In broad terms, it could be said that there are two ways in which you find content online.
through performing a search in a search engine, like Google or visiting a directory
through viewing links posted by those in your social networks
Traditionally, when you head to a search engine or directory, you’re usually looking for something specific. When you’re browsing through Twitter your social networks, you’re more likely to be looking for simply anything of interest that has been recommended by your friends.
In the past, these two methods of finding content were mutually exclusive. Today, social networks are having an increasing influence on the results that appear in your search results and in modern directories like NZS.com.
In terms of search engines, the influence that your social networks have on the results that appear can be surprising and yet also difficult to detect.
How does Google know who you are connected to?
Predominantly, Google finds out information on who we are connected to through the social media accounts connected to our Google profiles. If you add your Twitter account to your Google profile, Google will search through the people that you are following on Twitter and use that information to personalise your search results.
While this may sound intrusive, it’s actually public information. If you had time on your hands, you could go look at the people that we’re following on Twitter by clicking on ‘Following’ on our Twitter profile. Get a feel for the type of people that we like to follow and you would have a much better idea of content that might interest us. This is exactly what Google is doing with personalised search results.
Just take a look at a screenshot of a search example in our ‘Social Media and SEO‘ resource and find out about the advantages and disadvantages of personalised search results.
Why should I share content online?
After seeing the affect that your own social networks can have on the results that display in search – even so far as displaying websites in the first few results that previously weren’t even on the first page – it’s plain to see the reverse of this.
If we’re part of a large social network and have a number of followers on Twitter or Google+, we may find that when we click on a social sharing button we’re actually influencing the search results of a good number of people.
In that sense, it’s a good idea to share the content that you publish online. Obviously we can only ‘+1′ or ‘Like’ our content once so it’s also a good idea to look for positive content related to your business, services and products and share those pages with your networks as well.
The more content about your business that you can get into search results, the more you will get your brand in front of searchers. A classic example, if you’ll excuse the shameless plug, is to share your site profile on NZS.com. If you don’t yet have one, just complete this form to update your details and once your profile is live use the sharing buttons on that page to share it with your social networks. The Natcoll Design School have a great example of what this can look like.
What’s the catch?
As with most methods of influencing search results, there are, of course, two sides to every story. If we go overboard with sharing our own content and waxing lyrical about our own services, there’s a good chance our followers will start to disconnect.
Raving about your own content on Twitter is like walking into the middle of a conversation and shouting about your latest special offers. The conversation will usually move away and you’ll find yourself in an increasingly lonely situation!
So when updating any social media network, be sure to intersperse updates about yourself and your business with a good amount of general discussion with other users as well as links to other content that you find interesting online. If you’re struggling for time, speak with a social marketing professional to discuss a social media strategy for your business.
We’ve had an invite to play around with Google+, Google’s new social network, in its testing stage before it goes live to the rest of the world.
To give you an introduction to Google+ and its similarities and differences to other existing social networks, we’ve put together a screencast video to give you a brief tour of the service. The transcript can be read below the video.
Note: To receive informative emails about these topics and more, you can sign up to the NZS.com Newsletter here.
Transcript:
Hi my name’s Mark from NZS.com. Just quickly, NZS.com is a directory for New Zealand websites and provides a great deal of website resource and community tools for New Zealand business owners looking to promote themselves online.
I’m just going to fly you through a quick intro to Google+, just because I know there’s a lot of people out there without an invite or they have an invite but can’t get in just yet so I thought it’d be kinda cool to tease you guys with an example of what you can do with Google+.
I’m just going to talk about Circles and Sparks basically. Hangouts is a really cool video-group-chat-thing for up to 10 people but deserves a video of its own.
So the old Google Profile was a semi-smart profile about you but wasn’t really used by a lot of people, it wasn’t really mainstream, so Google+ have incorporated that into Google+ and has connected it with +1, the sharing button, to make it all really useful. The old Google Profile URL now redirects to the Google+ profile page.
Very similar to Facebook in the setup, you have a left column with your Facebook photo and you have what Google call the ‘stream’, similar to the Facebook wall but quite functional in the way it can be used.
Quite slick graphics and animation – you can flick through photos in your profile easily, you can imagine some creative types doing a few smart things with that.
You have your profile area then your photo albums. All very smart, nice graphically and they don’t just display as squares but fit themselves into the page really nicely.
