Google Now Taking on Facebook

“It is our intention to make this a model for how open a social site should be”

Google is previewing their new Buzz feature as I write this:

And they couldn’t be any more clear that this is a direct challenge to Facebook. With the ability to share photos, geo-tag posts, see who’s near you and more.

It’s no secret that Google would love some of the attention that Facebook is getting on the web. Christmas Day 09 actually saw Facebook pass Google as the most visited site in the world.  And while Google’s own Orkut social site has been a terrible flop (outside of Brazil at least), they have been stealthily building all the blocks of a Facebook competitor piece by piece.

In fact, it’s only the tying together of these various strands which is holding them back. Consider these Google products working in conjunction:
Google Profile
Google Chat
Picasa for photos
Youtube for videos
Reader for articles

and you have the basics of a Facebook-like service already.

And it goes without saying that there are other features which can be tied into these, sharing custom maps, reviewing product pages, the FourSquare-like features of the new Google Buzz, NearMeNow on the iPhone/Droid, etc, etc.

So will it work?

I think it will. Buzz will start rolling out to Gmail users within the hour, and judging by the buzz (sorry) on Twitter, there’s a huge amount of interest already:
http://twitter.com/#search?q=%22Google%20Buzz%22%20OR%20%23Buzz

APIs will be available, and public info will be provided as XML feeds. Anything public will indexed immediately by Google’s real time search. There is a lot of stuff here, even speculation about using Google Voice conversations as part of the Buzz. They have put a lot of thought into spam fighting (and I must say, Gmail spam fighting is great for me). Buzz seems to offer a huge amount of potential, especially if you consider the built in user-base Gmail has.

However, with @replies to tag people, the ability to ‘like’ or comment on posts, photos and updates, many may see this as too close to Facebook to be worthwhile.

So, what do you think? Can Google finally make a success of their social strategy, or is it too similar, too late?



Google Takes on Yelp

Google has never shied away from taking on other companies. Since inception, when Google supplied the search results for Yahoo, and then turned around and beat Yahoo at its own game, through the ‘email wars‘ with Yahoo and Microsoft, to taking on Apple with its own phone(s).

And I think we can now add Yelp to the list.

It was widely reported that last month Yelp wallked away from a Google buy out, an almost done deal worth $550+million. Google seems to have responsed to this snub by stepping up the quality of its own local Place Pages.

I’ve mentioned Google Local pages on here before, but as with all things Google, they never stay still for very long. Besides the existing features, such as photos, maps, coupons and hours, Google has introduced their own ranking system, with rankings based on aggregating comments on sites such as TripAdvisor, Kudzu and Igougo.

For instance, here’s the page for one of our clients in Charleston, Circa 1886 restaurant. Under the heading ‘What people are saying about’ you can read the comments, divided up into categories,  service, meal, staff, atmosphere and wine list, alongside a colored bar similar to the PageRank bar:

(click to enlarge)

and selecting one of the topics will show you more details and comments about that aspect.

More worryingly for Yelp, NextStop and others, Google has also released an iPhone/Android app (with good reviews), Near Me Now, which allows users to see what is nearby, and pulls inthe Place Pages data too.

Of course, Google has had its own notable failures too – Paypal is still a lot more popular than Google Checkout, Orkut has quiet some way to go to dethrone Facebook as King of the Internet, and Craigslist/Ebay are still casting a snooty eye over the upstart that is Google Base.

So what do you think? Has Google made a useful product? Is this it for Yelp? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Twitter to Challenge Google for Search (no, really!)

Finally, some big news about Twitter which doesn’t involve the company being bought by Google Microsoft Yahoo Apple whoever this week. Instead, at a Cnet panel last week Santosh Jayaram, Vice President, Business Operations, mentioned that Twitter will begin crawling the links in tweets, and then indexing those pages.

As Techcrunch rightly points out, this isn’t a matter of Twitter trying to beat Google at their main strength, traditional search, it is instead a brand new paradigm, with the promise of human-influenced, real-time search results.

Little is known about the details but there were comments made about weighting links based on influence (a la Google’s Page Rank system), but no word on how that would be done yet.

