Looking for a huge numbers of fans? Can’t wait a second longer? Then read on, this blog post is for you…

1. Buy your fans
This is definitely the easiest way to guarantee a following fast; decide how many ‘fans’ you want then simply go to any dodgy-looking site (probably via a Facebook ad) take your wallet out (remember to stick your head in the sand) et voila, success! But wait a second; by definition once you directly pay for a relationship what does that relationship become? What does it really mean? There’s a very obvious analogy here, one that doesn’t involve any love at all…

2. Give away loads of free stuff
Giving away free stuff sometimes isn’t a bad idea. It doesn’t really make a lot of sense to give away a 3D TV if you’re an outdoors pursuit’s specialist. Clearly your fans are more likely to be couch potatoes than bouldering dedicatees. I recently heard of a company that gave away 30,000 pairs of their not-so-cheap product and now have somewhere near 45,000 Facebook fans. They don’t do much else in the social space and the giveaway didn’t involve anything other than a straight ‘Like in exchange for the product’* mechanism. At least they now have a ‘following’** and they know that following is interested in what they sell (which already beats the companies that have decided to go with the first tactic in this list).

* Now, of course, forbidden by Facebook’s fun-killing Promotions Guidelines.

** I use the word in the loosest sense of its meaning.

3. Do something really stupid
One ‘positive’ by-product of doing something so stupid that it ends up as the latest in a litany of high-profile social media #fails is that you get a short-term boost in following. Unfortunately this boost tends to be reasonably short-lived (and is the equivalent of people rubber-necking as they slowly creep past a car crash before they speed off, glad that it wasn’t them). It’s no use kidding yourself; they’re there for the spectacle and may even have started following you to join in the social media fury. Not good fans.

4. Be something (or someone) that everyone wants to follow who’s not already on social media
A footballing deity, a deranged former Governor of Alaska or a self-proclaimed drug-addled superhuman. If you’re one of the most famous entities on the planet and you’re not yet on social media you have a landslide of fans waiting for you. We didn’t mean you Gary.

5. Run a spectacularly innovative, successful campaign
Every now and then we see a great campaign achieve unprecedented, wholly-deserved cut-through and people flock to them like some kind of messiah. These campaigns are rarer than celebrities and quickly become fixed aspirational benchmarks for marketers everywhere. They are unlikely, difficult to predict and usually the result of a ‘eureka idea’ made real though serious hard graft, planning and (often) significant budgets. So many great ideas get lost, distorted and drowned but every now and again one makes it through.

By now I hope you’ve got my point. Usually there are no quick wins; that is the very nature of social media. It builds over time, if you do things well and keep at it. Smart campaigns will give you injections of followings if they hit the mark, but be prepared to experiment. Some brands will never have huge followings but if they can build quality followings they too are realising the opportunity.

The more we try to force old habits on to this new landscape the more we destroy the opportunity to do something really valuable. 

@adigoodsell 

What is influence? It’s a massive question in the world of social media. Thousands of man hours are being pumped into companies who are trying to solve the problem in the hope that one day, you’ll be able to search a category and an application will spit out exactly the 5 top influencers you need to be communicating with to push your product.
I’m in the lucky position whereby I could be classed as an ‘influencer’ in a field (not social, sadly!), so I can quickly decipher which tools work and which don’t. I’ve tried blog ranking systems, I’ve had a go on Klout and I’ve used bespoke services. The commonality between all of them?

They’re all useless.

It’s not their fault though. It’s the fault of online influence and all its amazing intricacies / variables. The simple fact is that you’ll never be able to have a perfect system that analyses influence; you’ll always need human intervention. Why? Because anything that has an algorithm involved can be gamed and is open to error (the banking industry felt the full force of over dependence on algorithms first hand).

I don’t want to share the dark arts of social media with you; needless to say, with a bit of elbow grease and some solid hours, you can quickly create the impression you’re an influencer on various platforms. Why would you want to do that? Well, now businesses know that the power of recommendation is a powerful marketing tool, they want to montize that.

