Social Media News of the Week: September 12, 2011
September 16, 2011 by Bailey
Filed under All, SMNofW, social media
Last week was jam-packed with unveilings from social media giants. From Twitter to Facebook, many new tools and features were shared with users this week.
After much anticipation, Twitter finally revealed their analytics product on September 13. This feature allows publishers to track how many links and tweets are shared, information which was previously only available to advertisers. Also abuzz in the Twitter world is a new advertising feature, which allows brands to inject advertisements into the timelines of “non-followers”. This will be of great value to advertisers, especially since Twitter just announced that it has more than 100 million monthly active users around the world.
Over at Facebook, some changes are in order as well. This week, in an attempt to compete with Google +, Facebook revealed a new look for its “Friend List”. The new design allows users to have greater control over what they share and with whom they share it. Another feature that Facebook promoted this week was subscribing to profiles as opposed to “friending” people. By subscribing to a user’s profile, your newsfeed will show their public status updates and you can decide how much of these updates you would like to receive. This is yet another change in response to Google+.
Do you think changes made to Facebook will keep them more popular than Google+?
Social Media News of the Week: August 1, 2011
August 5, 2011 by Bailey
Filed under All, SMNofW, social media
The week started out with everyone discussing the debt ceiling and this held true for social media as well. Several Twitter hashtags popped up showing the country’s financial frustration, the most popular being #f***youWhiteHouse (we censor on this blog J). President Obama asked all citizens to turn to Twitter and tweet Republican lawmakers to #compromise. This campaign may have backfired a tad since he lost more than 36,000 followers in the process. I’m not sure if it had more to do with people feeling pressure or the fact that in four hours he released some 100 tweets asking people to tweet their GOP representatives.
If this wasn’t enough, Newt Gingrich has been accused of buying most of his Twitter followers. I hate to say this because I love that social media has become such an important part of our lives and politicians are embracing the platform, but COME ON people. There are important issues to address and to me these issues are definitely NOT fake followers and hashtag campaigns.
Enough ranting from me (what do I know, haha) and on to some fun stuff! Twitter has trashed their old version, Foursquare has introduced do-it-yourself business pages and Google+ is sending out their first business page invites today.
Just one last thing: Yesterday we had a food truck in front of our Charleston office and the food was amazing! I now know that they are so huge right now and are all over the social media scene. So blessed that we will have them twice a month from now on!
Plus or Minus? A Review of Google Plus
July 14, 2011 by Lyn Mettler
Filed under All, social media, TwitterMoms.com post
Google Plus is all the buzz in social media circles over the last week and a half and I got a chance to check it out recently.
After playing around in this latest social network, which is getting raves reviews from social media influencers, here’s my two cents on its potential uses for personal and business on my SocialMoms.com blog.
Social Media News of the Week: July 4, 2011
July 8, 2011 by Bailey
Filed under All, social media, social media week
This short holiday week was full of announcements! Facebook unveiled video chat powered by Skype! That’s a great idea for Facebook, because now you are able to increase your communication with friends all over without ever leaving the social network. Company pages can’t communicate with their “likers” yet but it’s just a matter of time before that’s an option and I’m sure video ads will be in the future as well!
What you might not know or remember is that MySpace released Skype-powered calls many moons ago in 2007! It’s funny how things don’t seem as cool when someone other than Facebook does them. In this case, many people just think Tom and MySpace were ahead of their time, considering Skype didn’t have the video option quite yet.
Google also released their Facebook competitor, Google+, and it’s getting rave reviews from early adopters and the social media glitterati! Here are 10 testimonials from those who are already registered courtesy of Mashable. We’re giving it a go here at Step Ahead and will have a blog next week detailing our thoughts.
I’m leaving you this week with a few questions: Did anyone follow Obama’s Twitter Town Hall? If so, what were your thoughts? Did anyone else religiously follow the TV show “The Voice” like I did? If you did, then you won’t be surprised that they snagged the title of “most social TV show in June”!
Final question: Who misses 4th of July already? I certainly do mainly because I love fireworks. If you love them like I do, here are a few great Twitter images from Independence Day!
