Posts Tagged ‘google’
Why take the Google+ page plunge?
November 18th, 2011
Google+ launched Google+ pages last week, in direct competition with Facebook, and the evidence shows that many brands have set up a page over the first week of activity, at least according to research by SEO firm BrightEdge, who confirmed ‘61 percent of world’s top 100 brands have already created Google+ pages‘, which is pretty impressive considering the time frame.
The question that keeps coming up is: ‘Why do I need a Facebook page and a Google+ page?’ Many of those brands that have taken the plunge already will have grabbed their Google+ page, simply to secure it, which is reason enough at least in the short term. Some may be surprised to hear though that it’s easy to set up fake pages so look for the verified badge when you visit the site.
So why does a brand need a Google+ page? Well, there are many reasons, 18.5 of which are defined in Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp’s piece on the Drum last week, and as he suggested, the integration of Analytics, YouTube, Adwords, Picassa offers an advantage over Facebook, and perhaps an insight into the longer term strategy.
Obviously Facebook is the prime motivation for the Google+ launch, and many feel Google+ is too far behind to mount an effective challenge, but the issue here is not so much about the stand alone effectiveness of Google+ vs Facebook, but the sheer scale of Google products that Google + already integrates, and will undoubtedly increase in the future. Let’s also not forget Google’s strength, its search engine, which has led to its Google+ pages already out ranking Facebook brand pages, which is reason enough for some brands to get involved.
The BrightEdge analysis showed Google+ pages on average appeared in the top 12 Google search results for the corresponding brand, while the brand’s Facebook pages on average appeared in the top 13 or 14 listed results.
The flexibility in connectedness, and search, gives Google the long term edge in terms of synching with its full range of services. Of course many services also synch with Facebook, but Google’s vision seems to take this to another level. We’re not talking about beating Facebook, Google is simply building around it and making it less relevant.
The reality is we’re a long way away from that today as 94 percent of the Top 100 brands analysed by BrightEdge have a presence on Facebook, and in terms of the big brands, like Coke, McDonalds and Verizon each only has dozens of fans on Google+, but millions of Facebook fans. The review of Facebook and Google+ properties for the top 100 brands showed a collective total of almost 300 million Facebook fans, compared to approximately 148,000 Google+ followers for these same brands.
Looking at the figures today, the task ahead of Google+ seems insurmountable, but i suspect the gulf between Facebook and Google+ will fall as the connected battle gets into second gear, and Google has already announced a pilot program that will allow businesses and brands to manage their Google+ Pages using a number of third-party applications, including Buddy Media, Context Optional, Hearsay Social, HootSuite, Involver, and Vitrue.
The issue is not so much about Google+ catching Facebook, but about offering a viable and useful reason to have a Google+ page as well. We may see different verticals opting for different networks based on reach and audience in the future, but with these options brands have ever more increasing routes to listening and engaging with their communities.
Google+ enforces real names rule but is it really necessary?
July 28th, 2011
Great article by BBC journalist Alex Hudson on why Google + insists on users giving their real names when they set up their account. The beta service has been hit hard this week because it suspended accounts that did not reveal users’ real names with many people questioning the “do no evil” company’s action.
As Alex says, Google+ took only 24 days to reach 20 million users but their decision to delete accounts without real names attached has caused anger and he asks a relevant question – “So why do social networks insist on your real name?”
Google has been upfront and says that for Google + to work effectively people should be able to search for friends and family quickly, easily, which demands that account holders use their real names. It also points out that its guidelines mirror those of other social networks.
Here’s the thing, though. The culture of the web has always had space and time for anonymity. I’d argue that the early growth of the web was in some part fuelled by this anonymity, allowing for role play and creation of alternative personas.
Google + is currently moving web culture towards a prosaic, potentially ossifying mode. To me, the suspension actions have a whiff of corporatism and control, not to say the potential for data harvesting that could have unacceptable consequences although Google argues that the ‘real names’ imperative will combat spam.
There is no shortage of views on this, as the 200+ comments on Alex’s article demonstrate. Join in!
July 21st, 2011
In just three weeks Google + has exploded onto the scene with an estimated 18 million users according to CNET news.
The statistics were compiled by Ancestry.com co-founder Paul Allen.
According to the same post this could have been a lot more if Google had actively been promoting it via it’s other channels and services, which I assume it will start doing soon. Add this to the reported fact that Google is trying to lure more celebrities to the site in an attempt to generate buzz should undoubtedly help.
Another factor that should help Google + is the iOS app, which launched on Tuesday, it’s already the top free app in the app store, unfortunately it’s only for iPhone and the iPod touch.
July 6th, 2011
Want to check out Google + but don’t have an invite? Well here is the next best thing. It’s called Circle Hack and has been designed to copy the circles feature on Google +. It is simply a way to organise friends into lists that can then be interacted with directly. Once a circle is organised via drag and drop the user clicks on the “Create list” link in the centre of the new circle to name it, and it is created.
