat was done, I really wish I had spoken at the event as well.

So in order to potentially address both these issues, I wanted to offer a ‘package’ deal to event organizers.  For the fee of $7,500.00 (not including travel), I will not only speak at your event (a 1-hour session), but I will also participate on a 1-hour panel, and we’ll do a LIVE #Blogchat as well.  That’s roughly a 25% discount over what I would charge to do each individually.  Now I can only offer three packages at this rate, one for August, one for October, and one for November.  So if you have an event scheduled for those months, please let me know and we’ll see if we can get something scheduled.

Now this doesn’t have to be a conference, it could also be a company event, in a couple of weeks I will be in Austin at Dell’s #DellCAP event, and we’ll be doing a LIVE #Blogchat as part of it.  Maybe you have a company or private industry event that you think this package would be a good fit for.

So I wanted to throw this out there and see what happens.  And as of right now, I’m not planning on doing any LIVE #Blogchats in December or January.  I do want to do one next year at SXSW in March, and possibly one in February, but I’ll just have too much going on at the end of the year to plan many speaking trips.

Again, the offer is I’ll speak at your event (up to 1-hour session), I will also be a panelist in another 1-hour session, plus we’ll hold a LIVE #Blogchat at your event, all for $7,500.00 plus travel (flight, hotel, cabs, food).  I can only offer three slots at this price, one for August, one for October, and one for November.  When these slots are reserved via a deposit, they come off the board.  And I’ll update this post to reflect that.  Please email me to secure one of these spots.

Also, if are only interested in having me speak at your event, or only interested in having a LIVE #Blogchat, of course we can talk about that, please email me and I’ll see what we can work out!

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How to Add Google +1 Button to Your WordPress Blog and Track Social Media Engagement With Google Analytics

Now that everyone is rushing to get into Google Plus, you are going to see a lot more sites and blogs adding the +1 button.  I added it here last week, and the process is easy as pie.  It’s done via a plugin, here is the page for the one I used.  You can either go to that page and download the plugin then upload it manually, or go to the Plugins area of your WordPress dashboard, and search for it Google +1 Button and that should bring it up.  Pretty sure this is for WordPress.org only.

Something else that got kinda lost in the shuffle with everyone rushing to get onto Plus was that Google Analytics is now tracking social media engagement levels!  If you are already set up with a Google Analytics account, you’ll need to make sure you are using the New version, look at the top of your screen and there should be a link to Switch to the New Version.  You want to click that, because the new version of GA has some extra functionality, including measuring social media engagement.

When you get in, then click Visitors, and you’ll see a few new options, including Social.  When you click it, then you’ll see options to track Engagement, Action and Pages.  Now if you have installed the Google +1 plugin above, then GA will automagically start showing you how many clicks your Google +1 buttons are getting, how many page views, time spent on site, etc.  When you click on Engagement, it will show you your traffic for the last month, then the amount of traffic that was Not Socially Engaged, and Socially Engaged.  Here’s a screenshot of what mine looks like now:

Yeah I know, nothing to write home about yet 😉  But as I get a lot more data in, I can see how the usage of people that click the Google +1 button compares to other site users.  And the great thing about this report is that it can also track engagement levels with Tweets, Facebook Likes, Facebook Shares, and I believe even when posts are Stumbled!  The bad news is, that can’t be done via a plugin (yet), those can only be added via coding that I do NOT want to touch yet.  If you are adventureous, here’s some tutorials on how you can add this functionality.  I did note that Google is asking plugin developers to start updating their plugins so that it will add tracking functionality automagically, similar to how the Google +1 Button works.  So my guess is that these plugins that we are now using to add ReTweet and Facebook Like buttons to our blogs will soon offer this, so I’m going to wait a bit before I try to add it myself and break my blog 😉

So there you go!  If you were wanting to add Google +1 buttons to your blog, the above plugin will do it for you, then once you have it installed, you can start tracking how many clicks you’re getting and other forms of engagement with the new version of Google Analytics.  Let me know what you think!

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#Blogchat this Sunday will be co-hosted by Dell’s Chief Blogger Lionel Menchaca!

Lionel being interviewed at #Blogchat LIVE at SXSW as Chris Heuer and Susan Beebe look on

I’m not sure how long the list is of people that have been blogging for the same company for FIVE years, but I’m guessing it’s pretty damn short.  But Lionel Menchaca is on it, and for the last five years, he has served as Dell’s Chief Blogger.  And this Sunday, he’ll also be returning to co-host #Blogchat for the second time!

Dell’s social media transformation has been nothing short of remarkable, from Dell Hell and exploding laptops in 2005 and 2006, to today being lauded for its progressive approach to using social media to connect with its customers.

And for the last 5 years, Dell’s blogging efforts have been at the forefront of its social media success, and I’m tickled pink that Lionel has agreed to join us at #Blogchat this Sunday!