For me, this goes against the basic fundamentals of social media. It’s the one area of marketing where a business had to become better if they wanted to engage with people. It’s been a land mark business leveller that once again put the customer in control of the relationship, now I fear we’re endangering that power by allowing ourselves to become part of the machine. Klout and their long term vision of rewarding influencers for talking about their products with gifts, vouchers and treats is a horrible concept.

We’ve seen first-hand that people don’t like being sold to by celebrities when they’re flogging chocolate bars via their Twitter accounts. I felt kind of betrayed when Jack Wilshere insisted on plugging a computer game via his Twitter account before Christmas. How would I feel if my friends were plugging high street coffee? Disgusted.

Dave from Chafford Hundred might have a lot of friends in my social network, but please, don’t think he has a clue when it comes to coffee, and don’t think because he’s recommended it in a status update I’m going to rush out to Starbucks, regardless of what his Klout score says. Creating a game out of influence wedges a block of mistrust into an arena that has predominantly, resisted marketing messages unless they were relevant and well thought out.

My hope is that influence is left in the hands of those who truly are influencers in their field. I hope that we don’t pay people to sell to their friends and I hope that we just accept that sometimes, the human eye is a more powerful tool than a fancy algorithm when it comes to identifying what is important to people.

@PeterWood33

Social media has clunked its way through many evolutions over the years. The past four has seen the digital world settle into a social rhythm. Facebook being the daddy of them all, Twitter is the cooler, younger kid on the block, and LinkedIn taking the lead as the place to hang out to talk serious stuff. The commonality with all of those platforms is they are essentially for everyone. The barriers to entry are extremely low. Most tech savvy people will generally have those three, even if they’re not active in all three (I bet everyone who reads this has all three).

For me, the above spaces are the terrestrial TV channels of the seventies. People were given three that catered to everyone in the UK on a basic level. This year feels like the year satellite TV made the break through, I’m not sure how it worked for the rest of the world outside the UK, but BSKYB gave us something we’d never had before… choice. If you wanted Sport, you had it 24 hours a day. If you wanted cooking, you filled your boots with as much Delia as you could stomach. If it was holidays, there was a place for you to indulge your passion.

This is the year that social goes satellite; the year the world finally has a dedicated home to indulge their interests. We’ve already seen a huge amount of buzz for social network Pinterest. I was desperate not to fall in love with yet another time drainer, but I have. A visual-based social network geared around your interests. Or how about the yet to be designed Manchester United social network that Sapient-Nitro are building? Talking football all day in a place designed specifically for that need. Instagram has been about for a while, but it’s really taken to the masses over the past 12 months with photography fanatics filling the space with arty snaps of their pugs. How about Path, the social network for sharing moments with your closest friends and family? Far more private than Facebook and slightly more intimate.

There are countless examples of smaller and more specialist social networks setting up all over the place. The question for marketeers globally is which networks work best with your product or service. My feeling is that 2012 social success is going to be more about pioneering ideas in new social spaces, the spaces where people might be more susceptible to brand messages, the places people aren’t being bombarded with different spins on tired ideas.

Which up and coming social networks are you keeping an eye on this year?

@PeterWood33

One area that search engines have made a number of significant advancements in recent years is in how they evaluate content on a website. So what does a perfectly optimised page look like in 2012? Let’s look at 10 elements.

1. Title tags are still important, but it’s not a good idea to over-optimise them. 

2. Descriptions still don’t appear to add much ranking value, but can help encourage clicks. 

3. Header tags still need to be relevant. 

4. URL still ideally mentions the keywords. 

5. Content is now about semantically relevant supporting keywords, not multiple mentions of the keywords. The example chosen is a recipe, because in order to make béarnaise sauce there are specific ingredients that are 100 percent relevant to the eventual outcome. One way of checking what keywords Google might consider as relevant is to do a ‘~keyword’ (or tilde) search. Other ways, let’s be honest, involve nothing more than common sense and knowing your subject. 

6. Video and other ‘rich’ content can be useful on a page to increase engagement levels, reduce bounce rates and also to appear alongside results as illustrated.

7. Internal links need to follow the “reasonable surfer” patent. It makes sense in the “perfectly optimised page” example above to link to peppercorn sauce as an alternative to béarnaise. 

