Perhaps you are aware of these current networks. But did you know that Google has been into social networks since just about the time they went public. Some of Google's social holdings and creations.
In 2001 they acquired Usenet and renamed it Google Groups.
Sprinks, 2003. a blogging network to be renamed Blogger.
Picasa, 2004, an image organizer and sharing service.
Dodgeball, 2005, a social network to be renamed Google Latitude.
But can you guess what Google's most successful social network is?
Actually there are two.One being more veiled than the other.
You Tube! Yes the video site is a social network. The videos get commented and shared across You Tube and embedded into other sites.
Some of You Tube's own statistics:
60 hours of video are uploaded every minute, or one hour of video is uploaded to YouTube every second.
Over 4 billion videos are viewed a day
Over 800 million unique users visit YouTube each month
Over 3 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube
More video is uploaded to YouTube in one month than the 3 major US networks created in 60 years
70% of YouTube traffic comes from outside the US
YouTube is localized in 39 countries and across 54 languages
In 2011, YouTube had more than 1 trillion views or almost 140 views for every person on Earth
Now this one might shock you.
My second most important social technology is reviews curated and created on Google Places. For many of theo world not locked into digital gadgetry, reviews will be used. Reviews are a very necessary part of any company reputation management program. As bad reviews can ruin a potential prospect from calling you.
So after reading this, I hope you can begin to understand that much of the hyperbole we hear on the web about the latest greatest is often nothing new. There are still great conversations happening through the old Usenet/Google Groups. And often these groups harbor old aged participants that just might fit your profile.
I also hope that you can begin to realize the need for a comprehensive publishing initiative within your company that syndicates your content. And the biggest place that you can do that is You Tube.
Additionally, Google Places and other local review sites are an integral part of your reputation online.
Do remember Lady Gaga at last years arrival to the Grammy's? She was birthed from a giant egg!
If you have mentioned Gaga's appearance at least once in delight or in disgust. Gaga wins. And I would bet you have spread the Gaga meme to at least one other person.
And if you have not told anyone your opinion, you at least have had the conversation in your head. Waiting for the right moment to spread the meme.
Very few of us can take a neutral position on Lady Gaga and her antics.
This "positioning" by her is nothing short of brilliant.
Of course she stands on the shoulders of of music and promotion giants such as Iggy Pop, David Bowie, and Madonna.
But while these performers reinvented themselves for every new album release. It seems Gaga reinvents herself for every appearance in the spot light.
In an industry scraping for profits. Gaga is one of the few performers who consistently makes money.
Kim Kardashian, Social Media and Reality TV
Have you ever wondered why Kim Kardashian can even exist in our vocabulary? Or Kendra Wilkinson? Holly's Word? None display any talent whatsoever as far as I can tell other than to titillate us with their "titilators" and more importantly their knack for self promotion. And the dollars are real folks.
Kim Kardashian brand will create by some estimates $1million a month and it all started with a Sex tape and hanging with a few other sex tapers like Paris Hilton.
This has been so dramatic a rise for basically doing nothing, that I have a conspiracy theory that Mrs. Kardashian had the tape incident written in as part of her publicity campaign to launch the family empire. But I digress.
Embrace Your Polarizer
So do I suggest that you go this route?
No no not at all. But in line with some of the stuff I have written in the past about Eddie Bernays, and polarization. Do not be afraid to offend. Because you simply cannot attract without offending.
That is to provide you and I advertising. Not the social media thing and the search engine thing. They are merely vehicles to gather information. Google and Facebook are tracking us so that they can produce better ads. Ironically, all this work, all this web space, and technology is really about building a media empire.
Think about all the stuff Google owns and provides.
Many folks whine and complain that Google has ruined their search engine results. The Google original dictate of providing relevancy is dead. And as such It is blasphemy cry the SEO enthusiasts.
They whine that the home page of a Google search is littered with Ads, Videos (with ads), Photos, News, Blogs, ad nauseum. Most insiders claim that the search from Google is worst than ever.
