Google are reporting more than 62 million Google+ users. Impressive, especially when compared to the 10 million users reported in July.

While not even close to the 800 million Facebook users, I suspect we’ll see serious growth and a closing of the gap over the next year.

Paul Allen thinks there may be 400 million Google+ users by the end of 2012, but a lot can happen in twelve months.

I believe that the growth of Google+ will be largely determined by the actions of Facebook.

If Facebook do nothing by the way of change or burn a few more privacy/usability bridges, Google+ will prosper.

When a competing product offers similar benefits, a little dissatisfaction may be all that’s needed to make the leap.

It’s a precarious position for Facebook, and a volatile one for Google.

Roll on 2012.

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We live in an age of crap service. We don’t like it, but we accept it. Sometimes we even expect it.

A few weeks ago I had the dubious pleasure of staying in one of Hilton’s London hotels, for the European Software Conference.

The conference was great.

The hotel set a new benchmark in appalling.

The hotel seemed to think that this was good enough to serve for breakfast – scrambled eggs by the way, although I’m not sure what they’ve been scrambled with:

When we requested an extra bed for our little girl, they seemed to think that this was reasonable – a total of three slats missing; impossible to sleep on:

Needless to say I won’t be staying at that particular hotel again. Ever.

Many small businesses pride themselves on good service. And most if not all customers appreciate good service when they receive it.

Oddly enough, bad service has also never been so dangerous.

In the past, the only option for someone unhappy with their hotel would be to vent at the staff on the front desk.

Today the same person can share their experiences with the world.

Hello world.

In the not-too-distant past, good service was taken for granted. Today it’s a rare commodity and a competitive advantage.

If you have it, flaunt it. Make sure visitors to your website know how good your customers think you are.

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Despite reporting over 800 million active users, Facebook appear to be the current hate-figure of the month. Crimes include interface changes and privacy terms – shocking stuff.

All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again. But for now, it’s cool to hate Facebook.

Which is why Spotify’s decision to force new users to log into their service using a Facebook account is baffling:

A thread on Spotify’s support forum shows an unjustified level of anger being directed towards Spotify. Even though the rule currently only applies to new users, a number of existing and pro users are already cancelling their accounts in triumphant fury.

I suspect the backlash will die down sooner rather than later, but for now can’t help wondering what on earth Spotify were thinking. Any ideas?

Choose your alliances with care.

So say we all.

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I’m running an Action Class for AppSumo today:

Let Dave show you how to get the most value out of Google AdWords!

Google Adwords is a great tool for reaching the world with your product or service. Yet unlike most power tools, it comes with no safety instructions, which can cause you to waste a sizeable portion of your budget without even realising it.

Dave’s goal during this Action Class is to redefine your relationship with Google, by giving you a range of actionable strategies with one single focus: to increase your account’s ROI.

After the talk, Dave will hang around to answer your AdWords related questions in the live Q&A Session.

When? Tuesday, September 6th, from 9:00am-10:00am PST.

Where? Online via a live video stream. Sign up below to get the link before the class starts, and for the video to watch it afterwards.

I hope you can join us.

Sign up for the webinar here.

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About once a week I’m asked what guarantees we offer for our services.

Sadly, in life and marketing there are no guarantees.

Yet of all our marketing services, it’s SEO that produces the most requests for a guarantee.

I could guarantee that you’ll be in the top-five listings for some of the keywords that we’ll optimise your website for.

So I can choose phrases with no competition, like “Who does Dave Collins think he is“.

I could guarantee that in the unlikely event we don’t achieve these positions for absurd keywords that no-one searches for, we won’t charge you next month.

Or I could just be honest and explain that we’ll make sure that your main pages are well optimised and correctly setup, but that ultimately much of ensuring your website ranks in first position for your chosen keywords lies beyond our control.

SEO usually works, and it often works very well.

But we won’t offer meaningless guarantees.

Update: Yes I do know this is a subject I wrote about less than four months ago in The myth of SEO guarantees, but the subject keeps coming up!

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It often appears that when companies grow beyond a certain size, no-one is responsible for actually caring about their customers.

There are people who care if unhappy customers mean a drop in revenue, but no-one who really loses sleep if a customer is getting a bad deal.

Software companies generally fall into one of two extremes. Their support is either outstanding or awful. Black or white.

I’ve experienced companies that do whatever it takes to make sure their customers are happy.

I’ve also experienced the other end of the spectrum; companies whose support is there to effectively fob-off unhappy customers.

I fully intended to name and shame the software company who have provided me with the worst support I have ever seen this week. But I won’t. There’s a recession on and it’s not the right time to sling mud, no matter how deserving it may be.

The bottom line is that I would have been happy with an apology and a refund. I understand that some technical issues are simply too obscure or complex to be worth fixing. But pushing the customer away with absurd claims and denials can be bad for business.

If you can’t fix it, say so.

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Scene 1 – “been there, done that”:

CEO: So what can you do for us?

Me: I’ll keep it brief. We bring targeted traffic to your website. Then we make sure that more of your visitors convert.