8. Facebook/Twitter/other login comments are a way of sharing the content on other platforms. The direct SEO benefit may be debatable, but it never hurts to get your content in front of a large amount of people. With Google Search Plus Your World, it could be that adding a Google+ login is more important than anything else.

9. User reviews add regular content to the page, which can also be coded to include microformatting instructions and add extra elements to your listings in search engine result pages (SERPs).

10. Newsfeeds only share content that already exists elsewhere, but they contribute to an overall impression of the page changing on a regular basis.

It’s worth noting that the “perfectly optimised page” above won’t be perfect for all verticals, or for all brands – not everyone has the ability to add customer reviews to their product pages (e.g., insurance comparison sites).

Although there’s no one-size-fits-all solution, hopefully the above list will give you some guidance on how to perfect your on-page SEO.

@garethowen1

Facebook insights. Dear oh dear. I’ve got to come out and say it – I’ve found their new and “improved” suite of analytics entirely perplexing, lacking in usefulness and extremely complex to explain, aggregate and apply to the real world.

I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one in the industry who has been using the old Insights page to report back successes to clients. I’ve been living in hope that they’ll never switch it off , but the time has come – the old insights page is still an option, but it’s not recording new data. I haven’t felt this down since I said goodbye to my Bebo account…

What are my gripes about the new Insights page and why do they matter?

The first problem with the new Insights landing page is that it doesn’t have a date range. What made Facebook take away the date range option? All you have access to is the last 30 days of data, so unless you do all your reports on the 1^st of every month (so many ruined weekends Facebook!), you have to look for more creative ways of accessing the data. I rang Facebook and was told that means exporting a report.

You can set the date range you want there. Then you’re greeted by a spreadsheet that has a total of 35 tabs with names like “28 days viral reach by story”, “Daily Total frequency distribution” and “Daily Page consumptions by type”. In the key metrics tab, there are 68 columns worth of for you to sift through. Yep, 68.

These are a heady mix of, ‘what the hell does that mean’ and ‘how could I possibly use that as a metric’, followed by… ‘these figures don’t even add up’.

Some of the data is cumulative, some of it is chronological snap shots and some of it is completely bizarre. Nowhere does it give you a summary report – you have to work it all out yourself, which, as I mentioned earlier is difficult because numbers don’t correlate within the spreadsheet.

The additional tabs “Likes”, “Reach” and “Talking about this” all give you a nice demographic split and some additional information, but it’s not particularly user friendly and least of all, I don’t find it particularly useful. What is “talking about this” and how can I use it as a proper metric? What does “Friends of Fans” mean in the grand scheme of things? Which businesses takes that seriously? How many of the 150 or so “friends” you averagely have actually engage with you on a daily basis or even care what you have to say?

Why can’t Facebook give us a proper summary about the metrics that really matter (with a date range), including:

• How many likes did I have this month?
• How many comments did I have?
• How many people shared my content?
• How many people posted on my wall?
• How many people did my content reach?
• Average time a fan spent on my wall
• Fans engaging via wall vs Engaging via their own newsfeed

I’d like that all in a nice table, with month-on-month and year-on-year data –  the rest can wait.

My overriding issue with this problem is that Facebook and their flouncy metrics are bad for social media as a whole. If Facebook can’t give us simple, easy to understand metrics to work with, it makes a social media professional’s job much harder when justifying business outlay on the platform.

For me, if Facebook wants to be taken seriously long term in the same way Google is with its analytics package, it’s going to have to drastically improve it’s technology and the data it collects and presents. Google+ are pulling every trick in the book to force us onto their new platform and you can bet your bottom dollar when their brand page proposition matures its metrics, it will be crystal clear and far easier to understand.

Come on Facebook, do us all a favour and sort out your metrics!

@Peterwood33

In the world of B2B, there is no doubt that LinkedIn is king. It’s a fantastic place to cultivate contacts, develop new ones, show off your business knowledge in a brash self-indulgent way and potentially win new business leads. It’s also been a pretty clever way of searching for jobs and it’s a  great way for a multitude of recruitment consultants to access your details and contact you for a ‘chat’.