Sunday’s #Blogchat topic will be How to Create and Maintain a Successful Corporate Blogging Strategy.  As we normally do with co-hosts, the flow of the conversation will be segmented into different sub-topics:

1 – At 8pm Central, we will begin #Blogchat by discussing this point – How do you sustain a blogging strategy for years, and how do you keep the blog relevant with your readers and customers?

2 – At 8:20pm, we’ll begin discussing this point – How do you find writers for your blog, and how do you keep them motivated to keep blogging for you?

3 – At 8:40pm, we’ll close by discussing this point – How do you create relevant content for your blog and how do you decide what content your readers are interested in?

So if you have any questions for Lionel, think about which of the above areas would be most appropriate, and please ask it then.  This #Blogchat will be sponsored by Dell, and that leads me to another surprise for y’all:

In a couple of weeks I will be in Austin working with Dell on a #DellCAP project (disc – Dell is a client).  But while I’m in town, we decided to do a LIVE #Blogchat! The Live #Blogchat will be Monday, July the 18th at the Westin Domain, with the meetup starting at 6pm, the actual #Blogchat will start at 7pm.  I will set up a signup page soon, and when I have that I’ll add a link here.  The event will be open to #DellCAP attendees plus about 30 people from the Austin area.  So I can’t wait to see all my Austin friends again!

So if you’ll be joining #Blogchat on Sunday, make SURE you are following Lionel on Twitter, and you can also check out Dell’s main blog, Direct2Dell.

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I am officially a social media packrat

And two events clearly illustrated this for me yesterday:

1 – I went to ManageFlitter.com to see how many people I am following that aren’t following me.  I was following almost 3,000 people that were NOT following me.  This really worried me because the main reason I use Twitter is as a way to connect with others and have conversations with them.  By following those 3,000 people that have no interest in seeing my tweets, it’s making it far more difficult for me to connect with the people that DO want to chat with me.  I don’t like that.

2 – I have about 600 people in my Circles in Google Plus.  I started looking at the people I have in my circles and realized that half of them I didn’t have the faintest idea who they were.  I’ve already lost control of my network on Plus after less than a week!

One of the things I have constantly wrestled with was how to scale as the size of my networks grow on these social media sites.  I have always been really strict about who I follow on Facebook, and even now I only have about 600 friends and have been there about 3 years.  But on Twitter I follow over 16K people.  I’ve always wondered in a rush to expand our networks, if we aren’t really stifling our ability to actually connect with people.

So I’ve decided to do a bit of an experiment.  On Plus I am going to be super-picky who I follow, and only follow people that are close friends and/or people I know and have met in real life.  Complete contrast to how I manage followers on Twitter.

The idea is to test two different approaches: Is it better to try to have mostly platonic connections with thousands of people like I do on Twitter (with the hope that some might develop into deeper connections), or have deeper connections with only a few people, and let your network grow only by bringing in closer connections, like I have on Plus.

Man this social media stuff can get complicated!  How do y’all manage your online networks?  Do you have different approaches for different sites?  Am really fascinated in how we scale (or attempt to scale!) our ability to communicate online.

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Should Your Business Be On Google Plus? Here’s the Quick and Easy Way to Decide

If you actively use social media, then you’ve probably seen a lot of people chattering about Google Plus over the last week or so.  A ton of invites went out, and a lot of people got their first look at Google’s newest social networking site.  After playing around with it for a few days, I can definitely see why a lot of Facebook users may want to migrate over.

However, does this mean that YOUR BUSINESS should be on Google Plus?  As always, there are two basic questions you need to ask yourself in order to decide:

1 – Will being on Google Plus help me better connect with my customers?

2 – Will being on Google Plus help my employees better connect with each other?

Those are the two main questions you need to ask.  If you can’t answer a ‘yes’ to either of those questions, then your business probably shouldn’t make the jump to Google Plus.  At least not yet.

You should also remember that the current buzz around Google Plus is being driven almost entirely by social media early adopters.  We are the geeky types that always want to try out the newest and the shiniest.  Remember a few months ago when you were suddenly hearing all this buzz about Quora and Empire Avenue?  Yep, that was us as well.

Now this is NOT to say that you should dismiss Google Plus.  I think you should absolutely familiarize yourself with the site and the available functionality.  For one, the ability to do Hangouts would be a great way for employees to connect, especially if they are working virtually.  And you need to understand that this product is NOT available to everyone.  Because it still has a lot of bugs that are being worked out, and new functionality will be implemented.  And we still aren’t sure exactly what impact content created there will have on search results.  There’s still a lot that’s up in the air at this point on many fronts.

So don’t think you need to do a cannonball into Google Plus just yet.  My advice would be to read up on the site and what it offers users, then when you get an invite, play with it a bit and see what you think.  I will be doing a more in-depth review of Plus once I’ve spent enough time with it to better understand what it offers.

If you are using Google Plus now, what potential impact do you see for businesses there?