Search Engine Round-up: Subterfuge, Spam & Swings
February 15, 2011 by Simon Ashton
Filed under All, seo
So we’re only half way through the second month of the year, and already things are heating up in the search engine battle between Bing and Google.
Firstly, Danny Sullivan broke the story that Google was accusing Bing of copying their search results.
For a full, detailed explanation I suggest you read the story here at Search Engine Land, but the basics are this – Google became suspicious that Bing was copying when the top results for some searches were the same even for misspellings and unusual search terms. So they sprang a trap…(!)
Yes, like something out of a Robert Ludlum novel*, Google manipulated their results for nonsense words such as ‘mbzrxpgjys’ and ‘hiybbprqag’, so that a particular honey pot page would show at the top of the search results. When these exact same pages showed up #1 on Bing too, Google had their confirmation.
(*If instead of writing books about kick-ass spies who look like Matt Damon, Ludlum actually wrote about the rather more dull topic of search engine positioning. Which seems unlikely, frankly.)
Once the story broke, Bing explained their side. Yes, the results were the same, they admitted, but because they were watching their users who have the IE toolbar turned on, and that influences the results people see. They were not copying Google.
Instead Bing turned the tables on Google, claiming the whole thing was an attempt to throw up a smokescreen* to avoid the fact that their search results are plagued with spam.
(*See? That’s totally something Jason Bourne would do.)
Which brings us to the second part of this month’s search engine news – Google’s latest attempt to find a way to block spam, particularly from content farms, such as those of Demand Media.
The plan is for a Chrome plugin which will allow users to block certain sites, while sending Google data about those sites so that they can analyze them and use that information to adjust the rankings accordingly.
Will it work? I’m skeptical. The amount of spam out there is tremendous, dwarfing the number of users who will a) use Chrome, b) also have the extension installed and c) use it regularly. However, I couldn’t be happier that at least Google is trying to do something about this mess.
Finally, the latest search engine stats were just released for January and show a 2% point swing from Google to Bing. A blip or a trend? What do you think?
Social Networks and Search – Two Great Tastes that Taste Great Together
December 14, 2010 by Simon Ashton
Filed under All, seo, social media
As we come to the very cold end of another year, it seems like 2010 could be remembered as the year that the social web and search began to properly work together.- Both Bing & Google do use retweets and Facebook posts as a ranking factor
- They both calculate the authority of the tweeter/poster, and give more/less weight depending
- Publicly available links on Facebook are tracked by both search engines
Social Media News of the Day: December 6, 2010
December 6, 2010 by Bailey
Filed under All, social media
All I Can Say Is…What??
Groupon has turned down Google’s $6 million offer and I’m honestly shocked! I understand that the group buying site is killing it but come on it’s $6 BILLION!! I have no idea what I’d do with $6 million let alone $6 billion. I can only assume that the owners of Groupon feel they will see a higher offer in the near future but, dang, that is one offer I would not have refused!
A More Informational Profile
Facebook updated the look of your profile page after Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance on 60 Minutes last night. The new layout is meant to be more informative about who you really are, and not surprisingly yet again there have been a resurgence of privacy concerns.
At the moment, you can opt-in or out of using the new profile and I’ve, of course, opted-in. It does bring your information up to the top, making it more noticeable and includes more images in addition to your basic information. As of now, with little use of the updated profile, I dig it, but we’ll see how I feel at the end of the week.
To those who’ve tried out the new Facebook profile, what are your thoughts?
Social Media News of the Day: December 1, 2010
December 1, 2010 by Bailey
Filed under All, social media
Yes, We Are Still in High School
I think most people, whether they loved their high school experience or hated it, remember the dreaded rumor! Well, no matter how long you’ve been out of high school, I know rumors still pop up in your life every now and then.
This week a huge rumor has been circulating around social media universe: will Google buy Groupon? This would be a major merger for the two companies, and Google has put in a $5.3 billion bid to purchase the group-buying site.
Groupon’s board is meeting today to discuss the bid, and the social media world should know soon how this will all play out! Thoughts?
Holiday Get and Give
Gap will include the new “Add to Foursquare” button on all their online ads for the holiday season. When you click on the button, it sets your Foursquare account to remind you to visit Gap when you check in close to a store. If you go and check in, you’ll get a 30% discount on one regularly-priced item.