One thing is certain though, this finally offers Twitter the chance to prove its real worth. All those big companies sniffing around for the past few weeks weren’t doing so as a result of the buzz around Twitter (despite Oprah’s growing disinterest after an initial flurry of tweets, the number of new users continues to climb), but for the oodles of data Twitter has unprecedented access to. As with Google’s purchase of Urchin a few years ago, seeing how real people behave online is inherently valuable.

How Will It Work?

Short answer: we’ll have to wait and see. Longer answer: I’m not sure, but I’d like to see something like this. A real-time search engine,which would compliment Google rather than replace it, where real people invisibly influence the search results.

For example, a current Twitter search for ‘obama‘ has thousands upon thousands of results with dozens more each few seconds. Great if you want to know what people are saying, not so useful if you want to discover what exactly they are reacting to, as you have to wade through page after page to see all the links.

Or ‘manny ramirez‘ – you’ll see lots of comments about his drug violation, and many of them also have links. The trouble is that with URL shortening, you can see what looks like 10 different links all going to the same article.

Wouldn’t it be great to have this page split into two columns, one with comments and another with the most popular linked-to articles/websites?

Of course, it will also become subject to the scourge of the internet – spammers – but that is where the relative influence of the writer comes in.

It’s easy to forget now, but before Google search engines were filled with spam. Yes, it still appears throughout the search results now,even on Google, but nothing like it was back in 1997/8, and that is largely because of Google’s PageRank system. For a detailed mathematical explanation see here, but basically Google used links to a webpage as a way of measuring its popularity,but with the very important caveat that not all links are equal.

If I run a golf course for example, a link from PGA.com would be far more valuable than a link from your old Geocities page – PGA.com is a popular site, and in a related field. A similar thing could be done for Twitter search, a link from ESPN columnist and professional RedSox fan Bill Simmons to a Manny Ramirez article would be worth more than one from Oprah, even though she has more followers.

And of course, Twitter search wouldn’t have to be limited to websites either. As with Google’s move towards universal search, it could easily incorporate videos, mp3s, photos, and anything else that people are discussing or linking to.

Something like this could be hugely useful, if implemented correctly. Despite Google’s success, the missing piece in their search has always been a human element. In fact they incorporate the Open Directory Project listings into their search algorithm as a way of helping to inject some personal judgment.

A search engine that shows exactly what is happening around the world right now, as discussed by real people? I can’t wait!

So what do you think? Am I missing the point? Is this another potential ‘Google-killer’ that will die on the vine? Please share your thoughts or comments.

Learn about yourself with Google

There was a meme on Facebook a while back, encouraging people to Google their name plus is, to see the funny results. For instance, Googling “Simon is” (with quotes) brings up:

Simon is an Intergalactic Hardware Visionary (cool!)
Simon is not a metal or a fuel or a food or water (true, I guess)
Simon is a cheese/hamburger worker (um…)
and so on.

So, kind of funny I suppose, but it got me thinking about what Google can *really* tell you about yourself.

Hopefully everyone reading this is aware of reputation management (if not, please contact us ASAP for a consult!). I have Google alerts set up for my name, just to make sure there’s nothing said about me I wouldn’t want my mom to read. A quick search for my name brings up my website, LinkedIn page, Facebook, plus the darned Hacker thing (it’s not real. And if it was, it’s not me, I swear!).

All well and good there.

But there’s plenty more that Google knows about you, from your searching habits.

If you have a Google account, and it’s getting hard to do much on the Internet these days without one, and providing you didn’t opt-out, then Google can show you a *lot* you may not be aware of.

Go to Google.com right now. In the top right corner, click on My Account > Web History. You’ll have to sign in – Google does like to create the illusion of privacy at least – but you’ll find a treasure trove of info.

The first thing to notice is the breakdown of all your searches, dating back years. You can view all together, or break it down into the different components – Web, Images, News, etc.

Once you get over the initial shock of just how much Google has been recording quietly in the background, it’s quite interesting to flick through. Almost like reading your old diary – Burns Night 2007 for instance I was searching Yahoo Answers for ‘how do I cook a turnip’. On May 21, 2007 I googled:

‘the name hannah is far too common’

Why? I have absolutely no idea! I am intrigued though. Lots of fun stuff to look back on.

