Google is rolling up its sleeves and investing more in local search. Next week they will launch Google Business Photos. To start they are offering business owners in select cities the opportunity for Google to take free photos of a business’ interior space. In the US, proprietors in the San Francisco Bay Area, Orange County, Phoenix, San Antonio, and St. Petersburg, FL, can apply for a free photo shoot. Additional cities will be added in the future based on demand. Right now Google is focusing on restaurants, hotels, retail shops, and other storefront businesses.

The photos will be used on Google Places pages like the Sonic Boom one below  to beef up the search engine’s local listings. Currently with Google Street View you can scope out the exterior of a business, but with this new feature, you’ll now be able to snoop around a shop or hotel without leaving your computer.

Google faces some tough competition in local search with the likes of Yelp, Facebook, and Foursquare, and Google Business Photos is clearly an attempt to seize more market share from these competitors. Adding these new photos definitely makes Google’s listings more robust, and the more rich the listings are, the less likely users could be to seek out other local search sites for additional information.

I recently ran across this interesting TED talk by Dan Cobley, director of marketing at Google. He draws some great parallels between physics and the world of marketing. For all you marketers out there, physics can teach us a few things about how we can better manage our brands. Here are some of the insights that Cobley shares.

Newton’s Second Law 

Newton’s second law of motion states that Force = Mass x Acceleration (F = ma). Based on this law, the larger a particle is, the more force is required to change its direction. How does this relate to marketing? The bigger a brand is, the more force is needed to change its positioning and reputation in the marketplace. Cobley offers the examples of Arthur Anderson choosing to launch Accenture instead of trying to convince people that Anderson could stand for anything other than accounting, and also Hoover having a hard time convincing consumers that it stood for something other than vacuum cleaners. This is one of the reasons companies like P&G and Unilever keep their brands separate instead of having one big parent brand.

The Scientific Method

You can’t prove a hypothesis through observation but you can disprove it. You can collect data to support your hypothesis and it will strengthen it, but you’ll never be able to conclusively prove it. However, one solid, contrary data point can easily disprove your theory. This can easily be applied to the marketing discipline. A brand can spend decades building a stellar reputation with consumers, but one company misstep can easily destroy all those years of perceived integrity. A couple recent examples are BP and Tiger Woods. BP spent years marketing itself as a pro-environment company only to have that reputation shattered by the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2010. And before all of his dirty laundry was aired to the world in 2009, Tiger Woods was seen for many years as the quintessential brand ambassador and one of the most admired professional athletes in the world. After having a reputable image for years, both BP and Tiger Woods have been permanently damaged by their scandals.

Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle

This theory asserts that you cannot measure the exact state, position, or momentum of a particle since the act of measuring it by definition changes it. In marketing research, it is a challenge to get completely accurate information from consumers. With the act of observing consumers, it changes the behavior of consumers. Cobley offers the example of a group of mothers who would never admit in a focus group to feeding their kids junk food although it’s well known that McDonald’s sells millions and millions of Happy Meals every year. He also mentions that when people are asked if they view porn online, very few people admit to it, although it’s the most common search on Google. The marketing lesson here is that you should try to measure what people actually do rather than what they say they do, and fortunately this is becoming easier to do.

I’d recommend watching the full video if you can. If you’re not familiar with the excellent TED talks, I’d also suggest checking out a few of them. TED is a nonprofit dedicated to “ideas worth spreading” in the areas of design, entertainment, business, science, and global events.

Does your website or blog get buried in search results? Here’s a useful tip to get higher rankings in search queries: Add social media buttons to your website or blog.

Before the rise of social media, it used to be that having more links coming into your site was the key thing to drive higher rankings in search results. If a site had a high number of links coming into it, that was a signal to a search engine that the site was important and should be shared with others, and therefore was placed higher in search results.

Today, however, the incoming link is getting some stiff competition from social media “Like” buttons. In other words, if a particular page is being shared frequently via social buttons, search engines are taking note. If a page is “liked” by a notable number of people, this also signals to a search engine that the page is popular, and it’s placing the page higher in searches as a result.

If I talked you into adding social sharing buttons to your site but you need some help getting started, the folks at Mashable have a helpful tutorial that you can use.

Considering starting a company blog? According to a recent study by HubSpot this would be a smart move. HubSpot surveyed over 1,500 companies, and they found that blogs had notable benefits for a company. Based on their findings, here are three compelling reasons to launch a company blog:

• A company with an active blog has 434% more indexed pages in search engine results compared to a company that does not have a blog.
• When you combine SEO and social media together, you will get 97% more links, and this will help you rank higher in search results.

• If you have a blog, you will get 55% more visitors to your company website on average.
• The study also showed that companies that combined a blog with social media had 79% more Twitter followers.

• You can effortlessly push your blog content to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, and by doing so you're regularly keeping your status updates engaging and fresh.