Check out some of the stuff Google provides to us as Webmasters all for free.
Adwords
Analytics
Webmaster
Profile
Blogging
Split Test Tools
Keyword Research
Google Plus For Business
Adsense (they even let us make money off their ads)
Other productivity tools include a full suite of office programs, Gmail, as well as other neat things like music storage and free books and places to store our family videos and pictures. What nice people those Google people!
With these tools they can track what we buy and our customers buy, what music you are into and what websites you visit. And get this. What you probably will buy, what music you might want next, and what site you might visit next or soon.
The Devil Does What the Devil Does.
I once had a pal who I set up selling mortgage leads. He was desperate for a sale and was not yet able to locate his own buyers. He had great leads but no idea where to find a buyer.
I had heard of a mutual acquaintance of who my pal had thought was of very questionable character, but he needed mortgage leads.
I hooked them up and forgot about it. I found out several months later that all was going well up and until this buyer stopped paying on already delivered leads.
I told my friend that he had done a deal with devil. Sometimes in business, we regrettably do that. But at least be smart enough to build into your pricing the eventuality that the devil will do what he eventually does. He is in no way your advocate and will always not only act as a business should in their own self interest, but will additionally seek advantage over you. Just because it can.
With Google, we are indeed doing a deal with the devil. Our privacy is being eaten up without prejudice on a daily basis. It is even uncool to complain about it. Twenty years ago there would have been an outcry. Today it is just the way things are. To hearken images of Orwell's 1984 simply put us in the camp of not "getting it".
However, if you have been in the business on line for any amount of time you have either sought out Google love or have already got it. Or like some of us veterans you have got it, lost it, and gotten it again over and over again.
Everything the Yellow Pages Wishes it Could Be
But indeed with all these free cool tools Google is taking our behavior and codifying it into a trend. The more data points they have on us the more they can render us not just relevant search results, but more importantly relevant advertisements.
This is everything the Yellow Pages wishes they could have been.
A big money block is in local for Google and we all do things locally. So think about why would Google hassle with the maps and taking photos of every house and business in America? I mean what a pain right?
Because as the funny car snapped the photo of your house, they grabbed and recorded your ip address and no doubt have cross referenced that with freely available ownership information (Are you a renter or owner). Minimally.
As you set up your Android cell phone, you quite possibly used your Gmail account. That Gmail account cross correlates with your home information and all your behavior there. So as you search for spots on your phone or use gps on the maps, I can see a day when Google most likely will serve you relevant advertising that matches to your current location and what you have searched for in the past on your phone and other computers.
Show Me the Money Google
This is the direction Google and Facebook wants to go . The question you need to ask is "how can I take advantage of this?"
The simple answer is you must know the players in the game, the rules of the game, and how to play it.
Google respects two things. No scratch that. Google craves content and references to that content (links and citations).
With content you can syndicate and get into lots of web places. Text, video, pictures, various documents are all indexed by Google.
The opportunities are not only getting your own pages indexed in as many ways as creatively possible. But also the other pages where your content is syndicated like videos and pictures.
Your business can also show up in many local directories and Google Places.
Give us a call or email and find out how you can make this giant task much more manageable and scalable for your business to produce more leads. 310 - 533 -9145
I announced the war with Google and Facebook over a year ago. Did SEO Just Die
Since then many have said that yes SEO is dead. As Google has changed time and time again. Over the next few weeks I will be chronicling some of these deep changes that are effecting your website and your social graph right now.
»
Its a Social World In a nutshell Google blinked. And much of that has do with the velocity of content being created in the social media. Facebook, Twitter and more. And now the new kid on the block Pinterest is digging into the Facebook Traffic.
»
Its about the data. Google's and Facebook's business is not search and Social. It is datamining. While Google has been changing many have complained that Google is no longer relevant. That is the point of search relevancy isn't it?
Google's job is guessing at your and my behavior such that they can serve us relevant advertising.
Google grabs that data through all the data it gets from your cookied searches, visits to websites with adsense, analytics etc, your signed-in behavior, and your Google Plus behavior and your Android phone locations and behavior.
