Firstly, the integration of Google’s own social media initiative into search results has heightened tension between itself and social media forerunners, Twitter and Facebook. Twitter has publicly announced a “concern” for the personalised results, believing the preference given would affect the search results of users in a negative manner. Google has stated that the SPYW results are an addition and not a replacement at all to users’ results but it can be seen to be conceivable that Google Plus content may appear higher in ranking results than that of Facebook or Twitter. The consequences for social media agencies are that existing endeavours with Facebook pages and Twitter accounts may need to be diminished in favour of augmenting Google Plus initiatives, a big win for Google in the social media industry.

Google’s personalised search algorithm may also mismatch ranking reports and researched data with user experiences as the preferences of each individual user cannot be gauged in order to perfect page optimisations to obtain the maximum traffic and ROI. This incomplete understanding of user preferences means a larger variable in strategies and potential user backlash in regards to the personalised changes may mean the market fragmentation of search engine choice, of which Google holds a distinct majority, can affect strategies as well. Professionals in the digital marketing industry are starting to take more notice of Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, as being a simpler and purer essence of results from the changed Google system. In resistance to the changes, users can turn off personalised search options and even use the created “Focus on the User” plugin for Chrome, Firefox and IE which replaces the Google + extra results with those from Foursquare, Twitter and Facebook, amongst other social media platforms. While Google has claimed that Facebook and Twitter data was difficult to source, this plugin has dispelled this claim.

The true extent of the changes will only be felt by digital marketing agencies in following months after rankings changes are noticeable. Whether the update will shift the search engine market or agencies choices in social media platforms remains to be seen.

Related posts:

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3. Google Revives Realtime Search With Google+

Search Plus Your World or Google’s World?

In short, online social influence is the impact that an individual has on an online audience. Someone with high social influence has the ability affect someone’s beliefs and drive action online; it determines who to trust and who to avoid within a network of users. Initially, social influence could be measured by how many ‘Likes’ a person had on Facebook or how many times their content was ‘retweeted’ on Twitter. However the increasing popularity and controversy surrounding sites like Klout in 2011, reveal that measuring social influence, and thus its importance, is a growing trend.

Klout is a popular website that scores your social influence by examining the activity on your social media accounts, giving users a score from 1 to 100. According to Klout, the higher your score, the more social influence you have in your online community. It monitors how often people reply to or share your posts, your ‘Likes’, comments, ‘retweets’, re-shares, wall-posts and mentions, which in turn validates you and your content and increases the value you add to your online community. Klout acts as a third party barometer, adding value to you as a brand.

Before we all jump on the bandwagon it is important to realise that Klout also has its flaws in attempting to accurately measure social influence. At this relative age of infancy, online social influence can easily be manipulated if one has the correct tools and knowledge. However the potential is huge when one considers the impact it could have on online marketing, search engine reputation management and brand identity. Similar to how SEO has changed and developed to retrieve organic search results, measurements of social influence will develop to authentically identify and validate the true social influencers, giving authority to great content. It’s a trend to watch closely in 2012.

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Online Social Influence and Why it Matters

Social Media Week in Glasgow will include more than 130 events, which will take place in venues across the city from September 19th – 23rd. Speakers from Google, Nokia, CNN and BBC will be participating in the 5-day celebration of social media.

With the world’s largest social media event for 2011 just beginning, statistics are rolling in about social network usage, and it appears that in the UK, social media sites are more popular than ever. According to a study conducted by InSites Consulting, approximately 37 million Britons (around 73% of the UK population) use social media sites on a regular basis. InSites studied social media usage in more than 30 countries around the world to put together these latest social media adoption statistics. Unsurprisingly, social networking juggernaut Facebook was the most popular platform among these 73 million UK respondents, with sites ranked in the following order of preference:

• Facebook 64%
• Twitter 24%
• LinkedIn 21%

According to researchers at InSites, this high rate of adoption (only slightly below the European figure of 74%), shows that social media has penetrated all layers of British society. For SEO agency owners in Britain, this serves as an indication that many consumers have begun making their purchasing decisions based on the information they gather during their social networking interactions. Another interesting finding was the fact that any new social networks would find it very difficult to compete with existing platforms; a staggering 93% of people surveyed are content with the existing platforms.

