Google Places is BORING

[Randy Kirk]

I'm waiting! and waiting! for what should be an amazing experience on Google Places after the merger. The experience where I go and see something at least as cool as Yelp or YellowPages, or as cool as Google Places used to be. This transition is leaving me full of breath (opposite of breathless?) Am I missing something. Are we able to create something, somewhere, that will improve the experience?

And I will repeat this in another thread, but do we really have to upload our videos to Places? These people own YOUTUBE!!

 

[katandmouse]

Randy, it's coming. Google has been rolling out some Place page that have the full Google Plus experience with hangouts, the wall and the ability to see what places your friends have recommended. They also have a lot of cool tools coming. Stay tuned. I think it's going to be great and a real help to local businesses.

 

[Randy Kirk]

Good to hear. Are there any links to examples?

 

[Linda Buquet]

Randy, here is all the latest info and best resources on what I call Phase 1 merge.
BREAKING! Google+ Business Merge with Google Place Pages Starts Now!

Be warned the 1st phase of merging is not available to all yet and is a little buggy.

WAIT I thought I saw you blog about all this??? You don't know about it yet???

Examples:

I merged my Place page before I was told service area businesses with address hidden were not allowed to merge. So mine is merged.

Catalyst eMarketing - About - Google+
So you can see I have reviews AND the follow button and posts and all the social features. BUT mine is not a good example because that's a new + page and I don't use it for updates AND don't market locally.

Here is the most widely shared page Google uses in all their examples.
The Meatball Shop - About - Google+

You said: "but do we really have to upload our videos to Places? These people own YOUTUBE!!"

Videos have been disabled on Place pages for about 2 months and don't even work now (on the old unmerged G+ Local pages). But they should work after the merge. I have not tried it on my new merged page yet.

 

[Randy Kirk]

If Meatball Soup is it, I have several of my clients at that level. Best we can tell, to add a video now, you have to upload raw video. We are testing today.

But Meatball Soup is boring. What I mean is that when fully optimized and using great photos, Google isn't giving the local customer enough ability to provide content. I was better a year ago.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Ahhh I understand now what you meant. Was not clear to me or Kathy at 1st what you meant. You made it sound like you were not even aware of the merge.

Since you can post unlimited content via posts, that gives the ability to add a ton more than you could with the old Place pages which only allowed a 160 character post and 200 char description. Plus Hangouts are pretty darn cool for businesses that will use that feature.

 

[Randy Kirk]

I love Google+ and expect it to be huge. Hangouts, too. Just disappointed in the visual and content capabilities that the consumer will see when the click on the Google+ function when do a Places search.