Wendy Schollum: Look for 1 stamp of approval on product

At some point in our lives, all of us have found ourselves in the unnerving position of standing in front of a shelf full of products (that we feel completely ignorant about) while a sales rep points to the most expensive variation, of an otherwise identical group, telling us that this is the one we really need.
And, at that moment, what we wouldn't give to have a friend, someone we know and trust and who had been through this product purchase process before, magically appear and direct us to the one that we should actually buy. Enter Google +1.
Launched last week, Google +1 is the search engine giant's latest attempt to embrace the concept of social information (information that is ranked and/or categorised by real world people, as opposed to automated pieces of search engine code).
In the coming months, Google users will start to see a "+1" icon appear next to each link on a Google search results page, giving users the ability to mark that link as one their friends should consider visiting. In short, it's Google's answer to its arch enemy's (Facebook) "like" button.
Google has stated that its +1 action is a "public stamp of approval", which publicly associates that link (and its contents) with the name of the person who +1 identified it, "in search, on ads and across the web". The idea is that, because the +1 feature is so public, people will be more discerning with their +1s than they are with their Facebook "likes" - just one of the ways Google is trying to distance itself from Facebook's "closed community" and advocate the advantages of "open web" social sharing.
For businesses, the time will quickly come that they will need to include the Google +1 button (alongside their Facebook "like" button and the Twitter "re-tweet" button) on their corporate websites, in order to foster social sharing of their website and products/services. It is also likely that the +1 function will start to play a role in Google's ever-changing website ranking algorithms - perhaps applying a better rank to websites that have a higher number of +1s? In the end, it is clear that this latest shift to harness user opinion is not one that businesses and online marketers will be able to ignore.
At the same time, this new online tool is likely to impact on consumers positively, giving them the ability to not only influence the appeal of certain links (through choosing to +1 some links over others), it is also likely to evolve into a tool that acts as a virtual friend, always ready and willing to give +1 advice on virtually any topic, or product purchase.
For more information on Google +1, or to sign up to try this feature before it is available to everyone, please go to www.google.com/+1.
Wendy Schollum is a web strategist and managing director of Xplore.net Solutions Ltd. If you would like more information on leveraging social media to promote your business, follow Wendy on Twitter (www.twitter.com/xploreNET), join the Xplore.net team on Facebook (www.facebook.com/xploreNET), email support@xplore.net or call 0800 100 900.