Many nonprofits still struggle with how to measure Social Media ROI and are not so clear on what exactly the benefits are of utilizing social media. An obvious benefit is about take front and center stage in a few days when Google launches their Real Time Search to the public. If your nonprofit is not utilizing social media, then the only content that will show up is what others are saying about your organization. Nonprofits that do utilize social media will have more control and will show up in real time results more often.  Here’s a video demo from Google:

]]> http://technoversed.wordpress.com/2009/12/09/google-chrome-launches-extensions-mac-version-social-search-google-goggles-a-lot-of-other-cool-stuff/ Wed, 09 Dec 2009 07:47:04 +0000 Hef http://technoversed.wordpress.com/2009/12/09/google-chrome-launches-extensions-mac-version-social-search-google-goggles-a-lot-of-other-cool-stuff/

Google Chrome Extensions:

The much-awaited steroid booster for Google’s Chrome browser is here. As of last night, Google Chrome launched extensions that fit nicely into their Chrome browser. This was a launch that came along with an onslaught of a few other announcements. It’s been a whirlwind of events that the Search Giant has unleashed on it’s users.

Chrome Extensions is a powerful add-on feature that gets added to the browser, from where you can access multiple applications without leaving the browser that you are working in at all. It’s helpful, handy, and convenient.Firefox is perhaps the first browser that started this in a mainstream way. So far, I have downloaded the following extensions and added them to my Chrome browser (VMWare environment, since I use a Mac).

The extensions sit very nicely next to the very long address bar and are easy to manage (click on ‘Tools’ > Extensions to disable/uninstall)

Here are some extensions that I have installed and have been playing around with:

• Chromed Bird – a very nice, clean twitter client application that allows you to update your Twitter timeline from the toolbar itself.
• DotSpots - Connects blog posts, links, photos, videos and docs to any text on the web or into your social stream. This one looks quite nifty and useful. Intend playing around with it some more later.
• Google Wave Notifier – Tells you the number of unread waves in your account. This is one of the most useful extensions Chrome has, if you are a frequent Google Wave user, since at the moment, this seems to be the only way to know whether you have unread updates on Wave or not (except if you keep Wave open in one of the tabs). The other great thing about this extension is that clicking on the icon will show you a summary of the subject line by the creator of the Wave.
• Google Mail Checker – Displays the number of unread messages in your Google Mail inbox. You can also click the button to open your inbox.
• RSS Subscription Extension – For anyone who uses a Reader to track blog posts from different sources. A one-click wonder.

Google Chrome Mac Version:

Google also launched the Mac version for Google Chrome about 12 months from the date of launch of their Windows version. The Mac version has been in the works for a long time now. When the Windows version was launched, Kara Swisher (of Boom Town) spoke to Sergey Brin about it and he made his embarrassment very evident. However, December 8th, 2009 Sergey would have been a proud man. The Chrome for Mac version is stable, fast, and almost as good as the Windows version. There are a few key features missing in the Mac version, but I’m sure it’s a matter of time.

Personally, I have been using the Mac developer version since the time it was launched, and the developments thus far until the beta release have been very encouraging and extremely progressive.

In fact, while Google is not officially supporting the newly-launched Extensions for the Mac build of Chrome just yet, Techcrunch has reported that the DotSpots founder - Matt Mastracci and a blogger at Grack.com have come up with a way to enable installation of the extensions in the developer version Chromium. You can read more about how to use extensions for Chromium (dev version) here. Caution: Do this at your own risk.

Google Social Search:

On Monday, 7th Dec, 2009, Google held an event in Mountain View at the Computer History Museum, where they announced the inclusion of their erstwhile experiment on Social Search to the world at large. According toAmit Singhal – a Google Fellow, it is also the first time that any search engine has incorporated real-time updates in their search results. This particular feature is available only on the ‘.com’ domain for now. Some new partners who were involved in making this real-time search more comprehensive were also announced. They were Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku andIdenti.ca — along with Twitter, which Google announced a few weeks ago.

