For starters, I work at a cool ass company in Bend, Oregon called G5. We provide digital experience management software and services to the self storage, senior living and multifamily housing industry. That means A LOT of local business (roughly 4000) locations, data, marketing and rad tools.

Dave; the VP of Digital Marketing Strategy put a few words in my ear before leaving work today... Scott, check out Google My Maps recent news.

Thinking very little of it I went back to my desk and searched for the news.

Google recently announced the revamping of their My Maps tool. You can check it out here and build your own map if you want https://www.google.com/maps/d
This article may help spark some creativity for you like it did for me - http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2014/09/the-best-ways-to-use-googles-new-my-maps-tool/

After some thinking I realized that an export from 360 would provide everything needed to build a map with all G5 locations on it. You can view my result here - https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=zKansLeThpfU.keAmY-Wuud38

Yes! There are only 2000ish locations on the map. I am limited to 4 layers and 500 locations per map layer with the free version. Good news - $5 for paid version which will allow us to upload all locations.

Anyone have ideas on what we could use this for?

• market data analysis
• client clusters
• sales pres
• cool thing on a TV 
• print with the big printer and hang on the strategy team wall 
  

Summit as friends!
Scott

I am lucky to enjoy my work life at G5 in Bend, Oregon. We specialize in Digital Experience Management. My job is to create quality G5 Google+ Local listings that align with our SEO strategy.

I hope you enjoy some of the photos from our unique office.

Google+ Local is the new Google local business listing product that has so generously been provided to businesses free of charge. Products like this are helping us create the social web, where users continue to have a larger influence on search results.

I have ran into several issues with Google+, but will only highlight one in this post. Google+ Pages or Google+ Local pages have a character limit on how long your business branded name or page title can be. That limit is 50 characters! I came to this conclusion after running a test using as many characters as possible. The highest number of characters that Google+ would accept for a business page was fifty. 

I hope that this information helps your create a business name that is less than 50 characters. Remember that while creating your business name you will be doing yourself and your future customers a HUGE favor by making it short and simple.