What makes this deal even sweeter is that if you use the Foursquare discount, Gap will donate $1 to Camp Interactive, the organization of choice for Foursquare! Why not get a good deal on what you want and help others at the same time?
Google Instant – One Month In
October 12, 2010 by Simon Ashton
Filed under All, seo
I’m sure by now you’ve seen Google Instant, the latest change to the Google search page, which actually updates results as you type in the query, as it has been live for around a month now.
After the initial announcement came the usual flurry of excitement that accompanies every new Google launch. There were the predictable naysayers (from those not involved in SEO) that it meant the death of SEO. Which, by my calculations means SEO has about 42 times as many lives as a cat. The usual suspects, Matt Cutts (of Google) and Danny Sullivan (of Search Engine Land) explain why this is not the case. SEO is still alive and well, much to the chagrin of many a new media expert.
But for me, the bigger change is not so much in the way the search is delivered – Instant is really just an extention of the Search Suggest function – but the increasingly important role of personalization in results.
What this means is that Google is trying to give you more and more the kind of thing they think you will like to see. For instance, John Smith searches for ‘new york hotels’ and clicks on the websites for the Marriott, the Chelsea Hotel, the Hudson Hotel, etc, while Jane Brown searches for ‘new york hotels’ and clicks on the websites for Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz. So Google learns about what each of them prefers, and tries to tailor the results in future to more closely match what John or Jane like.
Similarly, if you search for ‘zoo’ in San Diego, and you may see San Diego zoo as #1, but travel to Jacksonville and you’ll see it change to Jacksonville zoo. Do a lot of gourmet/food searches, and then search for java and you’ll see coffee sites, but if you search for coding and programming things and search for java you’ll see sites about the Java programming language.
We’ve talked before on here about the incredible wealth of data that Google has. And if you think of Google keeping a record of every search you’ve ever made, and multiply that by the billions of other searches done each month, you can see how the picture they build up of the best search results becomes much clearer.
Of course personalization didn’t begin last month, it’s been an ongoing process for a couple of years now, but it is more and more a factor which needs to be taken in to account. There is no longer a top 10 of search results which should really be considered authorative or definititive. Everyone’s search results will be different, and growing more different as Google tweaks and improves, so we can no longer say you are #3 for this phrase or #1 for for that one.
Instead, we suggest measuring the success of the search engine campaigns by looking more closely at the amount and quality of the search engine traffic. How many visitors came from the search engines? How many pages did they look at? How long did they stay on the site? What was the bounce rate? Did they buy/sign up for the newsletter/request more information? And so on, and so on.
One month in, I have to say we’re very happy comparing the results for our clients against the quality of traffic they were receiving this time last year. In almost every case, the important benchmarks have shown an improvement, which is what we would have thought – because of course the flipside of Google improving the relevancy of their search results is better, more qualified people arriving at the websites.
We have always said that in theory SEO should be win-win-win. If you are looking for a Charleston hotel, Google helps you find that hotel and the hotel gets the business. Everyone is happy. Hopefully this latest update to the process proves to be just another step along that same path.
Google Instant – the Bob Dylan version
Social Media News of the Day: August 24, 2010
August 24, 2010 by Bailey
Filed under All, social media
Your Daily Dose?
We all need a little inspiration sometimes, but what if you could get it every day? My dad enjoys his daily dose of food inspiration while I prefer a great laugh in the morning to get me going. Mashable [offers up] a list of 20 fun and inspirational accounts to check out on Twitter.
The Unblockable
You would think that Mark Zuckerberg is unable to be blocked on Facebook because he is the creator, but that’s not the case. This past weekend it was released that you cannot block Zuckerberg, because it is an automated feature that kicks in when someone is blocked in high volumes. Sorry Mark!
The Beach Bum Android App
Google Earth, which allows you to experience a more in depth look at the globe, will now let you go under water on its Android app. It will be able to pinpoint sweet surf spots and what creatures are looming underneath your feet. If you’re interested in this application this article provides a QR code to download it. Enjoy!
