All Entries Tagged With: "google"

The End of Spam?

Twitter is cracking down on spam. (Check out the awesome graph in this ReadWriteWeb article!) Twitter reported a week ago that the percentage of spam tweets per day is currently 1% or less. That’s great news for anyone trying to search Twitter for information or marketing leads.

Facebook also announced stricter rules for its two-year-old advertising service. The company is now using a “part human, part automated” system of assessing its engagement ads. Viewers can now approve or disapprove of the ad and say why. The system will reject ads that use “arbitrary profile-based copy” or false incentives to attract clicks.

This has two effects:

For the business- Click through rates are going to drop. CPM’s for mid-sized companies trying to get some headway are going to obviously suffer- at least in the short term.
For the consumer- Good news. You’ll get less of those spammy “try viagra”,  ”flatten those abs” ads targeted  towards you because of age or gender.

Remember in the early days of SEO when companies gamed the Google search algorithims by stuff their site full of keywords, tags, and metatags? Google smartened up and changed their search algorithims. Facebook is now smartening up too after seeing their ad platform get abused by spammers. This time they’re letting technology and the users help redefine appropriate advertisements.

So, this makes me want to throw out three statements for general consumption:

• What will spammers target next- will it be FourSquare or Flickr?
• Since Facebook’s 400 million plus members have the ability to rate/assess advertisements, will Google try to do the same thing with Buzz or something similar?
• Will the newly empowered users of the social media universe be able to eradicate spam all together?!!

Getting Your Content Out There – Fast.

Content is considered the “currency” of social media. Content is made by you, your company, you favorite blogger, news outlet and more..

Now, how do you/they make the content easier to find? Read on.

The algorithms that have made Google famous may be replaced in the near future with a new indexing system that will be better for web publishers out there. According to ReadWriteWeb, the system “will enable web publishers of any size to automatically submit new content to Google for indexing within seconds of that content being published.” Sounds good right?

The system is called PubSubHubbub (PuSH), and that article explains it better than I could; you can find more technical information here, and a great explanatory video here.  The kicker is that anyone can use this method of distributing content; it is entirely free code. And people are taking advantage: Wordpress has already adopted it so now, all your new content will get sent within a matter of seconds to those who subscribed to receive it.

Besides being a more efficient for Google to catalog everything, now, it won’t be just your tweets getting out to your readers in real time, but your blog posts as soon as you write them. The Web is moving to real time more and more every day, which is good news for marketers. Looking to break the latest story, lead the dialogue? Then you need your content available in real time. Stephen at Impact Media (which also reported on the PuSH announcement from Google) makes a good case that this sort of cataloguing won’t topple the search algorithims of today, but I think more people are interested in what’s happening right now than Stephen suggests and the faster you get your content into the search engines and their news feeds, the more likely they’ll see it.

Google Buzz, Part Deux

Let’s talk more about Google Buzz.   I mentioned this a few weeks ago giving you my general impressions of the new platform, and it seems the general consensus on the web bounces between “I HATE IT!” (which tends to be the gut reaction whenever a major player releases a new feature) and “let’s give it more time.”

I attribute the two reactions to two things: First, Buzz was automatically integrated with everyone’s Gmail. You had to click “accept” on a pop up menu – before you even got a chance to see what it was like! Second, it’s value is not immediately apparent.

Although Google automatically linked you to all your Gmail accounts, the learning curve to get the most out of it is pretty steep.

 I ‘m still trying to figure out how to integrate Buzz with of my other social media tools because the services it provides are already filled by Twitter and Facebook. In fact, Mashable readers ranked it third behind these two older platforms.

I

t’s not an intuitive program. If you’re looking for some basic guides to using Buzz, check here and here and here , and of course, Google itself. Just the presence of so many “how-to” guides is telling; there are lots of guides for Twitter, but those talk about the nuances of tweeting, not how to adjust settings, or worse, disable it. This is a big challenge for Google.

 Couple that with the multiple concerns about privacy, and no wonder people are upset.

However, Buzz is gaining some traction.

• A significant number of businesses are developing Buzz profiles and getting active. Here are some big businesses I was able to find  using Buzz: Samsung USA, Vizio, Verizon, CNN, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and more. (It took me a while to find where to search for profiles, just use the search bar at the bottom of this page.)
• Wordpress has already implemented a “Buzz This” feature for the blogs it hosts and HuffPost and TechCrunch have added “Buzz This” icons alongside Facebook and Twitter sharing icons
• The Washington Post reported last week that, according to AddThis, sharing via Google Reader has increased by 35% since Buzz launched. Still small potatoes compared to sharing on Facebook and retweeting, but presumably there will be more to come.

The bottom line is that these major organizations are paying attention. So as annoying as it may seem right now, you  probably should too.

The Buzz on Google Buzz

Unless you’ve been living under a rock these past few days, Google just entered the Social Media World- here are some quick initial thoughts. (and if you haven’t heard about Google Buzz, it’s ok, because being under a rock isn’t always a bad thing)

What is Google Buzz?
Combine Gmail and the status updates you find in Facebook. Throw in a photo and link sharing, and you have a real-time update of what your friends (who need gmail accounts of course) are doing.  There is obviously much more functionality here, but those are the basics for now, we’ll cover the nitty gritty in a later post.

The Pros
- Relatively easy customer interface that sits alongside your gmail inbox. For heavy users of gmail.com, this is a good thing. If you push your gmail to your phone or Outlook/Mac’s Mail, well you might not use it that much.
- No limits. Unlike Twitter, you aren’t limited to 140 characters. Who knows, people may begin to start blogging via Google Buzz?
- Mobile. Seamless integration with your mobile device with geo-location as well. So you can see what people are saying and where they are saying it.  Fairly similar to FourSquare and those who use Twitter with geo-location turned on.
-Content aggregation. Not surprisingly, Buzz allows you to integrate with other products, so when you add photos to Picasa, share something on Google Reader, watch something on YouTube or blog about something, your friends on Buzz, will get “buzzed”. Note that you can’t sync with Facebook…

The Cons
- The Buzz “stream” isn’t chronological. For those of us used to Twitter and Facebook, updates are chronological, but not exactly in Buzz. Google adds the latest comment on anything to the top of the Buzz stream. So, if one of your friends posted some great pictures on Buzz 10 minutes ago, But  if you have 13 people (and complete strangers mind you) commenting on someone else’s buzz, then your friend’s post gets slowly moved to the bottom. Google- pay attention here!
- Giving people so much room to say something and share  something may really clutter things up. That’s what makes Twitter so good….
- What makes a Google Buzz “friend”?  You may now get followed by other people using gmail/buzz. Does that mean you should follow them back? Twitter users probably will, but facebook-only users (vast majority of people) probably won’t. They’re comfortable with their Facebook friends because they share a common friendship around something. The only thing that connects fellow buzz users is a gmail account..

General Thoughts

-Nice early entry by Google. I think Google is still in the “test and learn” phase.
- Don’t jump on the bandwagon quite yet- Google will (should) probably tweak things in the next few months to make the user interface better. The lack of a chronological stream is quite confusing
-I think success of buzz will be directly related to not how many people use it, but simply how people use it. If people start adding all of their content to buzz, it will be a lot of content for the everyday user to digest- like drinking from a firehose.
-Don’t expect integration with Facebook- ever. I can’t imagine Facebook every letting them “in”. Remember that Facebook has 400 million users, and Google only has 176 million gmail users.

Video Description of Buzz
Still want to learn more? Here’s a quick video for you.