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Posts Tagged 'google'
Who does Google make it’s money from? A breakdown (Infograph)
Published January 23, 2012 google Leave a CommentTags: adsense, adwords, google
On Dependence of 3rd Party Platforms and Leaving the Grid
Published August 25, 2011 Social Networks Leave a CommentTags: amazon, Apple, google, networks, social
We use Gmail to send email. We use Facebook to connect with our past. We use Twitter to let people know what we’re doing right now. Without technology, how would we connect with people? The phone, the written word via snail mail, and or lo and behold… face to face?
What happens if Facebook, Apple, Twitter, Youtube, Pandora, Verison, Spotify, Evernote, Amazon, Google and Microsoft were to go away? What happens? Life goes on. Case in point, you’re talking to someone on your cell phone and the call is dropped, what do you do? You look at the phone, you may call them back, you may not, you shrug your shoulders and life goes on.
Have you ever thought about how dependent you are on the digital things that make your life go? I know I do. In fact, we often joke about what would happen if some of us were off the grid for any substantial amount of time.Would we shrivel up like a raisin? Get a case of the DT’s? For some it’s possible, they can hop right off of the grid and shut it down no problem. Digital for those that can’t disconnect, resembles some type of ambient ubiquity which they cannot separate themselves from for any extended period of time-like 2 days.
But what if someone just disconnects
This morning I was looking for someone who I had gotten to know fairly well who essentially created a whole new life for himself around social media. They created a slipstream niche around how to use social media for SMB’s. They wrote a book, they V-logged, they tweeted over 15,000 times, they created an active Facebook page, and then all of a sudden. No more. The sites are shut down, the social profiles are dormant and the person has just disappeared from the social ecosystem.
Did he die? Did he just decide that social media is so superficial that there has to be something better out there? Did he get a new job that necessitates that he not participate at all in social? I may never know because the only way I ever communicated with him were through 3rd party platforms and social networks. He doesn’t use those anymore. Maybe he wants to reconnect with his family? I don’t know. In a sense, he has gone from one extreme to the other, and that’s OK. Why? I’m starting to think about the overall value of social as it pertains to our truly personal, social selves and maybe just maybe this person decided that it wasn’t worth it.
It makes you wonder though. What will social look like in 5 years. Is social in and of itself creating its own oxymoron? Where social doesn’t really mean social at all? Maybe there is something to Facebook Fatigue. All I know is that when someone ceases “to be” in social media either a life has ended or…maybe just maybe…life goes on.
Who’s making the rules in social media?
Published July 15, 2011 social media , Twitter 3 CommentsTags: Facebook, google, social media, Twitter
I know it sounds like I’m bucking the system right? Or I’m challenging authority. Or I’m that guy who says, why are we doing it this way on his first day on the job… But here is where my head is at. Back in the Oh so heady dot com bubble days I became part of a very large team working on a startup. I remember thinking I had died and gone to heaven-I mean it was a dot com, I was going to be able to retire by the time I was 35. I came into the project mid-stream and yet the product had essentially been built. And I remember that very first day that I got a look at the site that it wasn’t right.
The reason? Simply put, a bunch of software engineers and developers built a system in which they assumed they knew what the user wanted without really asking. There was zero intuitiveness to it and I remember asking anyone willing to listen-How do they know the users will want this? Blink…Blink…
Let’s fast forward 11 years. I’m in a meeting in which I was talking to a bunch of department heads about the major social platforms, I alluded to Twitter in particular and how it has changed. The interface has not really changed and the “way” you’re supposed to use it functionally speaking has not changed-but the way in which we actually use it has-Dramatically. You see, when Twitter was first created it was meant to be a way to update people on what you were doing quickly right? Remember this comment from the naysayers? “Why do I care what someone had for lunch?” For the most part, the way it was built and the way it was intended to be used held fast. But…
What has changed is that we the users have redefined how we use Twitter. We have decided that Twitter is a great way to share links, to share content and to consume content. Sure you can have those short staccato like conversations, but we have chosen to use it in another way that suits are needs and desires. It is now purely a content consumption and content push platform. That’s not to say that Twitter is not good for conversations any longer, but obviously what Twitter has done for us, for them and for the Google+’s and the Facebook’s of the world, is that it has defined a new action that has been woven into the fabric of our social lives. The action of sharing a piece of digital content in the form of a link. Pure and simple.