Circles
Google Circles is where a lot of the functionality is at. It’s basically an insight into the fact that Google have looked at existing networks – looked at what works well and what doesn’t work so well – and I think what they found is that the transition between personal Facebook to professional Facebook and public Facebook was quite cloudy, it could sort of be done but it was difficult to get to, no one was really doing it, it was all kind of tricky. People were posting things they wouldn’t want others to see but not really knowing how to change the privacy settings to change that.
Circles makes that really easy. You can see by the way they’ve set up these circles with the notes next to them that they’ve “got it” – they understand why this is really useful. So you can see by the notes next to:
Friends – Your real friends, the ones you feel comfortable sharing private details with.
Family – Your close and extended family with as many or as few in-laws as you like.
Acquaintances – A good place to stick people you’ve met but aren’t particularly close to.
It’s really easy to drag people into those circles. You just select a bunch of people and drop them together. You can see it’s all very simple and nice and graphical.
There are three main options for finding people to add to those circles:
Find and Invite – “Our best guess of people you might want to add to a circle. Get more suggestions by importing contacts from your email account” – Google already have access to your Gmail account so you can get to your Google contacts in this list. You can also import your Hotmail contacts and your Yahoo! contacts. At this stage you can’t import your Facebook contacts; Facebook wouldn’t be too happy about that, but I’m sure people will find their own way around this.
People who’ve added you – So people who have already added you to their circle. You may or may not know them. They may have seen you around; seen something you’ve said publicly and wanted to keep up with you. They’ve tried to connect with you and are interested in what you’ve got to say so maybe you’ll be interested in what they have to say and want to add them to one of your own circles.
People in your circles – This is here so that you can add people to multiple circles if you wanted to. It’s good that Google are quite clear in that they say “Other users are notified when you add them but never told which circle”, they’re never told the name of the circle because you can obviously create your own with your own name. For example, I’m in the web industry so could have a “Web Professionals” circle that I can add people to but they would never know the name of the circle they’re being added to.
The Home Page
Circles come in handy here (on your home page). You’ve got your stream here. By default it shows all of the people in your circles combined. Hopefully down the track Google allow you to set a default circle to appear in your stream when you first visit the page.
To do that at the moment you’d jump into, for example, here in my “Social Media Contacts” circle- which is people that I already know through the likes of Twitter and Facebook – I can put those into a particular stream here so I only see updates from those people.
Likewise, when I post my own updates you can see that it selects that particular circle so when I make the status update, only that circle sees it. You can see instantly that’s going to be pretty cool for separating your personal updates from your professional updates and updates you want to be more public.
You can add photos, videos, links and location to your update. Location comes in really handy for the iPhone and Android apps where it takes a bit of the Foursquare flame (another social network and location ‘check-in’ service) in that you can check-in to places. You can add comments in the same sense that you could leave tips in Foursquare, all pretty cool.
In fact, the streams themselves all shows connections (similarities) with Twitter lists where you’d create a list of people that Tweet about one particular thing or are in a particular industry- you may create a list of all of the people that you know on Twitter that are photographers so you see only updates from those photographers.
Circles work in a similar way but you can also create an update that only displays for that particular list of people, which you can’t do in Twitter.
Sparks
Sparks is similar to the Facebook interests that you would add to your profile. They weren’t just words on a screen, they linked to a page that had information on that interest.
Sparks works like a search stream that you add to a shortcut in your menu (profile) so you can quickly get to that stream easily. Google have some default interests which are just hints and ideas but you can put anything you want.
You bring up a search stream (e.g. ‘social media’) and it shows results for content online that matches that search term. You can scan through, check stuff out, share things, and then you can save it to your interests and then click down here (on the interest) and it brings that stream back up again.
Menu Bar and Notifications
One of the cool things about notifications is that you have this menu bar at the top that a lot of people noticed became black a few weeks ago whether you’re on Gmail or Google.co.nz. Google+ adds this share box here which allows you to share links, post a new update and do what you like without leaving the page that you’re on.
Similar to the notifications, there’s nothing new here, you’ve got your notifications in a list but what’s quite cool is that you can jump through these and play around with all you like – editing circles, making comments – you can access that same menu from your gmail. You can be reading your emails and get a notification that’s quite discreet and choose to respond to that how you like, all without leaving your email. That works the same for Google Documents, Calendar and everything else.
That’s enough of an intro for now. That’s Google+ and I’m Mark from NZS.com. Thanks.
Further NZS.com Resources Related to Social Media:
Find out how to add social sharing buttons to your website or blog with our Social Buttons guide.