CEO: Hmmm. How do you do bring more traffic?

Me: We start with Google. We make sure that your website is optimised both for—

CEO: No no, we tried SEO. Didn’t work. What else?

Me: Okay, we can revisit that. We also use AdWords to—

CEO: Not interested. We tried that. Too expensive. Didn’t work. What else?

Me: I wouldn’t rule-out Google just because what you’ve already tried didn’t work. Our approach is to—

CEO: Google’s too expensive. It doesn’t work. We tried it. Not interested. What else can you do?

Me: Well… we also work at converting more visitors to customers. We—

CEO: We already do that. Doesn’t really work. What else…

Scene 2 – “open minds”:

Two days ago I spoke to a group of startups as part of the Springboard programme.

I shared my experiences of working with SEO and Google AdWords, and also shared what I feel are 23 of the most common website mistakes.

The buzz and thirst for knowledge in the room was electric. Particularly impressive as I didn’t even begin my sessions until 4:30 in the afternoon; a time when many of us are starting to droop a little.

What struck me the most was the willingness to hear new ideas and the open-minded approach to everything I had to say.

The twenty-something people in the room knew that there are no guarantees; that they won’t all automatically turn their ideas into sustainable businesses, but the combination of raw talent and open minds stack the odds heavily in their favour.

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Hyperbole and a Half is as far as you can get from the bog-standard blog (blog standard?), and it’s more or less the opposite of my chosen type of reading.

But it’s wonderful. It’s original, inspired, and quite literally makes me laugh out loud.

Anyone who has ever had a completely insane dog will relate to Wild Animal (The Simple Dog Goes for a Joy Ride), and it was this post that first raised the author’s genius.

Take a look at the navigation:

Beautiful.

And buried away in the fascinating oddness of her FAQ are some startlingly sensible points:

“Is your work copyrighted?  Can I repost it?

My stories and drawings are copyrighted, but as long as you attribute your use of my images/words correctly (with a link to the source of the material), it should be fine.  But please don’t completely repost anything (that’s such a gray area and it has worked out horribly for me in the past). Problems only arise when you use my work in a way that suggests you’re trying to pass it off as your own.  I work very hard to create these posts and it hurts my livelihood when my work is reposted without credit (websites like funnyjunk.com are horrible about this.)  Plagiarism always hurts the artist.”

Best of all, she has the best copyright notice I have ever seen, Copyright Allie Brosh (please don’t kill me)

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Despite the obvious popularity of facebook, their future rests on two factors, both of which lie partly out of their control.

The first is their ability to make money from a great idea. The web may have changed the delivery method and reach of interesting ideas, but the fundamental law of business still applies. Profit is required.

The second is their position as King. Facebook isn’t new, but has been flavour of the month for years now. Yet history teaches us that crowds are fickle and tastes change. I still remember when AltaVista was yesteryear’s Google, when MySpace was the new way and when portable music meant carrying a huge plastic ghetto blaster or boombox.

My main reservation with facebook advertising isn’t so much that it interrupts, but more that it’s invisible.

We’re so used to seeing advertising through our browser that it no longer registers. Quantity has rendered it useless.

Google AdWords works because people go to Google looking for a solution to their problem, and the ads show them what they’re looking for.

When people log in to their facebook accounts, however, they’re not looking for a solution to a problem. They want to see what their friends are up to or to share pictures and snippets of their lives.

I am, however, a data and control addict, and the targeting capabilities of facebook  are incredibly appealing, so I’ve setup a small experiment to see how well Facebook advertising can work.

I’m targeting software developers in the UK and US (try doing that in AdWords) and have committed enough of a budget to get a feel for how it works.

The campaign has been running for 10 hours, and so far has generated over 7,000 impressions and no clicks whatsoever.

It’s early days yet, and I’m going to give it at least a week before even attempting to draw any conclusions. But so far… well let’s wait and see.

Update: 11,000 impressions and one click – a 0.009% CTR.  But this isn’t AdWords and might actually work.
Later: 40,000 impressions and 4 clicks. I’m most interested in what these people  are going to do though…

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I recently bought a new version of an application that securely remembers my passwords and logins.

The problem is that it keeps crashing my browser.

I brought it to the company’s attention on January 27th. They claim to have fixed the issue five times, but this hasn’t been the case.

Their latest piece of advice came on February 21st – almost four weeks later:

I can see six main problems with this reply.

1) As a paying customer, I would expect their support to bother using capital letters in their reply.

2) They push the product as Chrome compatible, so I don’t like the ‘solution’ of using a different browser.

3) Why are they using technical terminology (reenterable calls) that I have no understanding of? Is this supposed to impress me or fob me off?

4) They ignore the fact that it is only their software that crashes my browser. Making me repeat myself is beyond frustrating.

5) The language is dreadful. This is supposed to reassure me?

6) I don’t want to read about it on the internet.

If my memory serves me correctly, I have been using their software for at least 8-9 years. That’s about to change.

Support is an opportunity to impress and retain customers. Bad support turns happy users into angry bloggers.

When software developers look at support requests as opportunities to impress, users respond accordingly.

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