Things were fine with LinkedIn and business. Employees went on there and pushed their personal brand by imparting their wisdom, this in turn benefited companies because those employees were acting as brand ambassadors which could help generate leads. Everyone was a winner.

Then the IPO happened and LinkedIn went on a revenue drive. Since then, the platform has undergone some pretty serious changes. Most of them have been fantastic. Allowing company pages to work like Facebook Fan Pages was a superb innovation, the advertising proposition has made PPC far simpler to set up and engagement ads have also allowed them to up their game with some seriously creative iterations of the display advert.

The other huge step change is the realisation that their platform is the future of recruitment. There have been subtle changes, like being able to list your skill sets in a standardised format that is searchable, job adverts that place your picture under a desirable job title, then there are the more subtle changes, like the job roles that sneak into your newsfeed uninvited and there’s also the e-mail I receive every week detailing the top ten jobs I might be interested in.

Now, is it me, or has LinkedIn just made moving jobs way more accessible than ever before? I’m perfectly happy where I work at the moment, but the continuous bombardment of greater riches and better roles almost grind me down. Will LinkedIn eventually be responsible for driving the average career length of employees down? Is this a bad thing? Or does it put the onus back on companies to up their employee retention efforts? Will we see companies trying to protect themselves by banning them from having a LinkedIn profile that states the company name? Or will we see an upturn in retribution efforts if employees find out about staff job seeking?

One thing is for sure, recruitment has just been made a lot easier for businesses if they choose to go it alone. For £125 you can list a job for 30 days and watch them flock. LinkedIn has an advantage over traditional job boards because of network verification, claiming you were the Vice President of Microsoft is tough when your ex-colleagues are in your network and likely to know you were chief tea maker in the post room. If you want to maintain the lie, your prospective employer might suspect a CV lie is underway when they see you have 2+ connections. The advantage LinkedIn has over recruitment agencies is the massive saving on a potential 20%+ fee.

An Operations Director I spoke to at a Digital Marketing Agency in London is putting its money where its social mouth it. He said,

‘As of January the 30^th, we’ll be suspending all recruitment contracts. Our tests have shown that we can match the job many recruitment agencies do at a fraction of the price. In our opinion, LinkedIn has led to lazy recruitment practices that we couldn’t abide by.’

Harry Fowler, Business Development Director at Digital recruiter Cogs Agency takes a different view point believing that the cream of recruitment will thrive regardless of how low the technology takes the barriers.

‘I would agree that it’s possibly made recruitment agencies lazy in their approach, but they were the crap agencies in the first place. The other argument is that they are only using the technology in front of them and candidates still need to put themselves up on LinkedIn to be found.’

‘Moving forward, I’d still say that nothing can beat industry knowledge and the personal relationship. Blindly flying around LinkedIn amassing as many people as possible whom you’ve never met or done business with is lazy and crass. You still need to meet people face to face prior to putting them in front of your client and before you can really class them as part of your database.’

So there we have it, regardless of which side of the fence you sit, LinkedIn looks like it’s going to be a game changer for recruitment both client and agency side over the next few years, the question is, will businesses embrace the changes or will they fight it?

How do you see it going?

@Peterwood33

I was recently asked about the effects of social media and public outrage. Specifically, the question was around Jeremy Clarkson and his ‘oh so controversial’ comments on the BEEB last week. You know, the comments that were definitely nothing to do with shifting copies of a Christmas DVD.

Anyway, let’s paint the picture of how the average outrage works in social media.

I’ll bullet point for ease of consumption.

1)      Jeremy Clarkson usually averages about 427 social mentions per day.

2)      After the interview aired on the evening of 30/11, his mentions shot up to 24,612. That’s 1.52 mentions per second up until midnight (based on a 1930 airing).

3)      Things died down in the early hours, settling to a steady 3,765 mentions. Come the morning, the social media outrage brigades were in force taking the story up to 22,000 mentions by lunch time.

4)      After that, things started to tail of. People had become bored of thinking up suitable capital punishments for silly comments. Mentions of  Jeremy dropped by 60% on average per day, after day one.

