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Social networking tools such as Google+ enable you to be the best digital shopkeeper in the world. You can wander out of your perfect shop (your primary website) and onto the “sidewalk” (social networks), where you can interact with people who might consider your product or service for their own needs. Your goal is to connect with those people where they are, on their pages, on their own sites, and, if conversations go well, to invite them back to interact with your business page, as if you’ve handed them an interesting, engaging, and interactive business card.

The opportunities to do interesting business here are vast. You should start early, practice often, and see what works. And in one final note, realize that by starting a business page, you should have in place a crisis plan, a few legal possibilities considered, a policy about how to interact with competitors, and many more bits of social business governance. The number one problem with social network business presence is a lack of rough guidelines and plans for what to do with the space and how to respond to the outlier issues that can arise.

Use these pages well, and you can build another great tool to help your company amplify the human digital channel. By building an outpost on Google+, you can potentially increase search rankings, participate with thoughtful users, and use the multitude of tools available to illuminate a new view of your business for your customers and prospects to see.

13. Feeling Lucky?

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It’s important to start this chapter by explaining that I’m not an expert in search. I understand the value of search. I know enough about it that I don’t make the big mistakes that one can make when constructing a website (no all-Flash sites, for instance). But I also know enough to realize that what Google+ offers you for business above any other opportunity is the chance to improve your search results because Google indexes the publicly shared content you create on Google+.

That means when you post something on Google+ about “How to Pick a Home Improvement Contractor,” and the information has lots of great advice that gets shared with people who are interested in this material (and somewhere it has a link back to your site), you can potentially start to see the benefits of that sooner than later. Because Google is actively patrolling Google+ for interesting content that others might want to find via search, you have the chance to get information that’s useful to your type of buyer out to the world.

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Neither Facebook, Twitter, nor LinkedIn make it easy for Google to do this, by the way. Google no longer indexes Twitter, and it never had access to information inside of Facebook. Because more people use Google to search the web for information than any other search engine, if you do the majority of your online business marketing inside of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, you miss the potential to reach people who use Google to find you.

This isn’t to say that Google+ is all you need to improve your search rankings. If you spend money on a search engine optimization (SEO) already, you won’t necessarily be able to cut that budget and just throw a few posts together for Google+. However, spending money simply on SEO without working on organic search value is a waste of money. It is like buying vitamins and protein supplements but then never exercising or eating well. You have to do the hard work to make the supplemental work mean anything.

Home Bases, Outposts, and Search

A fear is that Google+ search results might trump your own website’s search rankings. When you Google “chris brogan,” you can see my Google+ page come up in the ranks, encroaching on my own site, chrisbrogan.com. In my case, it’s not terribly significant because I make it easy for people to contact me. But if your home base is a site that converts people to buy your product, you probably don’t want Google+ to creep up in the ranks against you.

One way to keep your primary website