In the evolution of social, we might say that first it was blogs in which the written word was used in long form, then Twitter in short form, followed quickly by Facebook who then realized that Twitter was onto something so they borrowed the Twitter stream idea… The underlying theme in all of this is that we, the users have determined what we want from our social networks and how we will use them-and not the engineers. Although I still have a problem with the narrowness of defining what the social actions must look like or be called, i.e. “likes”, “friending”, and “follows”-We still have the power to really define them in the ways that we want to treat them.
The biggest mystery however lies with marketers trying to get inside the heads of the users to determine how they can turn them into loyal brand advocates. Stay tuned.
When Social Media Strategy Becomes Irrelevant
Published March 21, 2011 Facebook , google , Japan Earthquake 4 CommentsTags: Facebook, google, Japan Earthquake, social media
What’s important? Every day online and in the social media bubble we talk about ROI and the strategy and the channels used to grow your social media presence and impact. Here are 3 examples where social media has never figured more prominently and yet it had nothing to do with strategy or ROI, but had everything to do with the engine that does drive social media, PEOPLE.
This past Friday, YouTube created the YouTube Person Finder a channel that is aggregating video messages from the victims and the people affected by the massive earthquake and tsunami that hit northeastern Japan more than a week ago. No strategy, no ROI justification-Just YouTube realizing that they could create something that could help people in a time of need.
Meanwhile Google, creates the Google Person Finder which is pulling all relevant search information about people affected in the region into a simple interface. You can either supply information that you know about someone or you can search information posted about someone you know. On top of this, Google has created the Google Crisis Response Page which in my opinion should be shared by everyone just based on the amount of information posted and updated on it.
A Facebook Causes page was recently created to support and raise awareness and funds for the earthquake and tsunami victims. The page is called Help Japanese Earthquake and Tsunami Victims, and it allows Facebook users to donate anywhere from $10 to $500, or they can join the cause and share it with their Facebook friends. So far they have raised $240.000 This might not seem like a lot but every bit of it will help. Additional Facebook resources can also be found here Global Disaster Relief on Facebook page.
This is bigger picture stuff here and at the end of the day has nothing to do with business strategies or ROI but has everything to do with people using the power of social media to make a difference when it matters most-People in need. Impactful stuff…
The Relevance of my Online Relationships has Risen.
Published February 23, 2011 google , search 6 CommentsTags: google, Search, social search
Game changer alert! It’s not what Google knows anymore. It’s now going to be about who you know, who you are connected to, and how connected you are that will affect the results of your searches. Let that sink in for a second. The time has come where social and search are no longer sharing the same clothes. No, they are now joined at the hip sharing the same clothes!
Read this snippet below from Google’s blog post about social search
Is this is a good thing? I think so, there is definite relevance to our existing relationships when doing business. Case in point, I use my Twitter followers and also the people I follow on Twitter as a de facto RSS feed for information about the work I do and the research I need to do my job. So tying that information literally into a search feed, is essentially the same thing.
What this will get people to do possibly, is change the nature of the online relationships they have, they make, and that they curate. It may in fact increase the value of content created and networks joined, as well as the volume and frequency of participation. So this begs the question, Will this increase the noise or the signal?
Here’s some more info about it.
Content is under scrutiny? It’s about time.
Published February 17, 2011 google , search , SEO/SEM 3 CommentsTags: content farms, google, Search
Creation, curation and aggregation. We all probably fall into one of those categories. We do one of those. I do. I don’t dispute blog posts like this Why Content Curation Is Here to Stay. I get that. What I have a problem with is the type of content creation we run across when doing brand monitoring work for clients. It’s falling into two camps.
Here’s the first.