Come this Wednesday, my prediction is that no one will be talking about Mr Clarkson; all will be forgiven and the chances are, his DVD might just have slipped into your Tesco’s trolley.

Think my theory of outrage is a one off? How about the nasty incident of the Tram Lady last week or Sepp Blatter and his racist handshake. How did those incidents fare?

A sharp rise in outrage, followed by an equally sharp fall in interest.

Whilst social media networks and the opinion contained within them is important in the world of marketing and business, I think the lasting effects of negative sentiment can sometimes be over blown.

A few observations about social outrage…

1)      A trending topic is a giant bandwagon across all channels. How many people who claimed to be outraged were actually watching the BBC programme at the time? How many of the 23,000+ complaints came from reading the story on Twitter and complaining off the back?

2)      People use outrage to boost following. A bland comment won’t get you noticed. Heavy Twitribution needs to be dished out. As a scandal unfolds, the suggested punishment for someone who has broken social media ethical comment law becomes more extreme.

3)      Outrage is difficult to put into context. Who is outraged? Where are they based? What is the influence of their comment? Why are they saying it? In the world of globalised social media, would Jeremy Clarkson really mind if he’d offended an area of the world not interested in his DVD?

4)      During the time the world has been outraged at Jeremy Clarkson (108,000 mentions), the rest of the world has made a social mention about Justin Bieber at the rate of 2.15 a second (931,000).

So what have we learnt? Social media outrage today, is tomorrows digital chip paper.

Oh, and Justin Bieber rocks.

*Radian6 was used to collate information for this piece. Twitter, Forums, Blogs and Facebook were analysed for mentions. Twitter accounted for 55% of all mentions.

@PeterWood33

@SteakLondon

Manchester United have struck a deal with Sapient Nitro to become their global digital agency and as part of that deal, word has it they’re going to create a social media platform that will allow the club to engage directly with their online fan base of nearly 660million.

Ignoring the numbers, because I think they are nonsense, the concept is very interesting and very forward thinking. Businesses gain plenty of benefits from engaging with their fans via the world’s most prominent social media platforms, but for me, once you surpass a certain fan/follower threshold in certain industries; you have to start thinking a bit more selfishly.

How can your business start harness that passion and turn it into something of more value?

Facebook gives you some interesting base data on your fan base, but it doesn’t really give you much else in the way of statistics. It also doesn’t make it easy to do much with those highly engaged fans. Twitter is a fantastic place to converse on a one to one basis, especially in the world of sport, but again, you never really own the data, you don’t really know much about the people you’re engaging with and because the platform is someone else’s, so is the really interesting data and so is the flexibility.

Someone else owns your conversation. Someone else is profiting from your fans. Someone else could potentially switch you off at any time (I know, I know, that last point was very dramatic).

If you’re a brand like Manchester United, you have the ability to move your fans wherever you want. If you can move the bulk of your fans behind a wall into a bespoke Manchester United community, you’re on to a winner.

Your ability to track data is greatly increased, there are no strict rules on competitions and you can incentivise an already enthused community to keep on coming back. Hey, you could even integrate the established social media platforms into your community! The possibilities are endless, the ROI far more measurable and far easier to influence than it would be in the major standard social channels.

Manchester United owning the conversation is the key here, what they do once they’re in control is when we’ll see exactly how social they’re planning to be. A move many will watch with anticipation, a move I’m sure many of the big boys will look to follow if it’s a success.

@Peterwood33

Facebook has always been about driving engagement, the problem they’ve had over the past few years is that their mechanism for engagement hasn’t gone much further than the inflexible ‘Like’ button, a share, or, if you’re lucky, a comment or two. This was great while it lasted, but it did open brands pages up for social media black hat techniques. We’ve seen a well-known socially irrelevant brand up their likes by 5,000 in the space of a week and take unprecedented engagement from people, that if you investigate, either work for their PR agency, or are praising the price of a product they’re ineligible to purchase. 

All very naughty and not in the spirit of organic brand growth.

Well, the days of being judged by how many times you can coerce someone into a one off like are in the process of abolition. Likes will still be relevant, only if you pay attention to the ticker in the top right hand corner of your screen and jeez, who pays attention to that? Not me!