You can also see your trends, and figure out just how much of your life you owe to Google. My searches are fairly consistent during weekdays, but I search a lot more in March (average of 2098 searches) than November (1091 searches). And considering that I would never call myself a morning person, it’s odd that my most active hours are between 8 and 10am.

These trends also show you the phrases you most often search for, the sites you usually click on (Wikipedia, Youtube, IMDB and Amazon, if you’re interested) and lots more.

If you ever had any doubt about why Google is the number one search engine, this should put those to rest. Just thinking about how much they know about me, and multiplying that by the billions of searches they handle every month, well, I’m more surprised they can’t just send me what I need each day in an email, without my having to bother with all the searching at all.

Anyway, check it out. Let me know if you learn anything interesting or unexpected.

10 Free Items I Can’t Live Without

Talking to a client this morning,  I surprised her by admitting that I rarely pay for software. Not that I pirate it, I just have a lot of stuff that comes for free.

I’m not hard-line about it. While I admire the aims of the Free Software movement – I’m not actually against paying for stuff.  I’m writing this on a PC, with a licensed version of Windows XP. I have plenty of commercial software, MS Office, Webposition Gold, Quicken, etc, that I use pretty much daily. I just would prefer not to wherever possible.

So, for the recession-minded among you, here are the 10 free items that I use most often:

Firefox
#1 with a bullet. I love Firefox. There was much rejocing in the streets with the recent news that FF had overtaken IE6 for the first time. I was astounded. People still use IE6? Why?

I tried Chrome when it came out, and was fairly underwhelmed. Certainly, at the time, there was no reason for me to switch. I love my Add-ons.  I hate working on another computer that doesn’t have Web Developer or Favicon picker or Colorzilla, and so on.

If you’re one of those that hasn’t made the switch yet (about 30% of this site’s users are reading this in Internet Explorer), I urge you to today – you won’t regret it.

Tweetdeck
I tried Twitterfox, which was ok for a while, but as the number of followers increases, a stronger tool is required to effectively manage Twitter.

Hello Tweetdeck. Customizable colors, ability to sort people into groups, and built in search functionality. Why would I use anything else?

Paint dotNet
I’ll be honest. I downloaded GIMP, the ‘Open-Source Photoshop’ that everyone raves about, but it’s too complicated for me. The same is true of Photoshop itself. However, the much smaller, much more friendly Paint dotNet works great for my very limited needs. It has layers. It does transparancy. It loads in an instant and is pretty self-explanatory. Next!

Filezilla
Even though I use Dreamwweaver which has its own FTP client, I still prefer to stick with Filezilla. No frills, but easy to use, stable and does exactly what you need.

Well, assuming that ‘what you need’ is an FTP client, obviously.

Google AdWords Editor
We manage a lot of Google accounts. Each one has a lot of Campaigns and AdGroups. To try and keep everything updated via the web interface would just be a nightmare. The Editor, though, makes things a breeze. Find and replace your ‘25% off’ ad copy with the new special in every ad takes seconds. Setting up Broad, Phrase and Exact matches for keywords, even less.

Whether you look after one account or one hundred, you’ll find life easier with this tool

CutePDF Writer
I’m not a huge fan of PDFs, but sometimes they’re needed. A client sends me their latest menu as a Word document and asks me to put it on the website – what to do? Click Print, select CutePDF Writer. Job done.

Picasa 3
It took a while for me to jump on board with Picasa. Now I’m hooked.

Brings the power of Google to your stored photos – tagging, editing and organizing made simple. Plus you can share online with one-click. Oh, and the latest version also works with videos.

SyncBack
Ever have a computer die and take all your stuff with it? I have. Hopefully next time I’ll be more prepared, thanks largely to a great big external hard drive, and the free version of Syncback. I don’t have to worry about backing up my work/music/photos/videos as it does it all for me.

If you think this might be something you need, there’s a great How-to here.

Skype
All my family are still in the UK. I work with a Flash designer in Italy. One of my best friends lives in Tokyo. I never pay anything to talk to any of them, thanks to Skype.

The video calls on Skype 4.0 are better than ever. It has a chat feature. And it’s coming to the iPhone and Blackberry next month. Join us! You owe it to yourself!

iTunes
It’s not all work, work, work! Working by myself, without the distractions of co-workers, I have to have some kind of background music. I use Last.FM and Pandora for finding new music, but I’m iTunes through and through.

