I attended the first IAB Social Media Debate of 2012 yesterday afternoon. It was also the first since STEAK joined the IAB’s Social Media Council. The motion was as follows:

‘The online marketing industry is too easily distracted by the latest ‘shiny technical object’, reducing its effectiveness and ability to achieve results’  

The event was chaired by the ever-entertaining Tom Ollerton (@mrtomollerton) and featured John Pritchard, Jules Duncan (@juliusduncan) and Jon Bishop (@jonin60seconds) arguing for, and Rob Salmon (@rsalmonuk), Liz Scarff (@lizscarff) and Alex Tait (@astait) arguing against.

The debate’s subject matter apparently arose, quite unsurprisingly, out of a conversation about Google+ (ah, good old Google+). 

The team defending the motion quickly adopted the position of the frugal pragmatist, arguing that there are now simply too many social media platforms to spend time on – and dedicate resource to – all of them (Brian Solis’s mind-warping Conversation Prism was faithfully pulled out to demonstrate the point, with the accompanying claim that if you were to spend just two hours researching each of the platforms represented you would lose half of your working year – I looked into this and it’s not quite true: there are 108 tools and platforms in the Prism giving a grand total of 216 hours which divided by a working day of 7.5 hours is actually more like a month and a half. For the sake of fairness, however, I should point out that that Solis’s illustration is now 4 years old and doesn’t include Google+, Pinterest or Quora or any number of the other 50 million social start-ups that have kicked off since 2008. Point made and taken.) They argued that resources simply can’t stretch forever and that tried and tested options, with transparent analytics are the safest options for responsible marketers. ‘Don’t be first, be second’ was the buzz-motto proposed by PayPal’s Jon Bishop.

To counter, the team arguing against stated their belief that ‘…keeping up with the latest technical developments is essential to stay relevant in today’s communication landscape.’ A position that is really quite difficult to contend with these days. They used specific examples of businesses and projects that have both succeeded and failed due to their approach to innovation and change (including the late great Kodak). Perhaps most illuminating was Liz Scarff’s case study of her work with Save the Children in which AudioBoo played a key part in securing coverage of her #Blogadesh campaign on the Guardian’s live online coverage. She was challenged on this a number of times on the basis that the project story and content was really behind the success but she remained steadfast, maintaining that the Guardian simply would not have taken on the story in the same way had AudioBoo not been employed. Rob Salmon was particularly entertaining and to be fair had warned us that he was thrown out of the last debate he was involved in (at school) for getting ‘too excitable’. He cited the example of his work with Carling in launching the ‘iPint App’ on iTunes to demonstrate how being first on a platform can lead to newsworthiness and exposure.

All in all it was a lively debate, some very interesting points made by all involved and it was well worth attending.

Where do I stand? Well personally I think the idea of ‘bonfires’ and ‘fireworks’ is useful here. Social media gives us both long-term and short-term opportunities and both are woven in to the most successful strategies. Investing considerable amounts of time and resource into unproven platforms is certainly risky (especially when we’re blind to success metrics) and won’t be for most organisations. On the other hand, as every brand out there starts trying to ‘behave like a publisher’ using the big four platforms there’s the ever-present issue of how to achieve cut-through – how are you going to get noticed if you don’t do something markedly different from your competitors? There are lessons to be taken from both sides of the argument, but ultimately playing it too safe for too long is a surefire way to drive your brand into eventual obscurity.

I very much look forward to the next IAB Social Media event.

@adigoodsell

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 

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

After a year’s delay, Microsoft adCenter will start to power the PPC results on Yahoo UK in Q2 of 2012. Discussion of its potential for success aside, here are some useful links and an action plan for preparing UK campaigns.

Recap on UK Search Engine Market Shares

Yahoo/Bing face a major battle for market share in the UK – more than in the US. Google holds a dominant 91 percent of searches (Hitwise, 4 weeks to Jan 21st), with Yahoo and Bing at 2.28 percent and 3.83 percent respectively; less than the 4.80 percent of UK searches that take place on Google.com. There are more market share resources in this article.

Unsurprisingly, UK PPC campaigns on Yahoo and Bing receive less love than AdWords, although their combined research states their audiences are 41 percent more likely to convert than the “average” UK searcher.

Step 1: Shorten Your Yahoo Ads by February 1

Yahoo’s Panama system switched to ad lengths similar to Google some time ago – but they’re longer than those on adCenter. All new or modified ads on Panama are required to have an ad title of 25 characters (instead of 40) or less, and a display URL of a maximum 35 characters on February 1; ready for migration across to adCenter. Descriptions should also be shortened, from a maximum of 71 to 70 characters.

Existing ads that meet these requirements will migrate over to adCenter but will be truncated and paused – so I’d suggest editing all your ads sooner rather than later.

Step 2: Map Your Accounts

You may have accounts that live on Panama which are not on adCenter – take some time to compare and see which need migrating across, or what’s already in place. If you have a Yahoo or MSN rep, they’ll help with this process.

Best practice is to keep your adCenter account and build it out – not replace it by transferring over a larger Yahoo account; the systems are different.