Recently we were doing some work for a very prominent client where in the analysis of brand mentions we had to sort through thousands, yes thousands, of useless pages of content on websites that were set up as splogs to drive better search results around pages geared towards Google Adwords. This is troll like stuff. This is not new. Useless web pages have been appearing high up on search result pages for awhile now. So Let me ask you a question. I assume that most of you who read this post are fairly savvy web users, but when you do a search-what part of the search result do you look like? Me? I look at the URL under each search result. and that in and of itself can be revealing-sometimes content that you think is going to be worthwhile turns out to be crap.
I’m using Google search results as the prime example here.
I thought we were getting the best search results possible? Maybe not. For a lot of us Google is part of our everyday lives. We are slaves to the rhythm of search as much as we are to what Google returns to us. Google and search dominate the web. The conundrum? To get traffic to your webpage, you have to appear high in Google’s search results. Which in turn means that you must create some type of content that works for Google. Thus the incentive to learn or understand SEO and Google’s Algorithm i.e. game the system, is huge.
Google will admit that the quality of it’s SERPS is higher than it has ever been; in terms of comprehensiveness maybe so, relevance may be debatable. They might be the first to tell you that there is a proliferation of sites that rip off other people’s content because they’re too lazy to build their own audiences based on fresh content and fresh thoughts and ideas; and that is a problem. Yep, the rise of the ”content farm” which is heavy on volume and light on fresh, original content is upon us.
Google has been making changes to its algorithm to keep low-quality sites from appearing high in searches, according to Matt Cutts in a blog post last month. But he also wrote that, despite Google’s efforts,
The fact is that we’re not perfect, and combined with users’ skyrocketing expectations of Google, these imperfections get magnified in perception.”
I cannot tell you how frustrating it is to have to sort through garbage search results both personally and on behalf of a client; to be bogged down with the process of weeding through content farms.
“As pure web spam has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to ‘content farms’, which are sites with shallow or low-quality content,” Cutts added.
I got into SEO years ago and understand the game. High rankings in search have always been driven by the number of pages/sites that linked to it and how prominent they were ranked and what pages and sites were linked to them. There were always “other” little things involved, but to me it was always about the hub and spoke model. What sites were at the end of the spoke and so on and so forth. Oh yea, and one other thing-Content.
Marketing departments and SEO companies understand this. Thus, they’ve been creating “landing pages” buried inside corporate sites to hit all of the different possible combinations of keywords of a search query relating to their company/ industry. Bloggers do it by linking to each other. It works, content farms work, and that’s part of the problem.
The bigger part of the problem? Large companies are catching on. They know this and are willing to play in this grey area space that Google doesn’t police very well, and we, the people that do searches, suffer for it. As it turns out, they are getting away with it. Or are they? The latest to be identified according to the New York Times is JC Penney. Large and small companies will continue to game the system like this until a) they are caught and penalized or b) Google in particular-fixes the algorithm. Until then, content farms will continue to rule and the research that you and I do on behalf of clients, will still take three hours instead of one.
If only there were a way for monitoring companies to weight and kick out splogs and obvious content farms…hmmmm.
What Does it Mean When Social Media Companies Can’t Survive?
Published October 7, 2010 Facebook , social media 3 CommentsTags: 12seconds.tv, Facebook, google, jay baer, microsoft, xmarks
In recent weeks I’ve received emails from Xmarks and 12seconds.tv announcing that both were ceasing operations by the end of the month. I was bummed. With Xmarks, I actually used it every day to keep all my bookmarks synced across multiple machines. With 12seconds.tv, I had used a dozen times or so and I could see an application or a place for it in the crowded world of social applications and services. So why did they both decide to shut the doors?
No revenues. Simple as that. They could not make any money. Both companies had traffic and users, and both applications were free, but the problem was, they could not figure out how to make a living off of a social utility. I’ve said for a long time that I can’t stand the traditional internet business model that’s predicated on traffic. I hate that model; and yet as we speak in 2010, we have 2 companies that needed traffic to grab advertisers, and to a certain degree had half of that equation, and yet still couldn’t survive.
What does that mean?
Sure we’ve had a ton of companies that have gone belly up, but what does it mean today? Back in the day, when your internet startup wasn’t tied to a transactional product, your best bet for survival was predicated on a mix of lots of traffic, word of mouth, and great service which attracted advertisers. But that still was no guarantee of survival. Especially when it basically was relying on traffic fueled ad dollars.