Like most Apple stuff, it’s intuitive, easy, and looks great. It also doesn’t lock me into Apple. I can buy the ridiculously cheap albums from Amazon and automatically have them show in iTunes. It grabs all my podcasts from everywhere. It manages my Audible account for audio books.

Oh, and it also plays movies and tv shows, so I can catch up on Friday Night Lights from anywhere. Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can’t Lose, indeed!

So, that’s my free ride. How about you? What am I missing?

Skittles: Innocent Candy or Evil Spammer?

Another week, another blow up in the Twitterverse. And this time it’s all down to a small, sugary treat.

If you haven’t yet visited skittles.com, do so now. They have replaced a traditional website with a small navigation box which overlays a search for #skittles on Twitter, the Facebook Fan page, Flickr-hosted photos and a Youtube channel. The Social Web’s dream, right? Well, maybe.

I first came across it on Saturday evening and thought it was pretty cool, and more than a little daring too. Giving over complete control to the world? Huge potential for that to backfire. Still, a fun idea, and a lot more interesting than most product websites.

Well, as with so much on the internet, it didn’t take long for the backlash to begin.

• Many pointed out that the concept was kinda-sorta ‘borrowed’ (wholesale) from Modernista, an advertising agency in Boston who had done the same thing last March.
• Others complained about having to be an adult to see the site, as Tim Allick puts it, “Can’t believe that #skittles website bans KIDS! Doesn’t send them to a safe page, just tells ‘em to go away. How is this smart marketing?”. (He does have a point. It’s a kids candy after all. )
• The Wall St Journal chimed in with a round-up of comments, most of them negative.
• Joanne Jacobs wrote  a blog condemning the whole exercise as a failure – just one day after the site launch – ‘Why the Skittles social media campaign failed’: ” Skittles has failed in its social media campaign because all it has done is hold a mirror up to conversations, without providing any content of its own, any context for remotely valuable conversation, and any rationale for productive engagement.”
• A poll by PR Sarah Evans, shows that 60% of respondents wouldn’t be swayed by the new site to buy more Skittles.
• Etc, etc, and etc

Sigh. Sometimes it all seems so predictable. The constant flow of negativity. The need to show that ‘I’m not taken in by their sneaky advertising’. Jumping on the ‘this is just a rip-off’ and ‘besides, it doesn’t work anyway’-bandwagons.

Come on people! Where’s the joy? Where’s the ‘Yes, we can’-spirit we keep reading about!?

My 6 year old has recently begun spotting website addresses on things that I ignore – mcdonalds.com, orville.com, quakerkidsdoinggood.com – pretty much *everything* has a website now, and they’re all the same. A nice Flash intro. Maybe a game or something. A code you can enter to unlock the hidden area. Yawn.

At least Skittles.com didn’t do that.

So, personally, I’m sticking with my initial reaction, “It’s kind of cool”.

They may not have been first, but they were the first Big Name Brand to do it, and that’s something. It may not convince 60% of people to buy more, but that still leaves a lot that might. It has generated a ton of publicity, and got them over half a million fans on Facebook. And it’s different and interesting.

Unlike so much of the commentary around it.

Are You Making the Most of Google Local?

It has been almost 4 years since Google launched the Google Local Business Center, but it still amazes me that many businesses, small business in particular, and not taking any steps to boost their profile here.

Considering that for many searches now, there are 10 Google Local results listed before the rest of the results, see here for example,  it seems that far too many people are ignoring this huge potential source of traffic. Free traffic, no less!

So, if you’re one and you don’t know where to begin, here’s a few tips to get you started:

Find or Add Your Site.
Head over to http://www.google.com/local/add and sign in with your Google Account info. Click Add New Business, and start completing the info – name, address, etc.
Once you click Next, you may well find that your business is already listed. Just click Claim Listing. If it’s not there, select Add New Listing instead.

Take Control.
Obviously you don’t want just anyone to be able to change your listing information, so Google has a couple of ways to verify that you have the right to edit this account. By far the easiest is the phone method. If you are sitting by the work phone, Google will give you a PIN on the screen, and then call you at the phone number they have. Enter the PIN and you’re all set.
If that’s not possible the alternative is to have them mail you a postcard with the PIN. This can take a couple of weeks.
It is worth telling everyone in the office to keep an eye out for this card. It’s easily mistaken for junk mail and tossed, which will require you to start again.

