You might notice as you setup your business page on Google+  that you don’t have to verify you’re the business owner. Google Places requires telephone verification to ensure ownership of the business but this wasn’t included in Google+.

Why? Great question. I think we’d all like to know.

This means that ‘name squatting’ is entirely possible on Google+ unless you’re a global brand (and Google likes you). The only recourse at this time is to go ahead and create an ‘official’ presence for your business on Google+ by creating a company page.

Google has made it easy to create a business page by giving us a wizard style tool. Even though there are a few screens, it’s really just a two-step process asking for very basic information. Creating your business page on Google+ will only take you about 5 minutes.

Before you start…

You’ll need to decide if you’d like to be listed as a ‘Local Business or Place’ or as a company before you make your page. The only difference I discovered is that a ‘Local Business or Place’ links the page to a Google Place page and requires the business phone number. Creating a ‘Company’ page does not link a Google Place page and requires a website address for the business to get started.

Now, just follow these two steps.

1. Pick a Gmail account & login

Claiming your brand or business page on Google+ requires a Google account. If you don’t have one, you’ll need to create a Google account.

2. Create the Page

Visit http://plus.google.com/pages/create to make your page. Before you begin, you will need to decide if you’d like to be a ‘Local Business or Place’ or a ‘Company, Institution or Organization’.

When I elected our company to be a ‘Local Business’, our Google Place page turned up in the search results. I chose our Google Place page and it was linked to the new Google+ page (confused by the naming scheme yet?). If you don’t have a Google Place page, you’ll be prompted for the information to create one.

Creating a page is quick and simple, no matter which choice you make, due the wizard style process. You’ll add relevant information about your company like the company tagline, logo, etc. The process is straight-forward and self-explanatory. A lot of the information is optional. So, if you don’t have a copy of your logo handy — this can be done later.

The last page of the setup process prompts you to promote the page. If you’re electing to come back to this later, wait to promote the page. You can always do this later.

Now, you can integrate it into your marketing mix as it makes sense. When you decide to integrate Google+ into your marketing, be sure to checkout options for integrating Google+ into your website & blog including the badges. Giving people the ability to share content via Google+ will create more visibility for your business.

Post Automation

We haven’t yet seen tools that let you automatically post to the page like other social networks. Google just recently released an API for Google+ so we’re expecting to see post automation solutions soon.

Finding Your Google+ Pages

A couple of weeks after you make your page, you might find yourself wondering how to locate it in Google+ (like I did). In the left sidebar, you’ll see a drop-down that lists your pages. When you click on the page name, posts are made from the page instead of you.

Assigning Page Admins

Google+ now supports multiple admins for pages. You can add other profile managers, if needed, using their email address. This is found under ‘settings’.

Deleting a Google+ Page

Of course, you can always back out of the whole deal and delete your page.

Do you know the top 3 metrics to measure?

For most companies, the website’s highest purpose is to bring sales leads. If it’s not performing on this task, take a look at the following top three metrics for success.

• Total number of website visitors vs. visitors that become leads or buyers
• Close rate of sales leads
• Average order value

The number of metrics available for a website is daunting and trying to track all those numbers will distract you from real success. Instead, narrow your focus to metrics that will drive the business forward.

Is your website bringing more customers to your door?

By using the metrics mentioned, you can easily track the performance of your website and overall Web presence. If your metrics are trending downward, what is driving the change?

If traffic is at expected norms but interactions are down, you may want to review and update the product descriptions or offers on your website. If traffic has decreased, where are your previous visitors going? You may find you have a new competitor, visitors are finding more relevant content somewhere else online or your online market space has changed.

Are You Falling Behind?

When was the last time you reviewed your online competitors? The online marketplace changes quickly. It’s smart to complete this every 4 to 6 months or when your metrics significantly change. One way to do a competitive review is to search on your most valuable keywords and review both the search results and advertisements. You may discover new competitors or that existing competitors are gaining ground.

Unfortunately, it isn’t currently possible to legally collect this information using any web tracking software. Worse still, the anonymous data that can be legally collected about your web visitors does not reveal much in the way of identification.

This is because most web tracking software uses an IP address to look up contact information for prospective leads. An IP address is a number that identifies the network a visitor is coming from. It is legal in the United States to track IP addresses because they do not provide personal information. Because many computers can connect into one network, and many people can use the same computer, it is impossible to know who specifically is visiting your site.