The world just got smaller. Do a search in New York and chances are real good that Google will serve you local results having to do with services in New York. Google Places dominates the local searches with at least 4 results. Often times number 1 of yesterday, is now possibly 8.
Littered within that search will often be images and videos. We ran a post years ago that some day Google will be the new Yellow Pages. That day has come.
»
Disinformation. Google has succeeded largely from incredible public relations to compliment their just good enough search engine. With their online personalities, they have been able to spread vast and complicated concepts to misinform what is/was actually going on.
The more things change the more they stay the same. Google has always been about links, then the title tag and matching h tags. This concept has not changed. Its just that there is less of the same coveted prize called organic search results for you to grab.
Less competitive terms are easy as they have always been and the super competitive keywords will continue to be difficult to get.
Links have expanded in their definition. Links are 80% of the game. But now you have likes, Google pluses, and other social markers that Google desperately is trying to track. I call these social noise makers.
One reason Google has moved forward with Google Plus as an answer to Facebook, and recently adding SearchPlus Your World is that they were being blocked out of tracking social graphsof the biggies Twitter and Facebook.
Additionally local citations, or your business name, address, city, zip and phone weigh heavily for your Google Places (local) ranking. They serve the equivalence of links in local search.
»
To make things more crazy. Your website will need to adjust for mobile phonessome day soon as more and more searchers are using mobile phones to search the web. Soon to out number desktop searchers.
The long term answer is to get strategic and hire a firm like Spider Juice Technologies who can help you get your arms around the changes, while not getting swallowed up by all the marketing hype.
Step 1 is to embrace the fact that you must become a publisher of your own unique content, ghost written content, curated content, and collaborated content if you are to survive in this ever changing online environment.
Because the fact is. Google simply doesn't need you anymore.
Google +1 is a similar tool. Bing has the advantage of getting some of at least Facebook data to include in their ranking factors. But Google cannot get very deep profile data. Not until starting the Google Plus One Social Network.
Which in many ways is bringing all their tools into one house. By conglomerating all their tools into one profile Google is able to measure your own authority better.
This brings to mind a video I recently did that displayed the advantages that Facebook and Google have over one another.
Facebook launched their social graph over a year ago. And Google uses a concept called FOAF. Friend of a friend. By measuring the authority of each friend that is "linked" to another friend, the idea is that the authority can drip down through the network.
Very similar to linking.
On Page Social Networks
On Facebook your pages are indexed onto Google or Bing to the extent that Facebook or any other social network will allow them. Your personal profile is ranked slightly with limited info and a chance for a no followed generic anchor text.
While a Fanpage gets indexed. Thus its important to title Fanpages correctly. The name of the page is the title tag. Also any text you provide. And probably the most underutilized part of Fanpages that offers a gold mine of ranking potential. The Notes.
It is more important than ever to embrace a publishing model to allow you to rapidly take advantage of publishing opportunities and rapid change in the social media and searchable web.
SEO is and always has been about reputation management. But with the advent of social media it has swelled to include a number of factors that can expand or kill a business. Get the report.
This is the first part of a series of explorations into how social and seo are becoming closer and closer.
Click the ebook to download.
As promised the Ebook has been taken off line and is being updated and then matriculated into the Socialized SEO Platform. Go over there and opt in for updates on the killer content.
"From 2008 to 2009, usage of consumer ratings and reviews increased to 25 percent (+3) among IYP searchers and to 27 percent (+5) among general searchers. Additionally, people who use social networking sites for local business information are more likely to use consumer reviews (53 percent)... It's interesting that, while overall usage of ratings and reviews is only 24 percent, its importance during the business selection process is 57 percent! Because users of ratings and reviews heavily rely on them to select a company to do business with, they should be a serious component of any marketer's online strategy." Gregg Stewart, of TMP Marketing (a company that conducts studies with Comscore)
Get more special reports and access to the exclusive backroom.
I am not going to get into the intricacies of this so much as you can guess if you have any experience at all with Facebook.
