Traditional marketing and advertising is just not as effective as it used to be.  You have to stop and think if your marketing dollars are being spent wisely if TV ads are being skipped with DVR, radio ads can’t reach iPod users, un-wanted email gets marked as spam, direct mail campaigns end up in the trash, and online banner ads live in a crowded space, making them harder to be seen.
The consumer is online. The consumer is social. And the consumer does not want to be spammed.
Welcome to the REAL world of social media.

This quote was taken from this post: http://blogs.imediaconnection.com/blog/2012/02/02/what-your-agency-isn%E2%80%99t-telling-you-about-social-media-2/

• What happens on the backend of a Circle communication? It is easy to create a circle, but what do other see when I add them?

Google did a good job of communicating the frontend of Google+ by helping everyone understand Circles. However, they are doing a horrible job communicating on the other end get when they are added to a Circle. Do they get a message by email? Text? What happens if they do not use Google+? I had to call-up a friend, “with the old social technology called a phone,” and went through the motions with her to understand what other see. Then these 3 concepts understanding came to me:

Circles are only for you to disseminate content. You control how much content hit your stream by adjusting your volume of each circle like this:

What the other person gets is information added to there stream. As you know, when you post something to a circle, it will only showup in the stream of those people that is within your circle. When you add a person to a circle, they have no idea what the name of the circle is. They could have just been added to a circle called “Crazy People” for all they know. All they will see is that a post has been made on their main stream. If the person you added to the circle does not have a Google+ account, they will be sent an email instead of it being posted to there Google+ account stream.

• Spark missing? Replaced with search….ok. How do you share a circle?

Yes. Google Sparks are gone. Google did it again. They are good at explaining something new, but horrible on explaining things that has been removed or changed. Sparks seems to be replaced with a search saving feature when you do a Google+ search. When you use the search box on the top of the page, you can choose to save it. This causes the search term to show-up in the same area where sparks were located. This transition to this method was horrible. You can STILL find many instructions online about using Sparks. I had to go through several comments to find out what happened to them. If you know where the Official notice was for this please add a comment of it’s location.

• Sharing a circle? I could?

One thing what I thought Sparks help with was to publicly to share Circle. If I wanted a Circle to know they are part of a group, I would create a Spark. Nope. This too has changed. You now share a Circle. I found this video to show how it is done here:

Poor usability can be seen on how an app communicate changes.  I love Google, but I keep seeing over and over again that they cause their “near followers” to die off, and a hesitation for the rest of the world to follow them. People  want to use Google+. It is a great idea. Nevertheless, trust is being damaged by the confusion of changes. I shouldn’t have to dig around to find out the information in this post.  People will not tolerate this with a Freemium app today. This stuff only makes things unusable and frustrates the user at the most critical time of engagement. Well, I hope my research will reduce your frustration as it has for me.

• http://en.support.wordpress.com/sharing/

Here is a video I found about how to do it:

This answered my questions:
Q: Can you add plugins to the wordpress.com version? Or do you need to have a full install?
A: Yes, you do not need a full install to add major plugins. You will need a full install to use obscure plugins.

Q: How do I post my blog to my Google+ stream?
A: When you add the Google+1 feature and hoover over it. You can leave a comment and select the Google+ stream you want it to be posted to.

For websites, I believe this is the key ingredient Drupal brings to the table.  Static content is done and needs to be minimized on a site.  With Drupal you can create multi-faced user content that is separated by the roles within your business.  You can have people access content by an “Intranet,”  while at the same time a customer can update content.  The key strength behind this is that additional energy is not left only to just a website developer.  Energy now comes from everyone who interacts with content.  Just like Facebook, all you need is for people to log into a site and all actions are used to update the content.  Content becomes a living document instead of static information.

The growth of app stores have shown this to us the most.  People basically find apps more usable than many websites.  Why? They add a “live” interaction to content.  This is what people expect when they download an app while being the Fail point of many websites.  Social media has shown us that information is more relevant and brings the most attention if one believes what is seen is “live.”  Being able to keep content alive by adding to the live content strengthen this concept even more.

How does this effect a small business?  Services from a small business need a method where people can add energy to it.  Lack of energy on a service also shows the business what needs to be stopped, or repackaged.  No longer is this energy on the shoulders of a web developer or designer.  A developer today only point to something that they would want more energy behind, like an ad in Google.  Nevertheless, true energy is generated by people interacting with an idea.  Having a UI for behind and in front of the “curtain” will place you quickly to the top of the web.  It will open doors just because a person will believe your business is more accessible and usable.

I was upset that you took another $5 from my savings account.  I tried to search for why on your site and could not find it.  I had to go to Google and do a search to find out why.  Please do two things:

1. Provide a link next to a fee explaining why it has been charged.  It should not be so hard to find out why you have taken money from me.
2. Allow us to activate alerts that would warn us of a upcoming penalty.  For example…When I have reached 6 withdrawals limit within my savings account for a statement period.  I can activate an alert that will tell me that I will receive a $5 charge on my next withdrawal.