Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Does this tool still work?  Tried adding it today and no joy.

Good call George.

Find out if the content manager knows about keyword research. I do content management and have a graph on my wall that has two axes... The horizontal axis is "Profitable" The vertical axis is "Linkable" Content ideas are written on post-it notes and placed at an appropriate location on that chart.  The goal is to work on those in the upper right quadrant first... then generate more ideas for that same quadrant. After all upper right quadrant content is produced then pick the most fun jobs from the upper left and lower right quadrant. Generate more ideas for all quadrants but lower left.

Brad, Questions around this seem to be prevalent lately so I am assuming more and more are realizing there may be value in the G+ piece. As to your question, First I will suggest you read this great post by Cyrus Shepard that certainly got some circulation. Pay attention to the Update at the end as it explains a bit re why it may be true. Next, for your brands the first question is around the type of businesses they are. If they are a service area businesses you need to make sure you keep the brand pages (Google Plus) and the local unmerged. Read this from Mike Blumenthal.  I do not know that driving the traffic from the local 'places' pages to the G+ will help you as much as getting reviews on the Places will or potentially, having content on G+ that drives traffic to the locations. By the sites having individual G+ buttons, those +1s will help that site/page IMO. (OK, over time, etc.) Hope this at leasts adds a bit of information for you. Best Robert

While on a smaller scale it may not have a direct influence on ranking (because it is a brand name) it can be an issue if it is overdone. I believe for brand names (in most industries) Google does not penalize as heavily when compared to standard anchor text or keywords. However, moving forward I would try to limit over-usage of your brand name and continue to use the other variations as well.

reciprocal link building is significantly down-valued by Google which means it should not be a long term link building strategy. Some even consider it in the same pool as link farms etc. Link-building like I said is an art its not a one on formula but different methods of outreach this might help: http://moz.com/ugc/category/link-building