Here’s a quick video on how real-time search works on Google.com. Further, this particular feature is available on mobile search as well.

The social search feature has further been extended into Google Trends as well, where you can search for things under the ‘Hot Topics’ column.

You can also expand the ‘more options’ box on Google Search and click on ‘Latest’ to take a look at the feature for the search you’ve just performed.

Google Goggles & Near Me Now or Search Nearby:

At the same event as the one where real-time search on Google was announced, they also announced the arrival of Google Goggles. Literally taking the adage seriously – A picture is worth a thousand words, Vic Gundotra – VP Engineering at Google demonstrated how Google Android powered phones (Android 1.6+) now allow people to search based on the picture they click using the ‘visual search history’ feature. Here’s a quick video again.

Google’s Search Nearby (or Near Me Now) feature allows users to use their Android powered phones and look for things that are of interest to them around their current location, complete with reviews and ratings. If you are at a client meeting and want to find a place to grab some lunch, this feature will help you to do just that (comes with directions and distance from location as well).

Some other launches:

Google Groups addition to Apps – A forum for the folks at corporate offices

Speed Tracer – A Chrome extension to judge load speed of pages on the web

Living Stories – A new way to consume the news on the Internet, where quick snippets followed with information in order of decreasing importance.

And to think of it – we’re only halfway through the week.

The San Francisco Chronicle’s technology blog, The Tech Chronicles, describes the recent trend in charity fundraisers fueled by social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.  The Chronicle discussed the growing trend of social media for community causes and recognized LeapFish’s recent Tweet-a-Cause campaign that empowered Twitter users with the ability to Tweet a little boys wish to go to Disneyland true.

The article covered the partnership between The Greater Bay Area Make-A-Wish Foundation and LeapFish that raised $10,000 to send a 4-year-old ill boy to Disneyland.

Excerpt from the Article:

Regarding the use of Social Media to promote Charities, ” It only takes a couple of moments a day to change the world…LeapFish, a Pleasanton search engine, has pledged to donate $10,000 if 100,000 Twitter messages are generated.”

Click here to read the article on SFGate.com:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/techchron/detail?blogid=19&entry_id=52391

I don’t know how I missed this Daniel Roth article in the October Wired about Demand Media the first time around, but it showed up in my Twitter queue this morning, and came on the heels of my reading and thinking about Farhad Manjoo’s evisceration of Associated Content in Slate. (I was kinder about Associated Content back in my Wall Street Journal days, but then I was mostly interested in them as a different way to build a brand.) From there, I read Sage Ross’s very good take (channeling Jay Rosen) on Demand Media vs. Wikimedia.

And then I tried and failed to calm myself down.

Journalists, the Web is not how our profession ends. The Web is a wonderful vehicle for storytelling, explaining, doing civic good and empowering readers who want to dig for information. If you want to know how our profession ends, look at Demand Media, starting with Roth’s poignant portrait of an experienced video journalist shooting noisy, out-of-focus footage for $20 a pop. This is the journalist as Chinese factory worker — except for a lot of rural Chinese the factory is a step up. You know the old joke about the sign that reads Good, Fast, Cheap — Pick Two? Demand Media took that and turned it into an irony-free business plan. The joke, unfortunately, is on the rest of us.

I’d encountered material from Demand before, along with stuff from other vapidmedia factories such as Associated Content and eHow. But I’d written it off as the usual Internet stupidity breaking the waterline thanks to an unfortunate alignment of search-engine tumblers. I hadn’t grasped that the visibility of this stuff — indeed, the sole reason for its existence — was the product of a Google-dependent strategy, or processed that its bland stupidity was a direct consequence of a pitiless, bottom-line business model. Wired’s Roth describes the consequences aptly: “To appreciate the impact Demand is poised to have on the Web, imagine a classroom where one kid raises his hand after every question and screams out the answer. He may not be smart or even right, but he makes it difficult to hear anybody else.”