The company name can sometimes be found based on the IP address for large corporations, but for smaller companies, visitors browsing from home, or mobile visitors, the IP address will most likely be associated with an Internet Service Provider, like AT&T or Time Warner.

In the small likelihood a company name owns the IP, these marketing tools just send you the CEO or business owner’s name—or no contact information at all.

So how can you know if your website is reaching the right audience? Opt-in marketing, in which visitors freely give you their information through a contact form, newsletter sign-up, or another special offer is the best way to know exactly who is visiting your site. To get the best results, don’t ask for too much information up front—start with just an email address, and ask for more information later.

If you’re still dying to know which companies are browsing your site, you can find that information for free, using Google Analytics online tracking software, by looking at the Network Service Providers information for Visitors. This report will tell you the name of the company that is associated with the IP (if available).

Why? Customers and prospects typically don’t look for us on Facebook because we sell to businesses (B2B), not consumers. However, a company or individual could create brand confusion by presenting themselves as Knowmad on Facebook. In addition, we might later find a use for Facebook in our marketing and we don’t want to lose the opportunity to claim our brand name.

How did we decide on the use of Facebook for our brand? I’ve included a few questions in this post that helped us evaluate if Facebook is right for our business. Hopefully, these questions can help you start the conversation for your business.

Before holding this discussion, we defined our primary target audiences to make the conversation more effective.

Is our target audience on Facebook?
Yes. However, it’s not likely that our target audiences are looking to engage us on Facebook. We serve other businesses and our brand isn’t for general consumers (B2C).

Can Facebook drive traffic to our website or blog?
Maybe. It’s more likely that we can get more targeted traffic from Linkedin using our blog posts.

Would anyone buy from us on Facebook?
No. Knowmad doesn’t sell products. Our selling process is relationship-driven and not transactional.

Is Facebook a good recruiting tool for us?
Perhaps. It’s not the most efficient approach to recruiting because of our specialized need for highly skilled web strategists, web hackers and web savvy designers. We could spend quite a bit of money with little return.

If we increased our followers, what would happen?
Nothing noticeable from a business perspective.

Is there any benefit to us to use Facebook?
Yes. We don’t want someone poaching our brand name on the most widely used social network. However, this doesn’t warrant spending a lot of time on Facebook vs. other marketing opportunities.

Conclusions

These are just a few questions that could be asked about Facebook for a B2B business. The answers to these simple questions helped us quickly decide that our marketing efforts would be more effective using other avenues.

There are a lot of ways we can market our businesses, both online and offline. Given the time and budget limitations that we have, it’s important to make sure that we’re spending our time and marketing dollars wisely.

Here’s some advice that might be hard to swallow: The colors, fonts, spacing and imagery on your website could be the difference between a user purchasing from you or choosing a competitor. This means that even the most strategic SEO or marketing campaign could be jeopardized by a visually neglected site.

According to a 2002 study by Consumer WebWatch, nearly half of Web users assess a website’s credibility based solely on visual design elements. Not privacy policies, customer service numbers, evidence of a physical location or depth of content. Design alone trumps all of those rational indicators.

Like it or not, aesthetics are closely tied to our emotions. It’s evolutionary. And the way humans make decisions is far more emotionally-driven than we would like to admit. Therefore, you stand a better chance at gaining a visitor’s business by creating a compelling, trustworthy aesthetic.

There is no reason to use the terms “functional” and “ugly” interchangeably. The idea that one must sacrifice either form or function when creating a Web design is absurd. True design thrives upon constraint; it forces innovation. Anything less would be merely misdirected decoration.

Good design is subliminal

While beauty is important to initial impressions, no one (except perhaps you and industry web designers) should be staring at your homepage for too long thinking about how gorgeous it is. Good design is transparent and should not be consciously considered by a visitor. It is subliminal when it’s right, and blatantly obnoxious when it’s wrong. Most importantly, good design works. When evaluating your website (or individual pages on your website), ask yourself these questions:

• Are the most important tasks a user would want to perform apparent? (You have conducted audience research to define these tasks, haven’t you?) Also note that this does not mean cluttering your home page with every single task that a user might want to accomplish.
• Are there multiple logical paths to the resources users want to find? Instead of placing all of the tiny tasks on the homepage, create logical paths to them through the main navigation (which goes from general to specific).
• Are your calls to action relevant? Don’t put the same sidebar graphic call to action on every page; it will be overlooked if it is repeated too often.
• Are your forms forgiving? The forms on your website should provide human-friendly feedback, they should allow a user to correct mistakes easily, and they should be generous about what kind of information is accepted (does the phone number really need to have dashes in it?). If you get this wrong, you make yourself look like a sadistic, impatient robot, and no one wants to do business with one of those, right?