With three quarters of UK Internet users highly engaged in social media activities, SMW in Glasgow is sure to attract a record number of participants. Researchers say social networks are useful as a means of bridging the gap between consumers and brands, and this trend is only set to grow in the coming year.

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Social Media Penetration Grows in the UK

As providers of SEO services, we know that social media can be a great tool for spreading a positive marketing message both quickly and effectively; the only drawback being that a negative or even dangerous message can spread just as rapidly…

Following the recent London riots, Prime Minister David Cameron announced that the Coalition Government would take steps to restrict social media usage during times of unrest, in order to prevent troublemakers from inciting violent activity online. Social networking platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Blackberry instant messaging were blamed for helping rioters to organise protests and looting operations. This raised concerns among human rights groups, who said that although Cameron’s proposal was made in good faith, measures to monitor, limit or even shut down certain social media sites would “overextend powers in ways that would be susceptible to abuse”.

Last Thursday, Home Secretary Theresa May met with social network executives and police officials to discuss how the organisation of criminal activity on these sites could be prevented. However, the Government decided not to seek and additional powers to close down or restrict the networks. Cameron’s deputy Nick Clegg told press that UK ministers were not prepared to support “a Chinese- or Iran-style blackout of social media”.

The climb-down has naturally sparked a nationwide discussion about the merits of social media vs the obvious potential for exploitation of the technology. Meanwhile it has been reported that Thursday’s meeting was highly constructive, examining “how law enforcement and the networks can build on existing relationships and cooperation to crack down on the networks being used for criminal behaviour”.

So far, at least five people have been convicted, and two have received prison sentences, for organising disorderly and violent acts via Facebook. We’ll be watching with interest to see how the Government and network executives plan to prevent criminal activity on social networks without an impact on the freedom of ordinary law-abiding users.

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UK Officials Discuss the Role of Social Media in London Riots

Personally I don’t think Facebook’s social interaction model doesn’t benefit their users’ psyche. Anything positive sounds like overt bragging to some friends, and conversely, anything negative seems like attention seeking to others. Other users in a Facebook network also seem to want to share a very artificial and contrived version of their life. One that is filled with exotic holiday pics, all their skinny photos and even more oddly messages aimed at their kids who aren’t even on Facebook! The whole game stinks of social climbing and ego fueled one-upmanship to me. I don’t think that’s particularly healthy for anyone.

Where I think Google+ has a distinct advantage is that the “Circles” functionality is more representative of human interaction. You no longer have a single stream that pretends to be relevant to your entire social sphere, you have a multifaceted stream of messages from work colleagues, professional relationships or personal relationships. This allows you to express what you are actually feeling about a certain topic and exclude people that you would either not like to see or people who you think won’t be interested. It’s far closer to a real-life social circle. When I play tennis with my Kiwi builder mates I don’t talk about the latest search signal or client win. Probably because I will get abuse, and rightly so!

The circles functionality also allows you to use the same social platform when you’re at home or at work. I don’t tend to follow Twitter at night as I don’t normally care about other people’s opinion of The Apprentice and I don’t tend to use Facebook in the day because it’s a waste of time. Google+ circles allow me to keep track of SEO developments by day and more personal news at night.

The other thing about Google+ is that it isn’t ridiculously cluttered with muck and irrelevant ads from link buying agencies that seem to employ scantily clad women to buy links for them. Facebook needs to chase the revenue to justify their ridiculously bloated market valuation. That seems to be the most important factor to them apart from not giving a &*(*&^ about users’ privacy. I am sure Google+ advertising is not far off but they are typically far better at ad relevance.

Yes Google+ does not have the feature set that Facebook has but we need to remember this is a limited field trial. The functionality that Facebook has doesn’t present a huge challenge to skilled engineers and I fully expect the features to roll out quickly as this takes hold.

In my opinion Google+ is a leap ahead of any past foray into social and I owned any shares in Facebook I would be shedding them before their bubble bursts.

