As if Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Vine, Pinterest and LinkedIn didn't cover it all......now Joyride has a Google+ page!

You can find our new page here.

We're not sure what we'll be doing with it, but it had to be done.  Local business profiles that don't upgrade from Google Local pages to Google+ will likely find themselves left out of local search results.  And so, we now have Google+.

As a tool, Google+ actually has a lot of easy-to-use features and a delicious user interface, but we don't quite see what extra it brings to an already crowded table.  As a small business, our digital aims are to promote and manage our brand and our message and to find a way to communicate with the public and engage with our customers.  And we'd love to be able to do it in a way that aggregates inbound and effectively distributes outbound from one location, because the more tools we find ourselves using, the less relevant the content on any tool becomes.

At this point, we need integration, not just another social media platform that replicates features of other networks.  The value of a social network is the audience, the members themselves.  Without the audience or the ability to push to the audience at another network, Google+ will likely go unused, except to the extent that usage of Google+ and Google search results correlate.  And let's be honest, implicit coercion isn't the best way to get people to come to your party.

In fact, it's exactly one of those rare occasion that makes one see the real power of the Google's monopoly, and makes one question if "non-evil monopoly" might or might not in fact be a contradiction in terms.

That's all for now.