Build Out Your Listing.
This isn’t the Yellow Pages. It doesn’t cost you any extra to make your listing an all-singing, all dancing ad that shows off how great your company is. You can add up to 10 photos, so do so – not just a logo, but anything else that you think may help. Put in your office hours, types of payments accepted, even add in up to 5 Youtube videos. Really take some time and add in all the bells and whistles that you can.

Monitor the Results.
As well as seeing the traffic on your website analytics reports, Google also provides rolling stats of the last 30 days, with the number of impressions and clicks that your listing generated. You might very well be amazed at just how much traffic is now coming your way. As an added bonus they even offer the ability to show coupons. These are branded with the Google logo and a bar code so when your customer requests their free cup of coffee with any sandwich/car wax with any full service wash/website evaluation/whatever, you’ll know just where they came from.

Have you had any success with Google Local? Please let us know.

5 Ways to Improve Your Life with Twitter

(plus one bonus one!)

1) Quit Smoking – I used to smoke. A lot. And giving that up was one of the hardest things I’ve ever accomplished. If only I had been able to use a service like Qwitter.

Qwitter currently has 725 people using it to help them stop smoking. It tracks your cigarette consumption, allows you to keep a journal to help express your frustration, shows you your progress, and probably most importantly, provides support of others in the same boat.

2) Lose Weight – Similar to the support provided for smokers, using friends to help each other stay accountable can help with your weight loss goals. Just this week Lyn reached out to find like-minded people looking to lose a few pounds.

Making your goals public is a great way to help you stick to them. And if you want to skip the fast food and just eat better? Try searching for a ‘healthy recipe‘ instead.

3) Grow Plants – I love having plants around the home. They reduce dust and noise, make you feel calmer and (apparently) remove chemicals from the air. What’s not to like?

Well, I guess the downside is when you look around and see the beautiful green thing you envisioned has been reduced to a browning mess in a bucket of dry dirt.

For some reason, I’m absolutely incapable of keeping up with watering my plants. Enter Twitter! How about this amazing concept, a device which will let your plants tweet you when they need water? (ok, it’s almost a $100, but the idea is cool!)

4) Laugh - “University of Maryland School of Medicine presented results of the university’s study on the effect of laughter on cardiovascular health. The study indicates, (that) laughter appears to cause the endothelium to dilate and increase blood flow. Specifically, laughing was found to increase blood flow by more than 20 percent, with the positive effect lasting for up to 45 minutes.”

You know who’s funny? People on Twitter. Well, not all of them obviously, but enough that you can enjoy yourself. Much has been written about how Twitter has made tv more social. It also makes it a lot funnier. I wasn’t even watching the Grammys on Sunday, but there were so many funny comments appearing in my stream I had to turn it on to fully appreciate them (favorite of the night, @chrisroberts: “coldplay, the wiggles called. they want their jackets back.”)

No? Well how about a little schadenfreude? When actor, director, comedian and writer Stephen Fry got stuck in an elevator last week, he posted this picture which has been seen almost 80,000 times so far. And certainly if you’re going to get stuck, there are few people who would be more entertaining to be stuck with.

5) Exercise your brain – Why not write the Great American Novel?

Each November NaNowriMo (National Novel Writing Month) encourages people to write a novel of at least 50,000 words in 30 days. Of course, now they’re on Twitter to help you, as are many other participants.

If that doesn’t appeal, how about this? In Japan, 5 of the top 10 best-selling novels of last year were ‘cellphone novels’ – “composed on phone keypads by young women wielding dexterous thumbs and read by fans on their tiny screens ” (NYT) – surely that could be done just as easily on Twitter?

Actually, it’s already being done – check out the Twitter novels, Small Places, Slice (from Penguin Books, no less!) or Novelsin3lines. Can you do better?

And Your Bonus! – Use Twitter to Help Others
On Thursday, 12 February, over 175 cities around the world will be hosting Twestivals, bringing together Twitter communities to raise awareness (and money) for Charity: water.
All the events are 100% volunteer, and 100% of the money goes to charity:water projects. Find out more at Twestival.com, and see how you can help others.

That might even make you feel better about yourself too!