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Google+ is better for you than Facebook

Let’s begin by discussing what a promoted tweet actually is. It is similar to a Google AdWords ad in that it is a paid for ad. The promoted tweet is, however, a tweet that will be placed at the top of the search results in a user’s Twitter stream and will be identified by a different coloured background and will be labelled that it is a promotional tweet. Users can then retweet, reply or favourite it as they can with any other tweet. A benefit of promoted tweets is that advertisers are able to send their message out to users who don’t necessarily follow their account.

You will need to sign up with Twitter’s promoted products in order to promote your tweets. You then send a tweet to your followers and then you promote that tweet. The promoted tweet will appear as regular content in the search results and not alongside them. Promoted tweets are offered on a cost-per-engagement (CPE) basis which means only when a user engages with your tweet by retweeting, replying or marking it as favourite, is this charged for. However, if an existing follower retweets your promoted tweet you will not be charged for it.

So why would a promoted tweet be useful? Users can create trending topics that get noticed and responded to. For example, when the iPad was released there was an issue with recharging the battery. While Best Buy did send out a tweet with a solution, users would only find this if searching for it shortly after it was released. With promoted tweets, more customers could have seen it and find the solution to their problem a lot faster.

As mentioned earlier, promoted tweets are similar to AdWords ad in that they are sponsored ads. However, where an ad ranks in the SERPs is dependent on factors such as quality score and maximum bid value among other things. Promoted tweets will be ranked according to a new metric called “resonance” which will measure the interaction with a promoted tweet. This will include the number of times it is viewed, retweeted, favourite and how many times keywords or links are engaged with that tweet.

Then comes another interesting aspect of promoted tweets whereby customers are only allowed to promote their own tweets. Should a tweet not achieve a high resonance score then like a poorly ranked AdWords ad it will be dropped in favour of better scoring ads. Resonance is expected to be further developed to allow for geolocation for more targeted ad campaigns.

So what does this mean for companies offering conversion optimisation services? While some people suggest that while Twitter is good for promoting brands, it isn’t good for boosting sales which is generally the main focus of SMBs. Twitter, however, says that a number of these have had good results from using promoted tweets.

Whether promoted tweets will be a successful marketing tool or not is something we need to wait to see. Promoted tweets are an affordable form of advertising SMBs and it facilitates a much wider reach for the message. Like any form of advertising, so long as it is witty and memorable enough I don’t see any reason why promoted tweets will not become an effective form of social media advertising.

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Promoted Tweets: Necessary Evil or Useful Targeted Advertising?

Before jumping head first into a social media campaign you have to ask yourself a key question; how much chaos can your organization handle? This question is not to be critical about the social media industry but rather a prudence concept; having foresight into the worst case scenario. When done correctly social media can offer an organisation many advantages. It’s not some magical tool which will transform every aspect of your marketing strategy, it’s not a unicorn, it’s just a horse; an extra drive of power into your branding strategy. Therefore it needs to be handled with care and caution.

“Don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t want plastered on a billboard with your face on it.”

A recent example of how a single tweet on Twitter can have massive effects on a brand is the Duke Nukem Forever Tweet.  The new Duke Nukem Forever game, owned by the 2K Games Company, was recently put out for review and an US PR agency, Redner Group, who were hired to handle the company and product’s social media campaign, publically threatened on Twitter to stop sending review copies of games to critics who had written “venom-filled appraisals” and that they would be put on the “blacklist”. The heated tweet was deleted as soon as the 2K Company realised the chaos Redner had caused. Redner, who should have known that this was a cardinal mistake in marketing, was fired by the 2K Games Company. Deleted or not, the tweet made the same impact on the gaming company who hired a PR professional to prevent this poor practice to happen. A private apology has been sent out to all that reviewed the game but the damage has been done.

“Monitor, engage, and be transparent; these have always been the keys to success in the digital space.”

Once anything is published on the web, especially social media, there will be an immediate readership. Information on twitter travels in a way and a shape which is different than anything previously known. Twitter (and other social networking platforms), should not be the place to tell the world what you are thinking before you had a chance to think about it. That being said, social media should still be authentic, conversational, and social. The bottom line is that you should tell the truth but still make it fascinating.

