118 THE POWER OF VISUAL STORYTELLING much effort into choosing or commissioning an image as you would with any marketing campaign. Its look is clean and well organized, but a real advantage of Google+ is Circles: the ability from the outset to separate your connections by interest or industry. For brands, the Circles feature adds new potential for interacting in different ways with customers, employees, colleagues, the media, and other businesses. News and updates can be shared with only the relevant audience, meaning that brands can engage very differently with colleagues and customers. One of the best community functions about Google+ is the Hangouts. You can have private video chats with a select group of people—or you can broadcast the chats publicly or record them for marketing purposes. Recorded Hangouts are automatically posted to YouTube, helping them reach an even wider audience. Rather than straight-up numbers and stats, Google+ has opted for a feature called Ripples, which is a graphic that shows how a post has inter- acted with other users, literally like a ripple effect. This is useful for seeing how far your information has spread and the sorts of interactions it has inspired. Google’s +1 feature is similar to Facebook’s like button. The +1 fea- ture gives users a way of showing agreement or interest in content, and it allows them to share the content on their own stream if they wish. Central to Google’s vision for Google+ is the integration of Google+ data into the regular Google search engine. Google is the largest search engine in the world, and information shared on Google+ is prioritized in searches, which has huge implications for your SEO. Having a presence on Google+ is also important for businesses who have a local presence because their profile is automatically integrated into Google Maps, so people searching locally for businesses will be able to see more about you—which can give you the edge over your competitors. Brittney Bogues, CEO of All In PR, a digital PR firm geared toward pro athletes and nonprofits, finds Google+ essential for her business. For her, it’s the way the platform integrates with other Google tools that makes it