Hubspot Study Suggests Blogs Best Social Media for Leads

A new study from Hubspot, who canvessed 167 small to medium sized business owners and executives,  is both encouraging and confusing.

The percentage of leads from each source was broken down as:

Other (including public relations and print and online display advertising) 25%
SEO 16%
Email Marketing 14%
Pay Per Click 13%
Telemarketing 9%
Blogs+Social Media 8%
Trade Shows 8%
Direct Mail 7%

I find this very encouraging – particularly as we offer services for PR, SEO, email, PPC and Social Media, that’s 76% of the leads right there! – it’s certainly good to know that more and more businesses are trying a variety of methods to generate leads, rather than sticking to whatever they have done in the past. That has certainly been my feeling from talking to clients in all kinds of businesses lately.

However, I’m also slightly skeptical of the accuracy, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, if you’re in are a small or medium sized business yourself, you know the difficulty in pinning down exactly how a lead found you.

If they remember you from a trade show, but Google* you to find your contact info, does that count as SEO or a trade show?

If you send offers via both email and direct mail, as many of our clients do, which one gets the credit for the sale?

And Mike Volpe, Hubspot’s VP of marketing, even goes on to say that there are additional benefits to blogging,

“Not only are you creating a community around blog articles, but all those articles get indexed by search engines, so blogging has elements of search engine optimization (SEO) as well”

So how can we accurately claim that SEO is 16% vs Blogging’s 8%?  I don’t feel that we can. But I also don’t see that as a problem.

One thing we try to stress here at Step Ahead is that your marketing efforts, particularly onlne, will help each other. Being active on Twitter can drive traffic to your blog, which can help with your SEO, which can get people to sign up for your email marketing, which can inform people about your trade show appearances, which, well, you get the idea.

One final thing which jumped out at me from this was this statistic:

Companies with less than 50 employees earmarked more than three times as much of spending on blogging and social media than larger ones, and 36% more on SEO.

On the Internet, there is no reason the small companies can’t compete with the Big Boys. In fact, the lack of barriers to getting things accomplished, which plague many a large corporation, can be to your advantage. If you aren’t already blogging, tweeting, facebook-ing, etc, you can start right now. You don’t need to organize all the different departments, have a bunch of strategy meetings, get the lawyers to overlook things, and waste months of everybody’s time. Just sign up for an account and jump in.

So, what are you waiting for?

*I really don’t like using Google as a verb, but everyone else does it!

The Easy Way to Increase Your Sales by 23,000%

Another ‘Free-conomics’ Success Story

With so many people from author Neil Gaiman to Nine Inch Nails (who released the best selling album of the year on a Creative Commons license ), now giving away free work to generate sales, the idea is no longer the novelty it once was. But for those who continue to doubt the power of the web, Monty Python give us what is surely one of the biggest indicators yet.

Apparently fed up of seeing their clips being pirated all over YouTube, they took an unusal step. They formed the Monty Python channel, collected all their stuff themselves, and simply gave it away. But not solely from the goodness of their hearts,

“We’re letting you see absolutely everything for free. So there! But we want something in return. None of your driveling, mindless comments. Instead, we want you to click on the links, buy our movies & TV shows and soften our pain and disgust at being ripped off all these years.”

The channel has been a huge YouTube hit. with most clips having 100,000+ views in the first couple of months alone. The real success though is in how these free videos have led to real sales. Lots and lots of real sales. In fact a 23,000% increase in sales, and moving them to the number 2 spot on the Amazon tv bestsellers list!

I think that this shows us two things. Despite all the hype about pirating of music and movies, people are still willing to pay for what they like. As I was working yesterday I heard a song I liked on Pandora radio, so immediately hopped over to Amazon and bought it. It just needs to be made easy for people to do it, without tying them down to contracts, DRM-locked files and other hindrances.

It also demonstrates the amazing power of Youtube for getting your product seen. It seems such a regular part of daily life that it’s hard to believe YouTube is less than four years old, but in those 4 years great strides have been made. Widescreen, HD videos, with captions, links to buy and so on make Youtube one of the most valuable places to be seen on the web. Just ask the Monty Python guys, who are leading the way in making money by selling products which are available for free.

If that isn’t a web 2.0 success story, then I’m a dead parrot.

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