By now you’ve probably heard about Google+, the latest social networking craze and most recent effort by Google to take on Facebook and Twitter. But did you know that it could affect how your business’s website gets found on Google’s search engine?

In addition to building a social networking, Google aims, with its ‘+1′ button, the equivalent of Facebook’s ‘Like’ button, to determine the value of websites. They want consumers to add personalized recommendations to Web content and business sites.

More than 20 million people have already jumped onboard Google+ and many internet marketing professionals are beginning to wonder if those ‘+1′s will also start affecting how businesses appear in the search engine rankings.

Google+ has some remarkable similarities to Facebooks, utilities a similar suite of names for areas of the software, including ‘Hangouts’, ‘Circles’ or ‘Sparks’.

We have to assume at this stage that these ‘+1′s are likely to affect in some way the positions of sites within the search engine rankings. Only time will tell, either way, if you were to see recommendations against a certain site, how would that effect your decision process.

So how do you optimise for recommendations?

The more searching becomes about real people, the more we, as marketer, need to promote such recommendations in a natural a way as possible.

Watch this space…

The Agency, which is responsible for all QE Global marketing was commissioned to create a sales aid and information piece that could illustrate the credentials of LED lighting to an industry which currently uses a variety of lighting solutions.

Masters Allen Production Director Aidan Rooney says, ‘The fact that QE Global can now use a sales tool which provides instant results is great, but the icing-on-the-cake is that this information is now available globally. By using an app, we have increased our client’s brand awareness and enabled users to instantly see the benefits of LED lighting on their pocket and the environment.’

The QE Global energy saving calculator allows users to enter details of their existing light fittings, for example; hours of operation and cost of fittings, and then compare against a series of QE Global LED products. The results illustrate cost, energy and maintenance savings against existing products. An additional element to the brief was to allow users to compare non-QE Global products too, to provide both transparency and awareness of general LED products.

QE Global Managing Director Carl Haffner added, ‘Whilst this was an exercise to promote the benefits of QE Global products, we were also keen to open this up to a wider audience so they could see for themselves the benefits of LED lighting, not only with our products but any LED lighting products.’

The ‘QE Global energy saving calculator’ app is available as a free download from the Apple App Store. Plans to roll out the app on a number of different devices are already in progress.

With that in mind we thought some inspiration from Abraham Games would go down a storm. We’ve added several pictures around the halls which add colour, interest and an insider view into what makes us tick!

By simply opening your profile and selecting privacy settings from the ‘My Account’ tab at the top of the page you can view all your privacy settings immediately.

Setting your profile to”friends only” can stop your profile being shown on google and other search engines reducing the amount of information you share online. It’s certainly sensible these days to only add details to your social media profiles that you really don’t mind sharing with the world, as you never know, the world just might be looking.

For more information on Google Buzz read the Wall Street Journal site article which goes into great detail about the development of the new social networking competitor.

You guessed it, it is an automated response. Check out this link to find out how.

http://www.ehow.com/how_5842327_setup-twitter-autoresponder.html

How about that for efficiency!

Check out this video from the BBC. Interesting stuff:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8586008.stm

So what do this mean for the typical business owner? Well they suddenly need to think about how to put together an online marketing plan. Do you sign up to Facebook? What about online PR? Should you start Pay Par Click advertising or create a Banner Ad? What about Blogging, RSS or Feeds?

All of a sudden, an understanding of a variety of new technologies is critical to taking advantage of the online marketing opportunities. No longer can you simply write a new plan and then carry it out. You need to either take on an Online Marketing Manager or find a suitable company to manage it all for you. Outsourcing your online marketing might be the right way forward as you would be taking on the expertise of a number of specialists and at the same time, drastically reducing the monthly outgoings required.

Either way the new technologies cannot be ignored, perhaps the first step is to start talking to someone who can help to shape the online marketing plan and to focus on the right places online to start marketing.

Sadly it appears that the Rubitone is not intended to be a commercial product. Probably a few licencing issues. The original Rubik’s Cube is rumoured to have sold over 350 million cubes worldwide since its launch. Bit of a shame really, we could see the Rubitone easily outselling the Pantone mugs!

So, if you find yourself in a conundrum and you don’t want to run another algorithm, you could easily give your old Rubik’s Cube the Rubitone treatment with a few left over Pantone chips. In a colour of your choice of course.

Sticking with the iPhone, the iPhone apps continue to expand, there seems to be an app for almost anything now with over 50,000 available to download at the app store. The Apple WWDC conference in San Francisco was a perfect opportunity to show off the vast array on offer with a collection of cinema displays mounted together, each one crammed with app icons pulsating when purchased.

The youtube clip below illustrates the huge numbers of apps that are currently being downloaded.