Another thing to take into account when jumping on the social media bandwagon is Google’s “New” Social Search. Social media will now not only have an effect on you PR strategy and customer relations but also on your Search engine reputation management strategy. This includes SEO and online content management and now also social media updates about your brand.  Keep in mind that it is not what you say about your brand, it is what other people say. Search Engine Reputation Management involves both social media marketing and social media optimization. Proper control of search engine results needs to be taken and optimization employed as well as marketing to manage and control damaged identities and reputations on the net. Ultimately you need to be engaged and generate spontaneous communication while utilising the proper tools and techniques available and staying aware that you are all the while tattooing your reputation and online presence.

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2. Social media over share: are brands just as obsessed with social media as we are?
3. Online Social Influence and Why it Matters

Social Media – The Online Tattoo

Speakers:
Bas van den Beld – State of Search
Marcus Taylor – SEOptimise
Jim Yu – BrightEdge
Cedric Chambaz – Microsoft

Bas van den Beld – State of Search

SE’s are trying to figure out user intent and they are trying to give you the best and most relevant info. This can be difficult as a computer at home can be used by multiple people. So they are trying to work on user experience for example showing calories on recipes

Google has chosen two directions to join search and social:

Firstly through Page Rank (Which is essentially a social signal). Google is good at making connections. So they figure they can work out connections between people as well. As Eric Schmidt said :-  “We know where you are, we know what you like”

Secondly, if people in your social circle rate things then it shows up in the results. You get more tailored and hopefully smarter recommendations. Google +1 and Google hotpot are mechanisms to acquire these social signals and build up your social profile.

The biggest change going on right now is to do with Google accounts and profiles. Interestingly enough the address details are being shown in the SERPs but only to people connected 1 level away from you. If you go to the “Social Connections” tab in your profile you will see the connections. Your Google social circle could be a lot larger than you expect.

Mobile is huge. A computer can be shared. A mobile is very personal. Google can build up a much more detailed profile. For example I searched a route on my desktop, went to my car got out my android and on opening the maps it knew my last search and offered a route.

Main Tip: As a marketer – think ahead. Connect the dots, Work on your social circle

Marcus Taylor – SEOptimise

How important are Facebook likes? I have been running a lot of experiments to test impact on indexation and ranking. There is not very much data, but the correlation between pages that rank well and pages that have been shared or liked is HIGH! We don’t know if there is any causation though.

Google was quoted saying “We treat links on Facebook fan pages the same as we treat tweeted links. We have no personal wall data from Facebook” via a Search Engine Land interview. It is a bit ambiguous. I wanted to know for ssure so I started experimenting.

I took 2 un-indexed domains with no backlinks with no ability to ping google. I started progressively added likes to them. Within 2-3 hours the domains got indexed!

Does this work for multiple URL’s? I added varying numbers of likes to un-indexed urls and this time looked at the server logs. What I found was zero visits from Googlebot. This was a surprising result on the back of the previous test.

So in conclusion, we cannot indicate casualty and cannot suggest that Likes are a direct ranking factor, however Facebook can refer a large amount of quality traffic it also drives links and other behavioural ranking factors. So perhaps the traffic is more a factor and the actual like itself. For example tweeting a blog post perhaps is not the factor but the behavioural impact of the resultant traffic can be causual in being a ranking factor. Traffic in its own right sends ranking factors!

Jim Yu – BrightEdge

You need to do the analysis by industry – Across several verticals we found correlation between high ranking pages and the fact they had more than 1 tweet or like/share.

For retail and finance, social is critical. There is significant adoption of social . Understand your competitors as there are a lot of individuals that have a lot of tweets and shares and they are doing well compared to the actual brands themselves

Social SEO Techniques

The basics – for example look at deep product page from Overstock.com. Get connected – links back to the main FB and Twitter accounts. There is also a share button on the page and then there is also a like button.

You can target head terms with social media friendly pages to help freshness /recency e.g. virus updates are very time dependent and as such social signals may count more heavily.

Useful products get shared and are less time critical. Time critical products get tweets.

Create parallel structures of social objects and interlink them. Look at Amazon. Not only do they have an Amazon page on FB, they also have pages for Fashion, for video, and other verticals from their site. So sitemap categories and map to FB pages and these then cross link.