However, lets get a bit more aggressive shall we?
How can we get our message onto more profiles such that we get more traffic.
Engage other people.Sharing engages people with you. It does nothing for the engines until your content that you want found is shared or liked or tweeted etc. You engage to get folks to get into you and your stuff. So they will consume your content (maybe buy) and share your stuff.
Comment on other profile walls.
Tag other profiles onto your pictures or videos. This puts your message onto their wall. Some people may not like this. One way around it is to ask if they will themselves tag their profile to a picture. Jonathan Altfeld asked me to do this for a flyer of his for a seminar. How could I help but say yes?
You know the game. The next big thing. And online the next big thing is every other day. Often times I need to council my clients that they need to blog or publish to be successful online. More often than not it falls on deaf ears because it is not very fun. Blasting crap all over the net is easier and less work.
A little Fun from Jack and Tom with Today's theme.
Facebook Killed Plug N Play
As business people we fight long and hard to scale everything we do. So Realtors used IDX. And syndicated using tools from their IDX providers or tools like Postlets.com. Other industries are not so lucky to already have a built in content mill ready to churn out to the masses.
Either way social media, particularly Facebook has made the Plug N Play a death trap. Sure scale is important. But it is called social media for a reason.
Social Democracy
When you essentially spam Facebook just to spam Facebook, you will never know that your post was called spam, or you were removed from ones wall. Call it Social Democracy. There is no dislike button on Facebook. But what I described quietly serves the same purpose.
Look at your own profile of "friends" see how often they:
Post on their own profile.
Engage others via Comments or Likes.
The last time they were active.
What is the quality of the commentary on others posts and on their own?
Finally The Dirty Truth of Social Media
There may be 700 Million + folks on Facebook, but this little experiment will prove out that there is not as much socializing going on as the numbers might imply. And that can serve as your trap or your opportunity to spread your message. People do not know what to do when they get onto the social media. Engage them and you can easily become a thought leader in your niche.
However, do not fall into another trap whereby you go around asking if someone wants to buy your stuff. Socialize with them and talk about things that they care about. Think of it as a giant Chamber of Commerce meeting.
Google has released their own social noise maker called plus one. OR +1. This is Google's answer to Facebook's like button. And as I have said before that likes are the new links as Google, and Bing embrace the social authority of ones social graph. Neglect to use these at your own sites demise. Twitter just released their Follow button whereby you can follow an individual or company on Twitter.
I have counseled my real estate agent clients to be their neighborhood advocate. That means be the online source of hyperlocal or neighborhood information. This advise really can apply to any local business from the dentist, to the plumber and even restaurant, and more.
What most people think is that what I mean is to post dry boring statistics about home values, and recently sold homes. Of course for a home owner these things are a big deal when they are considering "hows the market?". However, they are a mere blip on the radar for most of the time. Thus, your message is wasted.
Instead, any local business can stoke community pride by video taping the events they participate inside that community.
If you properly tag your YouTube video you will get local folks watching your video about their town.
This was brought home to me the other day as I posted a video of our local home town parade we attend most every year.
I put the video up on YouTube late Saturday night. By Sunday morning it was already at 37 views. As of right now Monday morning it is 126. Based on experience it will keep growing. I also posted pictures of the parade and the video into Facebook.
So imagine if I would have put Tim's Real Estate, Or Torrance Dentist, or Torrance Fill in the blank, as a watermark, or bookend on either side of the video? 126 People would see my message so far. The marketing benefits of doing this are delightful.
Branding
Community involvement
Socialized SEO as the video gets picked up by the social nets
Its cheap
Its ongoing
You are not always selling, youare perceived as a community advocate
Its more fun!
Imagine if I hammed it up a bit as roving reporter and placed the branded bookend and footers?
Here is the short clip and a photo taken by my daughter. Turn your speakers down.
You can also post your photos and watermark them with your appropriate branding. Put them on photo sites like Flikr with full creative common rights so people use them on their website. Post them across the social media and your message spreads virally.
Recent Comments