Step 3: Know the Differences Between Panama and adCenter

The two systems work differently. This webinar explains how on the Search Alliance website – watch from 10:30 minutes onwards. There’s also a comparison guide.

You can view training videos as well and study for the adCenter exam.

Step 4: Allocate Time to Adjust, Expand Campaigns

After reviewing the above steps, there are several areas of your campaigns you will need to work on, including:

• Editing copy and display URLs 
• Expanding keywords 
• Reviewing negatives and the levels they are applied at 
• Adjusting match types 
• Adjusting geo-targeting 
• Reviewing dynamic insertion parameters

Consider spending time on campaigns already live on adCenter, too, as there may be keyword variations searched for on Yahoo than never had searches on Bing, and aren’t currently in your adCenter account.

There might be an opportunity here to improve targeting – adCenter has more granular targeting options than Panama down to city or metro areas, as well as region and country levels.

Step 5: Adjust Your Bid, Budget Strategy

AdCenter has higher minimum bids – £0.05 compared to £0.01 – and requires you to set a monthly budget (unlike Panama); you’ll need to incorporate this change into your workflow going forward.

Step 6: Review Your Landing Pages

This is always best practice – review your pages against the keywords driving traffic to them: are the keywords in the page, and is the content relevant? This is factored into rankings.

Step 7: Manage Expectations

Some U.S. accounts saw increases in performance post-transition; others saw the opposite. So communicate that there is a change coming and the waters may be choppy; not just because of the migration of accounts, but because of consumers seeing different ads and performance changing.

Watching Brief

Following the above steps, working closely with your search engine reps and maintain a watching brief should put you in a good position to cope with the change.

 @DuncanParry

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

Predictions are popping up everywhere as the New Year begins. Instead of producing another list of things that are likely to happen, here are the five things I’d like to see happen in 2012 but in reality probably won’t.

Bing Takes 15% Search Market Share From Google

It’s not the first time I’ve found myself writing that competition spurs on innovation. While Google might be innovating without a strong search competitor in the west, increased competition can only be a good thing – and helps keep large companies honest.

Which brings me to one way Bing might achieve this, in my idealised version of 2012.

Bing and Facebook Crack Social-Assisted Search

Word of mouth is still the most effective form of marketing, with search engines often ranking as the second most effective. So taking the word of mouth nature of social and using this to influence search results sounds like a perfect marriage, but nobody has made it work, with scale, internationally – yet.

If Bing and Facebook could crack this, they might just have a competitive advantage over Google, which will be focused on growing their user base on Google+ and lack much of the data Facebook have. Microsoft invested in Facebook and powers its web search, after all.

Yahoo is Reinvigorated With a New Strategy

Poor Yahoo. Left behind in search by Google, lacking a CEO, and the subject of constant speculation, the company is a long way from the Internet pioneer it once was. A reinvigorated Yahoo would be great to see; they still have many great services they’ve built or acquired.

Clients Appreciate That Specialists Deliver Better Campaigns – and Are Worth Paying For

Recessionary pressure and the power of procurement departments has meant some clients have consolidated activity under one all-service agency – even if that agency isn’t strong in digital areas like search, ad exchanges or conversion optimisation.

These brands are getting a “cheap” deal overall but are often missing a vital point – as Honda CMO Steve Center has said, “If you grind the margin out of your agency you will get a marginal agency.”

This especially applies when a digital department is charged out with a low fee to protect an all-service deal; that department’s P&L might not be funded to hire the best digital people (or simply enough people). Specialist agencies know these accounts well – they’re the ones you onboard and have to rebuild from scratch, or achieve amazing results for quickly – because there was so much low hanging fruit left by the other agency.

CMOs and CEOs Finally “Get Digital”

Many digital marketers will tell you how frustrating they find senior executive attitudes to funding digital. They’re happy to spend millions on TV ads, but ask them to agree to fund a landing page optimization tool and they recoil – even though the latter will bring concrete sales improvements.

Offline and branding are vital parts of the marketing mix – but the appropriation of budgets between channels is often out-dated. Twenty-five percent of time spent in media was on the Internet in 2010 in the U.S., but only 19 percent of budgets were spent on the channel; mobile saw 8 percent of time with only 0.5 percent of budgets. Print, by comparison, received 27 percent of budgets but only 8 percent of time.

There’s still a long way to go before the top execs at many brands truly “get” digital and budgets are more fairly apportioned.

I am not usually one for a conspiracy theory, unless it’s contained within a decent yarn like the Da Vinci code… but over the last year in particular, I am becoming increasingly convinced that Google wants rid of natural search results – to the point where I would really like them to make a statement of some kind and put people out of their misery.

Google will always base any statements around the phrase ‘user intent’ or ‘user experience’ and on the face of it, most of the things I am about to list could easily be batted away by Google’s ever-inventive PR wing using one of the two phrases above. However, user intent aside, Google has consistently taken steps to devalue the natural search results that it carries and the question remains – is Google’s master plan to abolish the natural algorithm… which is what made it so popular in the first place?

There are a number of specific developments in particular that point to this. And in true conspiracy theorist style, I will list them in bold. I might also throw in some exclamation marks too.