A brands goal now is to integrate with Facebook’s new Timeline / Open Social Graph. They’ve opened up the ‘like’ to be any verb a brand so wishes, so now, a travel company could opt for ‘visited’ to be their new ‘like’ and the object could be a destination, say Scarborough. The idea being that developers could build a travel app that sits in your timeline and documents where you travelled in 2011 and if you fancied it, you could back date it over the past five years and keep a record of all your holidays snaps in a branded holiday scrap book (Scarborough beach never looked so grand).

This is fantastic, Facebook are effectively forcing major brands to make themselves useful if they want to be part of our lives. The Mark Zuckerberg vision realised (from the very start, even when Facebook was struggling for revenue, he was notorious for refusing advertising offers that impinged on the user experience).

However, this has put many brands in a sticky situation. What if your brand can’t inspire mass engagement? What if you can’t think of a way to integrate your toothpaste product into a consumer’s timeline? What then? Have Facebook alienated all but the most exciting, well-funded brands, from their platform?

Yes and no is the answer. It’s all about figuring out how to make your brand relevant. Being a manufacturer of cookers doesn’t limit you to conversation around the efficiency of your flame safety device. You could instead engage with people’s diet plans with a recipe app that clocks your calorie intake and promotes oven cooked food over microwave alternative (I know, a very cliché example, but this isn’t a pitch!).

Facebook doesn’t alienate boring brands; it alienates lazy and tired ideas. If you can’t be bothered to make yourself relevant, then join the ticker in the top right hand corner with the rest of the irrelevant drivel. Facebook has shaken up the game again, fat lazy brands beware, you’re going to have to put in a lot more effort if you’ve got designs on peoples newsfeed real estate.

Leon Wong, Paid Search Strategist, Steak

We know what you’re thinking: How can I spend more time on social networks?  Surely that question was buzzing around the Googleplex this year, as the internet monolith prepped for its fourth foray into social networking. The result was something – regardless of Google+ success – that will forever up the bar in social networking tools (a la Circles, Hangouts and Sparks) – and more importantly, monetize social data.

With more than 10 million users in its first two weeks, and  more than 20 million in its first three, Google+ may accumulate over 3 percent of Facebook’s 750 million users in its first month by the end of July. Sure, one month is a blip when testing massive roll outs like a social network, but it’s a sign that – after many tries – Google may finally have its star in social.

As search marketers, we often need to figure out consumer’s intentions (don’t ask us about the guy on the corner though).  Now we’re taking our lens to Google’s to determine its intentions with its social arm, its implications on the public – and of course, on search.

Here to shed light on Google+ is Steak’s paid search strategist Leon Wong. With three years of search marketing experience with Fortune 500 clients, Wong shares his thoughts after touring what could reinvent online sharing, if not social networking altogether.

Google...plus you.

What’s in a Name?

As confusing as Google Plus sounds, the idea is quite simple. The search giant’s latest effort to integrate social media with search may be the next big thing – or perhaps, a revisit. Google Buzz, the predecessor of Google Plus, launched in February only to halt over complaints of security concerns and information leaks.  Since then, the buzz around Google’s social media was crickets – until now.

The new and improved social media integration will attempt to dazzle you with a bunch of features, such as the Circles, Instant Upload, Hangout, Huddle and Sparks.  At launch date, this buzz made me want to play in the sandbox with the rest of the exclusive invitees. Now, that elusive “invite” is more common than Lindsay Lohan mug shots.  Google+ is stretching its legs.

Let’s face it: Google has hundreds of millions of users, the vast majority of whom trust the company. Some may believe if they can’t find something on Google, it probably doesn’t exist.  It’s a wonder, though, how the search king with over $30 billion in annual revenue and 28,000 employees worldwide found itself chasing the coattails of Facebook.

But here we are. Google knows that it must fill the void of marrying people with data: something that if they don’t fill, someone else will — and win the Web, admitted Google insiders.