Circle Hack is defined as “a one-night experiment with Javascript”, and is not affiliated with Facebook.
Tiny URL for your Google+ profile
July 5th, 2011
As one of the lucky few to get an invite to Google + so far, I’m always on the look out for the next wave of associated tools. I’ve not yet had a proper play with Google +, but first impressions are positive. To find out more I can recommend this post: Chris Brogan’s The Google Plus 50
One of the first tools you probably want to look at is http://gplus.to/ which is essentially a link shortening tool, which is useful for adding a Google + account in your email signature or similar. I imagine Google will create some sort of official app soon, but in the meantime this is very simple to use, so why not give it a go!
Swiffy gets overshadowed by Google+
June 29th, 2011
Google+ has just been announced and has been the talk of the town ever since, and rightly so, but we are no nearer to actually finding out if it’s any good. We just hope it won’t follow in the footsteps of Google’s complex Wave application which is no longer in development.
However, something else has also been launched by Google, which could be just as important. Swiffy from Google labs, converts Flash SWF files to HTML5, allowing you to reuse Flash content on devices without a Flash player. Read the FAQ here.
According to Marcel Gordon, Swiffy’s product manager, the project was started by an engineering intern named Pieter Senster, who wanted to explore how to display Flash ads on devices like the iPhone and iPad, which don’t support Flash. “Pieter made such great progress that Google hired him full time and formed a team to work on the project.”
Facebook Faces Friday 13th horror after commencing open hostilities with Google
May 13th, 2011
Today maybe Friday 13th, but yesterday marked the realisation of a nightmare scenario for Facebook, when news broke that it had hired a PR agency to plant negative stories about its big rival Google.
The stories specifically related to a privacy issue surrounding the Google Social Circle tool, which allows Gmail users to see information about their friends and friends of friends.
Dan Lyons at The Daily Beast broke the story yesterday (May 12th), and it has been growing ever since. If you’re not familiar with Lyons, he spent 10 years at Forbes and is now technology editor at Newsweek and the creator of Fake Steve Jobs.
He confirmed: “For the past few days, a mystery has been unfolding in Silicon Valley. Somebody, it seems, hired Burson-Marsteller, a top public-relations firm, to pitch anti-Google stories to newspapers, urging them to investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy. Burson even offered to help an influential blogger write a Google-bashing op-ed, which it promised it could place in outlets like The Washington Post, Politico, and The Huffington Post.
“The plot backfired when the blogger turned down Burson’s offer and posted the emails that Burson had sent him. It got worse when USA Today broke a story accusing Burson of spreading a “whisper campaign” about Google “on behalf of an unnamed client.” See the emails here which included this pitch from Burson: “The American people must be made aware of the now immediate intrusions into their deeply personal lives Google is cataloging and broadcasting every minute of every day-without their permission.”
The Daily Beast story confirmed the client was Facebook, and Burson-Marsteller was seeding the story that Google Social Circle was “designed to scrape private data and build deeply personal dossiers on millions of users-in a direct and flagrant violation of Google’s agreement with the FTC.”
Facebook has since admitted it, citing two reasons: “First, because it believes Google is doing some things in social networking that raise privacy concerns; second, and perhaps more important, because Facebook resents Google’s attempts to use Facebook data in its own social-networking service.”
Let’s leave to one side claims of data ownership from Facebook, and focus on what exactly Facebook was trying to achieve.
If the key objective of the campaign was to spread anti-Google stories and highlight that Google was violating user privacy, surely the campaign has in fact achieved exactly the opposite.
I would also have hoped that these sorts of tactics, which certainly go on, would not have been necessary for such a young and progressive organisation that should have learnt from mistakes of corporate comms of a by-gone era.
Even if we remove the ethical issue for a moment, the alarm bells should still have been ringing when this campaign was discussed. Whether this idea originated from Facebook or the agency, the potential negatives vastly outweigh the potential positives, and someone must have said ‘what if this gets out?’ After all, in the socially-connected world we live in, it was always going to be a big possibility.
As Facebook wakes up to its Friday 13th PR nightmare, and the ongoing fallout, what does this mean for the rest of us? Is it an insight into the long-brewing hostilities between the two biggest boys on the digital block? Is it a pre-emptive strike by Facebook as it knows Google is focused on the social networking space? Is Facebook right in its accusations?
The truth is none of these points really matter in the near future as Facebook has managed to put the negative spotlight on itself and destroy any platform it may have been trying to build by approaching a delicate issue with a poorly judged bully-boy tactic.
I’m sure Google isn’t totally innocent, but by making the first public move, Facebook has given itself a mountain to climb.
Read more at:
Quality content to be rewarded by Google algorithm change
April 15th, 2011
Content farms have long been the antithesis of quality content providers. In theory, those that develop relevant and quality content should find themselves higher in search engine results pages than the repetitive, keyword-heavy farmed content. However, that has not always been the case.