Do you have any questions about social media or any other topics? Post a question and start a discussion with the NZS.com community on NZS.com Answers.
Facebook have announced a new video calling service. The video calling service is powered by Skype and will allow you to easily add video to your conversations with Facebook friends.
Facebook are currently extending the prominence of their chat service even more by introducing a new ‘messages sidebar’ that appears along the right side of your window with on Facebook.
At this stage, Facebook have released a promotional video launching Facebook Video Calling, although the video reveals little about how the service works.
This ‘awesome announcement’ (in the words of Mark Zuckerberg) is slightly dampened as it follows the recent Beta launch of Google+. Google+ is a social network created by Google and boasts video group calling for up to 10 people in ‘Google Hangouts’. You can either enter a public hangout and wait for people to turn up, or create a hangout for a specific ‘circle’ of accounts that you have previously included in the circle.
Google’s video shows a bit more of how the service works.
To this extent, when it comes to video calling, it’s fair to say Google+ is a step ahead of both Skype and Facebook simply because of the sheer number of people that can be included on the video group call, as well as the clever integration with Google Circles.
However, Facebook has the benefit of being a well established social network with more than 750 million active users, while Google is still in an invite-only beta testing stage. So it could be said that Facebook has a head start while Google cements the transition from ‘search’ to ‘search and social’.
Initial thoughts from the NZS.com community suggest that Facebook could remain strong as a more personal social networking tool, while Google+ will act as a more professional and public form of social networking, perhaps hitting the mark that LinkedIn have been aiming for all this time?
What do you think? Will you be spending your time more on Google+ than Facebook over the next year? Or is Facebook enough of a social network for you?
P.S. Kudos for Facebook’s much nicer version of an embedded video than YouTube! Doesn’t it look much smarter without those controls at the bottom?
Yesterday, Google launched their Plus One button (+1) to the world. Or at least, to a portion of the world.
The Google +1 is Google’s answer to other social sharing functions such as Facebook Likes. For along time, Google has been trying to expand it’s share of the Internet user market and has tried to reduce its dependence on search by introducing social media products such as Google Profiles and Google Buzz.
Sharp eyed users may also have seen search results that are relevant to their social networks at the bottom of search result pages, such as images specifically from their own Flickr network as well as other social media channels.
With +1, Google hopes to step further into social sharing and finally create a button that can take its place alongside other social sharing buttons such as the Tweet and Facebook Like buttons. You can find out much more about these sharing buttons as well as how many New Zealanders are interacting on social media in our Social Buttons website resource.
In reality, +1 may be much more targeted and limited in its use than initial appearances would suggest.
Limitations of Google Plus One
Firstly, it’s only open to Google account holders. Nothing too wrong with this – you can only Tweet something if you have a Twitter account and, generally, you can only Facebook Like something if you have a Facebook account.
However, +1 can only be used specifically by Google account holders that have a Google Profile. If the Google user doesn’t have a profile, they’ll be prompted to create one simply by adding a couple of quick details. This is obviously quite a strong push by Google to get more Internet users into Google Profiles. The issue is that those users that have a Google account for their business may not be authorised to create a Google Profile. Google doesn’t recommend that profiles are attached to business accounts as if that individual leaves the business, they’ll probably lose access to their profile.
It appears that Google is suggesting that searchers create their own personal Google account and Google profile so that they can use the plus one feature. This is made ‘easier’ by Google by providing a quick link to switch Google accounts so that a user with a business Google account can switch to their personal account to +1 a search result, blog post or similar.
Again, the reality is that, at this stage, this service is almost completely unusable. For those that already use a Google account for business and have a personal Google account as well, it’s obvious that this switching account service has substantial flaws. The main flaw being that if you switch a Google account in one browser window, you lose access to the Google apps that you had open elsewhere, such as Google Docs, Google Webmaster Central and Google Analytics to name a few. You could lose your place in many documents all just to add a +1 to a search result.
For some users, the +1 service could still be very useful to bookmark results and find more websites based on recommendations. For others, Google needs to fix its account issues before this service will become usable.
Don’t forget to read our Social Buttons resource to find out more about social sharing and how New Zealand is using social networks.
If you follow the latest search news you’ve probably come across this interview with search industry big kahuna Bruce Clay. His firm is one of the top SEO and SEM companies in the world, and at an American Search Engine Strategies conference in August he discussed the importance of video and other engagement objects for search in the future.
