Blog. What we're doing. What we're thinking. What we like. What we love. And not a single mention of what we had for lunch.

The launch of Google+ this week has led to a flurry of comments from the digital world keen to see how the development affects their business. Ever since the launch of Google+, companies have been looking to see how they could get involved in the much-hyped social media platform even after the failure of Google Wave and Buzz.

At every attempt, Google have tried to keep control of the site with a strict policy of removing companies who tried to use personal profiles to promote themselves – often axing genuine users by mistake. I often wondered if scrum half Austin Healey would get the boot for being a “car brand” whilst fashion brand Paul Smith evaded the Google+ police by sounding like a single person.

Yet the majority of users have been asking for a Google+ equivalent of Facebook pages from the start so the launch this week of the business pages section has been warmly received.

There are some useful features for both businesses and followers. Because users have the ability to create circles of influence, they can choose how deeply they want to view and engage with a brand – even creating a bespoke ‘circle’ purely for companies.

Creating hangouts can provide live press conferences or customer Q&A sessions with selected guests at minimal cost. Many are already seeing the platform as being ideal for delivering customer service support.

Start a Google search with a ‘+’ sign and you’ll find their Google+ page. So far only a handful of brand partners are listed despite many companies launching their own page. These case studies have obviously been developed over time.

Burberry is possibly the best page up there. It’s five headline images feature animated pictures of snow falling and mimics the Facebook set-up but the page has a very different look and feel to their Facebook offering.

Pepsi’s Google+ page is more subtle than their Facebook page as well, discussing their link with music through the decades rather than the product itself. Save the Children are using their page to promote campaign videos. There’s everything from an Angry Birds page through to the X-Games (there’s no company listed with a Z yet).

Many are still to be convinced of the success of Google+, although the statistics speak for themselves. It’s taken Google+ 88 days to reach the 50 million user mark. It took Facebook four years, TV 13 years and radio 38 years to achieve the same reach.

Although this seems impressive, I’d argue that many of the fifty million have checked in to see what’s on offer and not come back. Although communities are developing on the platform, many are technology led and many potential users feel left out.

Discussions on the X-factor or the Kardashians might not be highbrow, but they provide a massive amount of online content for Facebook and Twitter.

The question of whether people are willing to switch their social media strategies to Google+ or pay extra to add another channel and administer it is yet to be proved. But the tide is turning as Google continues to increase the offering of its cloud-based services.

Tuesday saw the BBC Look North team catch up with our chairman to talk make-up, at Illamasqua's newly opened Meadowhall counter.

Watch the clip below:

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Breaker, breaker, here comes the caper, straight with the taper, the lyric skyscraper.

Bumper crop this week.

And what better way to start than Women laughing alone with salad:

Flicking through some D&AD's the other day and came across this old friend. If you ever need a cheer up, just read these beauties:

Nice twitter campaign - World's longest scarf:

Kitten Covers - nuff said:

Fontache:

iPhone enhanced ad:

And finally - our old friend, the lamp post poster:

In a world where new technology and media platforms seem increasingly important, it is easy to overlook the basics when communicating.

Often the heart of a message is about finding the emotion that connects with your audience and creating a trigger for them to respond.

This couldn’t be a criticism levelled at Twitter who launched their new stories platform this week. As a marketing campaign, producing a handful of case studies demonstrating the impact of your product isn’t a revolutionary concept.

Even creating a well designed website for those case studies to sit within isn’t the idea of the century, but there is a lot more to the site and the idea behind it.

There is no real format for the stories although they have some things in common. All tell a story about how Twitter has helped a person or organisation, all of the testimonials are short and pithy. In fact Mike Massimino’s entry is shorter than his original tweet.

The navigation takes you quickly and simply through the site offering you the chance to share them. It’s the stories that are the stars, though. Twitter has managed to cram a lot of emotion in to the site. It reminds me of Ernest Hemmingway who was challenged to write a story in six words – he came up with "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."

Twitter will be adding new stories every month, crowd sourcing tales they would never be able to discover for themselves. This first batch seems to be trying to show the depth of what could be included on the site – from historic moments to examples of commercial success to lives being saved.

It is also interesting that none of the well known examples are in there, like the Hudson plane crash or the rescuing of James Karl Buck from an Egyptian prison.

Facebook already has a similar platform but all of the stories are formatted in the same way. In a role reversal, it is the Twitter site that comes alive with the use of videos and images to illustrate them where appropriate.

Twitter isn’t the only social media site looking at stories. Storify has updated its user interface to make creating social media stories even easier.

If you haven’t seen it before, it is a way of collating and mashing social media updates, images and videos with commentary and website links to create your own story.

The new interface makes it easier to create bookmarks to sites without being logged into you account and improves your ability to drag and drop elements to put together a story.

What I like about the Storify site is the ability to take people on a journey with few rules. Like a good novel, you can start the story in the middle before taking your audience back to the start.

The effectiveness of a site like this is down to the story. It doesn’t matter how you tell your stories – if the story doesn’t connect with your audience and lacks human emotion, no social media platform will make it stand out.

Posted by Thomas Atcheson.