People love Gmail; they love YouTube; they love search. And now with Circles, Google has fixed something that Facebook unwittingly failed to do. Instead of mashing all your contacts into a single feed, you can now organize your contacts into a hierarchy.  It allows you to “follow” people, not necessarily request them (like Twitter meets the anti-Facebook), so anyone can be in your circles — family, friends, coworkers, hobby groups, even celebrities. You can create a circle of those you don’t know, but want to follow.

The buzz is there, the ‘wow’ factor is there. But the next big question is why now?

Google Plus Features: Circles, Hangouts, Instant Upload, Sparks, Huddle

Data=Dollars

Up till now Google has been an algorithmic company. But they have come to realize – after many failures – that consumer behavior is inherently irrational and can not be anticipated through pure metrics.  At its core this is a data play in that Google wants to understand consumers’ behavior in the here and now, but it also may answer how to monetize social.

If Google can marry its massive search data with its equally massive display data alongside topics that you and your friends like – nicely self-organized by interest – Google can learn your interests based on what your friends have (or want to have), and start presenting hyper- targeted ads against that.

For example, Google knows that I have searched for fly fishing equipment, have viewed fly fishing videos on YouTube, and clicked on display ads related to fly fishing.  That’s the old Google.

The new Google now knows that I have a group of friends that I “circled” as Fly Fishing Buddies.  They saw a “spark” related to fly fishing, and they can now mine my posts about fly fishing.  They can now serve me relevant ads across the web (through their display network and beyond) that are related to fly fishing, providing me specific brands that my friends already purchased, or specific locations where I’ve expressed a desire to fish, etc.

Google has the advertising inventory that Facebook doesn’t have.  Google also has years’ worth of prior search and display data that the recent Facebook-Microsoft Bing alliance doesn’t have.  If Google can convince people that aggregating all this data is not a privacy problem, it could deliver something special.  This is search targeting + contextual targeting + audience targeting + social network targeting.  Viola, instant monetization of social!

Show Them the (Ad) Money

Google+ Sparks, a personal-interest stream feature

Well, I’m sure all the advertisers are curious as to how Google+ will impact search, particularly paid search. While taking the tour, I couldn’t help but notice the Sparks feature. Initially, I thought it was a place for people to meet. However after a few clicks through, I soon realized that it’s actually a search bar, which allows you to look up items of your interest. Google’s algorithm will automatically sort and group articles that it predicts your likes into a drop down menu, and allow you to bookmark your interests.

Having the ability to create a personal space where you could indulge at leisure is very attractive. The bottom line is if there is a place to implement sponsored ads, I will not be surprised to see a few banner or text ads around that area.

The ad value is amplified when you start sharing your articles and bookmarked searches with a specific person, circle, group of circles or the general public that you might find the articles intriguing as well.  Though I can hear the news organizations grumbling already…

More Toys

What about Hangouts, Instant Upload or Huddle?  If these features look familiar, they should: they’re derived from other platforms or social media sites like Facebook. Hangouts will let you virtually hangout with up to 10 contacts via Skype-like video chat, while Instant Upload allows you to upload pictures from your mobile phone “instantly” (duh!). Huddle is just simply a group chat with your friends (well, hello again, AOL chat rooms!).

All of this translates into one goal: to gather social behavior data. By building an integrated platform for you to manage your friends and interactions, Google can now collect information about you and how people interact with you. This type of data can only be harvested from an integrated social media platform – thus Google Plus!

World Domination?

Google+ Circles, a group contact organizer

So the development of Google Plus is not just another one of Google’s plans to take over the world, but rather to own another piece of real estate in the social media space. Creating another channel to collect data and serve relevant ads to a particular group or individual is more logical and the right path for it start breathing down Facebook’s neck, especially considering the cozy partnership Facebook has with Bing. (See Steak’s opinion on the Facebook-Bing partnership, 5/17/11)

After all, paid search is still Google’s bread and butter. It helps the search giant make more than $33 billion dollars in revenue per year. Features such as Circles, Hangout, and Sparks are just few examples of how Google plans to garner user data in this space. Whether Google is trying to steal the social media crown or just simply create a new channel to collect information, I know my Steak comrades and I will be dissecting its every move.  I sure am glad I found that dang invite.