Google has consistently informed us that quality content combined with real customer engagement will be rewarded by an improvement on SERPs (assuming the website meets basic organic search optimisation), and this week a post titled: ‘High-quality sites algorithm goes global, incorporates user feedback’ on the Google Webmaster Central blog by Amit Singhal seems to have taken a large step towards making this a reality.
He confirmed: “Over a month ago we introduced an algorithmic improvement designed to help people
find more high-quality sites in search. Since then we’ve gotten a lot of positive responses about the change: searchers are finding better results, and many great publishers are getting more traffic.
“Today we’ve rolled out this improvement globally to all English-language Google users, and we’ve also incorporated new user feedback signals to help people find better search results. In some high-confidence situations, we are beginning to incorporate data about the sites that users block into our algorithms. In addition, this change also goes deeper into the “long tail” of low-quality websites to return higher-quality results where the algorithm might not have been able to make an assessment before. The impact of these new signals is smaller in scope than the original change: about 2% of U.S. queries are affected by a reasonable amount, compared with almost 12% of U.S. queries for the original change.”
Fundamentally, this should mean that offering quality content and customer engagement will be rewarded, and low quality websites, even those with high traffic, will not necessarily trump those that are trying to make the web a better place with useful content.
Obviously it will take some time for the algorithm to take effect, but this is a technical change to back up Google’s vision, and should be applauded, at least in theory.
As Singhal recently confirmed himself: “Google depends on the high-quality content created by wonderful websites around the world, and we do have a responsibility to encourage a healthy web ecosystem.
“It is important for high-quality sites to be rewarded, and that’s exactly what this change does.”
I only hope this isn’t another false dawn in the clean-up of some of the Web’s less scrupulous sites, and that finally we see both reputation and relevancy, as well as traffic and SEO, worthy of ranking.
Singhal closed by saying: “Google’s quality guidelines provide helpful information about how to improve your site. As sites change, our algorithmic rankings will update to reflect that. In addition, you’re welcome to post in our Webmaster Help Forums. While we aren’t making any manual exceptions, we will consider this feedback as we continue to refine our algorithms.”
I think we should all take his advice, and if there isn’t an improvement we should also do our best to let Google know it isn’t good enough.
March 31st, 2011
With all the talk today dominated by the Google +1 Button (read the Independent review here), I wanted to offer you something completely different that Google has been working on.
Over at Google labs, they have been working on a new application called Google Talk Guru - Google says it is: “An application intended for chat (IM) users, including those using chat clients on low-end phones, allowing them to answer simple web queries from the context of their chat application. First invite guru@googlelabs.com to chat, and then send queries via your chat client. Categories supported include weather, translation, unit and currency conversions, and sports scores”
Another Google Labs products that I encourage you to take a look at is Google Body. A detailed 3D model of the human body. You can peel back anatomical layers, zoom in, and navigate to parts that interest you. Click to identify anatomy, or search for muscles, organs, bones and more.
You need Google Chrome 10 or Mozilla Firefox 4 to view it, i promise you it’s worth it!
Google, culturomics and Harvard’s history gift
December 17th, 2010
Take two full centuries of history that have been captured, more or less, in 5,195,769 digitised books. Apply an exceptional tool; review, sift and discover new insights.
Where to start? Well, a team of Harvard researchers has worked with Google to devise a way to quantitatively analyse human culture through online analysis of the Google Books resource, which can now be probed for cultural trends using Google’s new ‘culturomics’ tool.
The team constructed a corpus of digitised texts containing about 4 per cent of all books ever printed. Analysis of this enables us to investigate cultural trends quantitatively.
The research, published in Science journal this week, surveys the vast terrain of ‘culturomics’, focusing on linguistic and cultural phenomena reflected in the English language between 1800 and 2000. A subscription is needed to access the study.
The team give us a simple way to interrogate Google Books data and discover insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship and historical epidemiology.
It is the largest data release in the history of the humanities; the data set has more than 500 billion words, around three-quarters in English, with smaller amounts in French, Spanish, German, Chinese and Russian.
The team suggests that ‘culturomics’ extends the boundaries of rigorous quantitative inquiry to a wide array of new phenomena spanning the social sciences and the humanities.
Big thanks for this significant shift to: Jean-Baptiste Michel, Yuan Kui Shen, Aviva P. Aiden, Adrian Veres, Matthew K. Gray, The Google Books Team, Joseph P. Pickett, Dale Hoiberg1, Dan Clancy, Peter Norvig, Jon Orwant, Steven Pinker, Martin A. Nowak and Erez Lieberman Aiden. And you can read more on Harvard Gazette.
You should try this tool – it gives instant and potentially very rich historical context for the growth of cultural ‘drivers’. It’s also fun! For instance, I was surprised that the term “revolution” showed a particular historical flow but also tickled by the graph plot around “romance”.
Quite terrifyingly, Google offers the datasets backing the visual information. These were generated last year and you can learn more here.
Google has good things to say about the open distribution of historical texts. Worth a look: