netmeg - 5:24 pm on Jul 8, 2011 (gmt 0)

There's two kinds of button interactions that you probably want to address - one that's on your site (if you add it) and one that's actually embedded in the SERPs, on ads, blah blah blah.

Google has done a really lousy job of educating users (i.e. what I call normal people - people who USE websites but don't create or oversee or market them) as to what the +1 Button is, or what it means or why they should click on it. They probably need to invest in some more TV commercials. And do some reassuring.

In the short term, you could educate your users yourself, I suppose. Put a little link that says "what's this" and explain what clicking the button will mean. It depends on your base, I guess. Some people will happily click anything you put in front of them. Others are much more reticent. I put a few +1 buttons back (minus the count) to see what would happen; one of my friends then emailed me and asked what it was, and when I explained, he wanted to know if he would be sucked into some social media vortex if he clicked on it. And he wasn't entirely joking. So there's *that*.