Recommendations – Tips and takeaways

1. There is a high correlation – don’t get left behind
2. The basics – Link social pages and make it easy to share etc
3. Go beyond the basics – deep links
4. Create viral content on other channels and drive it into the website
5. Create social objects as parallels and interlink to your directory pages

Cedric Chambaz – Microsoft

Bing – Making it personal.

Search exists to deliver relevant results. We want to fulfil an intent. Using topical qualifiers to rate a page has always been the case, however things have evolved over the years. Today the SE’s are the gateway to all the new content.

We need to get away from the one size fits all. How do we get more personal? Your mobile is very personal and secondly your address book adds more data.

We need to draw a distinction between Searching Social networks and Social Search.

At Bing we differentiated bing.com/social. This is so the results don’t clutter the main index. It is a live search of social feeds that updates in real time.

What if the result served were unique to me? Searching from Facebook is powered by Bing and monetised by adcentre. What if your searches showed friends likes? If it was prioritised on collective wisdom and prioritised by my social circle wisdom (Direct network) This may lead me to make an informed decision based on my social graph. This can include reviews by my network for shopping/ restaurants.

At Bing we are pushing the envelope. Combining advertising and social. There are Rich ads in Search. we have integration of video likes. The advertising experience is embedded in the SERP and concludes with share, like, etc. features to make it more social.

Q&A

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SMX London coverage: Social Signals & Search

The DEMO conference is a global event designed to showcase the most exciting new technology and provide industry networking opportunities. One launch that might be of particular interest to a search marketing company was Heystaks.

Irish start-up Heystaks used DEMO Spring 2011 as the platform to launch their social search solution, which is designed to help Internet users find more individually targeted search results. Heystaks users can connect with like-minded people and create “search staks”, collections of content favoured by a certain online community – a stak can be public, private or shared via invitations. This means that when running a search using any search engine, those using Heystaks will see results that are highly relevant to their personal preferences. Take a look at Heystaks’ DEMO Spring 2011 presentation:

Another development designed to connect users through social media platforms was SocialEyes, a video communication service launched at DEMO Spring 2011. This video-based “chat room” taps into a user’s social network for a multi-chat experience, setting it apart from existing services like Skype. The service is designed to emulate daily face-to-face interactions as closely as possible, providing users with complete control over each conversation. Using SocialEyes, you can make multiple calls using individual peer-to-peer connections, and interact with each contact differently; for example, you may choose to mute one and conduct a private conversation with another, or you might want to connect the whole group for a conference call. See the video below:

For more exiting developments in the world of search, social media and related technology, check out the DEMO Spring 2011 website.

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Social and Search Trends at DEMO Spring 2011

The Social Networking Privacy Act proposed penalising networks that displayed the contact information (physical addresses and phone numbers) of users aged under 18 years. Facebook spent over $6 600 lobbying officials in the state of California to oppose the Act, and the proposed bill was eventually killed, much to the dismay of privacy advocates and safety organisations.

While passing legislation to prevent social media platforms sharing the information of minors is a sensible proposal, others say that these restrictions would encourage underage users to lie about their age online.

Of course, while it is the duty of responsible adults to protect the privacy of minors, it also seems there are plenty of grown-ups who don’t fully understand just how much of their privacy they compromise on a daily basis through their actions on social media platforms.

Regular status updates and location-specific tweets can often give away important details about a user’s daily routine, making it easier than ever for tech-savvy criminals to target them. Others find social media sites keep track of communications they’d rather were kept a secret – US lawyers report that around 20% of modern divorce cases involve evidence of infidelities found on Facebook.

Privacy experts and security officials are constantly questioning social media’s commitment to protecting the personal information of their millions of users. However, on the positive side social networking has proved useful in reporting local crimes, issuing accident warnings and most recently, as a platform for Australian families to locate missing loved ones during the disastrous Queensland floods.

Senator Ellen Corbett, who originally introduced the bill detailing the Social Networking Privacy Act, told press she is “determined to try again”. Do you think social media platforms should have stricter privacy control? And what do you think of Facebook’s entry into the political sphere?

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Social Networking Privacy Act Halted