This morning Jay Baer wrote a post about how social media behemoth Facebook was basically suffocating the rest of the web 2.0 world. Frankly I have to agree with him. Not only is Facebook swallowing up our time, but it’s redefining our choices and driving our preferences-which means that companies that are trying to go it alone in the social media landscape, now have to compete for attention and eyeballs of people that prefer to play inside the walls of Facebook only!
Forget ad revenue from traffic as a major concern for new social startups. They now have to compete with Facebook right out of the blocks. It reminds me of the halcyon days of first Microsoft’s dominance and then Google’s. Everyone was always wondering what they were going to do next. This is Facebook’s world and we’re just living in it.
That’s what that means.
You can laugh at this, but it’s pretty spot on as well…
10 lessons Twitter should have taught you in 2009
Published December 29, 2009 Twitter 3 CommentsTags: google, marc meyer, micro-blogging, microsoft, sidewiki, social media, Twitter, wave
You know we’re all amazed at the power of Twitter and the numbers don’t lie. I know I am. But if Twitter went away tomorrow what would you do? How would you adapt? As we have all seen when Twitter does goes down for any prolonged amount of time, the silence is deafening. Some migrate over to Facebook and still others bounce over to friendfeed. But at those times, if you just stop for a moment you notice some things, actually a few things.
This morning I was thinking about those things and then some, and in those times you have to gather your thoughts quickly. Here’s my take on Twitter and real time conversations. Did you notice these things?
1) Our need for real time communication is insatiable
2) Our desire for a platform or a “place” that supports real time communication is what has fueled growth on the internet over the last 12 years.
3) The more focused these type of platforms are, the more successful they are and possibly you!
4) Simple wins
5) Plurk wasn’t simple.
6) LiveFyre will have potential
7) Friendfeed is not the alternative you think and neither is Facebook.
8. A premium level can exist but value has to trump the bells and whistles; And you won’t use it unless everyone else is.
9) The premium level has to have 99.9% uptime in order for you to trust it.
10) Yes, real time instantaneous communication is a great thing for businesses, and an awesome networking tool, but the real power will lie in its ability to bridge the gap with the customer. And the customer needs to know that they have this channel to access where they can get real answers from real people and get real results in….real time.
In the end, I think Google still might win. If you look at this past year, Sidewiki and Google Wave were and are diamonds in the rough for real time communications, they’re just waiting for you to figure them out and… given that those 2 came out in 2009, know that Google is not done, never forget that.
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10 social sites for your week
Published December 18, 2009 social media 1 CommentTags: ben mcconnell, google, gowalla, ken Burbary, marc meyer, shiv singh, social media, Social Networks, zoho
This weeks selection of social sites cover the gamut from social media monitoring to a few juicy blog posts on community, strategy and real time search, to a couple of new social networks. Have any I should add? Lemme know!
1) Check out Zoho, It appears that Zoho offers everything from a business solutions standpoint to a new set of tires. (Just kidding on the tires)
2) 46 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools Free is good
3) Free is really good. 7 Essential multimedia tools and their free alternatives
4) From the SEOMoz Blog -How To Monitor & Track Google’s Real-time Search-Pay attention to this, it’s going to loom large.
5) Daily Mugshot is fun. Change the wrapper on your personal brand every day!
6) What is thankfulfor? It’s your personal gratitude journal. It’s also a collective gratitude journal, for all of us. Very cool and simple.
7) A strategic plan has a better chance of being successful when it’s easy to understand, easy to find, and easy to share. With that being said check out this post by Ben McConnell
8. Shiv Singh talks about Ken Burbary’s Social Analytics Lifecycle. I agree with Shiv on this, I like where it’s going and it is certainly a work in progress, but I would add consumer and influencer insights as an input as well too.
9) Check Daniel Eden’s Vinyl Art work out. This could definitely be a present for someone you know.
10) Share your experiences through Gowalla. I haven’t played with this to any degree yet, but I do like the UI.