The removal of the referrer string for people logged in to their gmail account: although notionally only 10% of search traffic will be affected by this, we all know the value of robust data and 10% ‘unknown’ is not robust. Natural search tracking tools will be inaccurate all of the time, and reporting ROI will not be accurate either! And this is before Google’s wonderful social media offering takes off, increasing the % of people logged in whilst doing a search…

All studies carried out into the click through rates for natural search show that it has fallen significantly – some suggest that the rate of decline has even increased in the last six months! Certainly, the heady days of 70-80% of traffic going to natural search results is over. Many seem to suggest that 50% is the very best we can expect, especially for searches with commercial intent or searches where the cost per click for PPC ads is highest… Some (Google) will argue that this is due to improved, targeted PPC creative and a superior understanding of user intent by PPC practitioners, but in truth, it could also be something to do with the fact that with Google Instant products/local business results/PPC site links etc. most natural search results are now way below the fold.

How much is it worth to Google to increase traffic for commercial searches? Let’s just look at [car insurance] as an example of one keyword, admittedly a highly competitive one, but still just one keyword. If only 30% of the 500,000 or so people that search on Google each month for car insurance used to go through a paid search ad and Google were paid on average £2.50 for each of those 150,000 visitors, then they would have made £375,000 from that keyword. If 50% of searchers now go through a paid ad, that number has gone up to £750,000! If you replicate that across all of Google’s search, it’s clear that they have a large lever to pull to ensure they hit their quarterly forecasts to keep the markets happy, and there is still another 50% of room for maneuver!

The thing is, despite of all of the teeth-gnashing and wailing (that I’m helping to contribute to, admittedly), Google can do exactly what it likes. It’s their search engine and it’s the biggest one out there. All I would like to know is whether or not they will move to an entirely paid model? To people in the search industry this might be a big problem, an admission that they can’t actually create an algorithm clever enough to determine user intent and therefore, are willing to let big companies pay their way to the top of all listings, but at the moment all the evidence suggests that is exactly what they are going to do. They’re just not going to tell anyone about it until after they’ve strangled off all natural search results and the final internal study confirms that people no longer click on natural search results any more. It’s all about user intent, after all.

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.

Friends. Followers. Contacts. Circles. Social networks can be fun and productive for work or pleasure.

But social networks are also time consuming – more than most of us probably care to admit. With the average person reported to have 130 friends and growing on Facebook alone, the continuous flow of updates from individuals and organizations is overwhelming. From that page you liked on Facebook, to that industry pundit you follow on Twitter, and many others in between, everybody is updating, tweeting, posting, liking, checking in, sharing, +1ing…

Here’s the thing. It’s too much. Admit it. You’re overwhelmed.

I’ve declared a few times on Facebook and Twitter my plans to carry out a cull. A few people or pages get dropped. But…what if that person notices? What if that ex-colleague goes to work somewhere interesting? What if I miss that industry announcement or insider tip? Better not be too harsh, better stay connected.

I’m now on five social networks – four public ones and one closed network for work (Yammer). This week I’ve faced the truth: it’s too much. Time for a cull. But where to start?

Facebook

I know instinctively that Facebook is my personal space – it’s where friends and family share photos and post personal updates. It’s where I go to get away from work – not to blend the personal and professional.

Step one: un-friend work-only contacts and pages. Step two: move them to LinkedIn or Twitter depending on their social media activity; do I want to only keep in contact with them (LinkedIn) or read what they have to say (Twitter)?

Twitter

I maintain several accounts for myself and work, and the work accounts have clear objectives and strategies. My own, I freely admit, doesn’t. It’s a collection of personal and work interests, and I’m a generous follower.

Time for a change. This is the worrying bit – do I follow my instinct, and cull anybody I don’t regularly find useful? Will I miss out? What will happen to my follower volume? Should I care?

I’ve decide to not rush in here – analyzing hundreds of followers and then making bulk changes, whether un-following or adding them to lists, isn’t particularly easy and I’ve yet to find a tool with all the functionality I want to speed this up. Instead, I’m removing accounts I don’t find useful when I see messages from them – cleaning up my Twitter stream as I go.

LinkedIn & Yammer

LinkedIn is the easiest to keep under control – I’m cautious of adding anybody who approaches me (especially recruiters). Yammer, as a B2B network, is even easier to keep relevant – I have 100 percent control over groups and who I follow (OK, so I’m an admin, which helps.)

Google Plus

Now that’s a blank canvas. So how will I avoid repeating the mistakes I’ve drifted into on Facebook and Twitter?

Circles. I’ve immediately setup three – Work, Family & Friends and Acquaintances. I know I’ll add a further one for “Hobbies & Sports” when businesses and organizations have official pages. I might split my work circle up in future – but I’m keeping them small, and have already started consciously ignoring some followers who I don’t want in my circles.

Social Media Relevancy

If I used to be your friend on Facebook, or I no longer mutually follow you on Twitter, sorry. Relevancy has been one of the underpinning characteristics of the biggest success story of digital – search – and the same applies to social media.

Life’s too short, too busy, and too rushed for the irrelevant. For that attitude, I won’t apologize.