These are but a few considerations to make. A Web designer who truly understands the Web medium will be able to design not only the page’s initial look, but for the interactive states as well.

Well-designed, Usable Sites Have a Higher Return

Even if you think your website is performing well, there is still room for improvement: according to research conducted by usability guru Jakob Nielsen, the average website redesigned for usability increases core business metrics such as conversions, page views, and target feature usage by 83%. And in the case of an e-commerce website one button could cost you $300 million  over a year.

Now, to most Web developers and designers, touting that a website is “usable” would be akin to a chef bragging about his “edible” food. While Web usability has increased dramatically on the whole over the years, there are still many sites that get it wrong (or, more commonly, are just plain oblivious to it) and are losing customers or spending a lot on customer service support because of a poorly designed, difficult website.

Discordance between what a website or application appears to do and what it actually does can damage trust. Consider success messages that are red instead of green, buttons that don’t “push” in when you click on them, and text that is blue and underlined that isn’t really a link. These things may seem like minor annoyances, but they create the perception of an unstable, disoriented environment.

Bottom line: Yes, your site should be pretty (and functional).

I’m not suggesting that your website should be senselessly embellished and decorated like a scrapbook (unless your market research indicates that this is what your target audience will respond to). But your online presence should have a degree of emotion, and an aesthetically-appealing quality that fits with your brand and the strategic functionality you plan to build into your site.

Don’t fight human nature–use it to your advantage by building a site that fosters trust through elegant, thoughtful design, and you’ll be headed in the right direction.

Claiming a business name on social networks is an important part of a strong marketing strategy because it creates a permission-based channel to market to potential buyers. These are the people that want to be updated on what your business is offering. Creating a business name on these networks also protects your corporate brand by preventing other individuals or organizations from claiming the brand name and misrepresenting the brand on these networks.

One of the first networks to start claiming the business brand name is Facebook.com. As of March 2010, Facebook has over 400 million active users. More than 100 million active users are currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices. Fifty percent (50%) of Facebook’s userbase log on to the network in any given day. No matter your business size, your buyers are most likely on the Facebook network.

Setting a business up on Facebook is quick and easy. We’ll assume that you’re already registered on facebook.com. If you’re not already registered on facebook.com, visit the website’s homepage to register. Once you’ve completed that step, read on to setup your business page.

Setup a Business Page on Facebook

If you don’t already have a page setup for the business on Facebook, log into Facebook and setup a new Facebook page. When you create a new Facebook fan page for a business, you can select either the “Local Business” or “Brand or Product” option (unless you are an artist, band, or public figure). Choose the option and associated category that best fits your business need. Use your associated business name, brand or product name for ‘Name of Page’. For now, we’ll assume that you’re using the business name for the page.

During page creation, you can choose if you’d like to publish the page or keep it unpublished until a later time. If you don’t already have a plan in place for your page, we suggest you keep it unpublished while you research what your page will contain. You can publish the page when you’re ready.

Setup a Vanity URL

A vanity URL is a URL or domain name, created to point to something to which it is related and indicated in the name of the URL. For example, www.facebook.com/yourbusinessname. Facebook started offering vanity urls in the summer of 2009. Facebook offers vanity URLs in the form of usernames for pages. For business pages, you need to have at least 25 fans to claim the vanity url.

You’ll want to claim the vanity URL (a.k.a. – username) for your business for at least two reasons.

• You’ll want to make it easy to find and share your Facebook Business Page.
• You can prevent others from taking the brand name in the network. (See my earlier comments about protecting your brand.)

Claiming your business vanity url on Facebook is fairly simple. However, be aware that you will not be able to edit or transfer this username once you set it.

• Visit Facebook’s username page to setup a vanity url on facebook.com.
• Click the link in the page to ‘Set a username for your Pages’.
• Choose the page you’re setting up the url for from the dropdown.
• Enter your desired username for your business page (e.g. – yourbusinessname) and click the button to ‘Check Availability’.
• Once you find an available and appropriate name, accept the username for the page. You’ll be presented with the shortened url for your business page.

Were you able to successfully setup your fan page? If so, post your link in the comments below.