Basically, some people in the industry have taken from the interview that Bruce is implying that without video, you website may be unlikely to rank in the future. And while that may be a tad extreme, it is clear that engagement objects are becoming increasingly crucial when it comes to organic and universal results in search engines.
An ‘engagement object’ is an element or multimedia component you can add to your website that engages users and encourages them to interact with your website.
These include videos, podcasts and audio files, images, macros, graphs and charts, webcomics, RSS feeds, maps, polls, and live streaming.
In the interview, Bruce talks about which variables are important to the Google search algorithm, discussing how the introduction of universal search has resulted in a change in the number of variables that are considered for ranking.
While it has been previously accepted that Google used 120 variables to rank websites, the general belief is that since the introduction of universal search and greater use of engagement objects, Google has increased its algorithm variables to as many as 200.
He goes on to say that websites containing video, viewed as one of the most important engagement objects, will soon be received by Google’s algorithm better, resulting in your site having a greater opportunity to rank well.
If you’re a customisation geek, Google is offering to further satisfy your appetite for styley backgrounds even more with its newest range of Google Chrome themes
With Google Chrome themes from designers like Anna Sui, Donna Karen and Kate Spade (pictured), as well as a range of cool cartoon and pop culture inspired motifs to choose from, you can be sure your Chrome browser will never look less then geek-a-liciously gorgeous again.
Google Chrome is currently only for Windows Vista/XP SP3 users. A Mac-friendly version is said to be on the way.
Do you know your Firefox from your Safari? Your Chrome from your Opera? Do you know what web browser you use when you use the Internet?
A link was sent to me today to this cool little website, brought to us by ‘some folks at Google’. The back story is that when Google launched Chrome they did a survey in Times Square in New York, asking more than 50 passersby of different ages and backgrounds one seemingly simple question:
As you’ll see if you check out the video footage the results are pretty embarrassing, and the What Browser? website offers a quick snapshot and overview of what exactly a browser is for anyone too embarrassed to ask…
I’m happy to admit I actually learned a thing or two myself!
Google has been forced in court to release the identity of a blogger who has allegedly defamed 39 year old former model Liskula Cohen.
The former Australian Vogue cover girl won a landmark court battle this week to reveal the identity of an anonymous blogger who made defamatory remarks about her in their blog, ‘Skankiest in NYC’.
Referred to as a “skank” and an “old hag” on the blog, Cohen sued search engine giant Google in January in the hope of forcing the company to reveal the identity of the blogger using Google’s Blogger service. While it was shut down in March, the blog was almost entirely devoted to making slanderous comments about Cohen. It contained just five entries, all of which were published on August 21 last year.
“I would have to say the first-place award for ‘Skankiest in NYC’ would have to go to Liskula Gentile Cohen,” the anonymous blogger wrote. “How old is this skank? 40 something? She’s a psychotic, lying, whoring, still going to clubs at her age, skank.”
Cohen believed the posts to be defamatory, but was forced to take action against Google in order to unmask the blogger’s identity before she could take further legal action.
Before Judge Madden’s ruling a Google spokeswoman said, “We sympathise with anyone who may be the victim of cyber bullying. We also take great care to respect privacy concerns and will only provide information about a user in response to a subpoena or other court order”.
On Monday Judge Madden ruled that Cohen was entitled to sue the blogger for defamation and in an unprecedented move he ordered Google to provide the blogger’s name. Judge Madden also rejected the claims by the blogger’s lawyer Anne Salisbury that the comments were mere opinion and that only factual assertions could be considered libellous.
Cohen’s lawyer Steven Wagner hoped the decision would send a message that the internet was “not a free-for-all”.
“The law protects freedom of speech, including anonymous speech, but it doesn’t protect defamation, and people should not think that they can defame others on the Internet or on blogs by hiding behind a screen name.”
The yet-to-be-named blogger’s lawyer warned the ruling could open the floodgates for anyone who has been the subject of a nasty comment online to take legal action.
After seeing the affect that your own social networks can have on the results that display in search – even so far as displaying websites in the first few results that previously weren’t even on the first page – it’s plain to see the reverse of this.
Initial thoughts from the NZS.com community suggest that Facebook could remain strong as a more personal social networking tool, while Google+ will act as a more professional and public form of social networking, perhaps hitting the mark that LinkedIn have been aiming for all this time?
Yesterday, Google launched their Plus One button (+1) to the world. Or at least, to a portion of the world.
If you’re a customisation geek, Google is offering to further satisfy your appetite for styley backgrounds even more with its newest range of 