Now that I’ve spluttered and raged, an attempt at perspective. It’s good to understand what information people are searching for, and by all accounts Demand Media has done a terrific job at that. Journalists have spent far too long uninterested in questions like that, maintaining and sometimes even cultivating an air of artistic disconnect from readers and the business side of their publications. It’s an understatement to say that hasn’t served them well in trying to adapt to the seismic changes in our industry. Smart algorithms like Demand’s are a way to bridge that disconnect, and a potential source of story ideas to boot. (Check out the interesting exchange about people donating cars in Dallas.)

Nor am I saying that you’ve got to be a member of the journalistic priesthood to impart useful information or tell good stories. I’m sure there’s some good, even great stuff produced by Demand Media and Associated Content, just as I rejoice that millions of people now produce commentaries, explainers and, yes, new stories without journalistic backgrounds or affiliations.

But Demand Media isn’t just an algorithm, and the confines of business models like Demand’s work against the production of good stuff. I’ll choose to believe Demand CEO Richard Rosenblatt that he wants to improve quality, but if he’s true to what’s made his company successful, he’ll have a lot of trouble doing that. Similarly, this article by Demand’s Steven Kydd, touting that The Future = Art + Science + Scale, has some valuable lessons for publishers, and it sounds reasonable enough. But the Demand equation sure feels more like The Present = Science + Scale – Art than what Kydd came up with. (See the sign up above.)

A couple of weeks back I had an interesting conversation with a first-class digital-media experimenter in which we talked about how systems are constructed, and how the starting points you choose will allow users to do interesting, unexpected things with those systems, or prevent that. Twitter is an obvious example — it’s slightly out of control, which has allowed its users to turn it into a hotbed of innovation. Demand’s system strikes me as so rigidly controlled that it’s a poor fit for any kind of innovation. Which would be fine if Demand weren’t the kid waving his hand in class with an obvious, not particularly edifying answer to everything.

Granted, it’s very early — too worried, probably, for me to get as worked up as I have. As Manjoo notes, vapidmedia is basically an exploitation of a weakness in search engines, which suggests its success could be temporary — the vapidmedia business model is perilously close to that of spam blogs, which Google battles all the time. As Manjoo notes, “once Google and co. wise up to [Associated Content]’s schemes, its business model is toast.” Still, I worry that’s wishful thinking. In class, the pushy kid with his hand up all the time would get pulled aside by the teacher and told to wait his turn. But there is no search-engine teacher. Google is hard on the crooked, but much as I dislike Demand Media and its peers, they aren’t crooked — and Google’s democratic, Hero Engineer mentality doesn’t lend itself to punishing the merely dumb.

A more hopeful sign, for me, lies in another Web truism: The cream rises, and over time talent wins out. As social search eclipses industrial search, the cream should rise faster. Right?

Well, maybe. Like a lot of current journalism debates, that becomes a referendum on one’s faith in people. Do you think people can produce accountability journalism without the framework of big journalistic institutions? Well, having thought about that a lot … I don’t know. Do you think if people move to the fore in finding information and sharing it we’ll get better information? I don’t know that one either.

This gets back to something said by Sage Ross about Wikimedia vs. Demand Media, which he describes rather poetically as “media driven by love versus media driven by money.” That’s a bit too simplistic for me, but I’d like to agree with his overall point. Now that I’ve calmed down some, I’d like to conclude that this too will pass, that people will make algorithms a complement to their own choices, that the cream will rise, the vapidmedia factories will be shuttered, and we’ll all be the better for it. I’d like to have faith, in other words. But media driven by love isn’t always so edifying, either. Have you been to Yahoo Answers lately?

In the last two days, Google has made some changes to Google News, allowing publishers more control over how articles can be viewed for free. Yesterday, Google said it will let publishers limit readers to five free articles per day, a modification to its First Click Free program, and offered to crawl and index preview pages made available, labeling them in search results as Subscription.  This morning, Google unveiled a web crawler specifically for Google News, allowing publishers to tweak their robots.txt file to exclude Google News but not regular search, or to further slice and dice what’s visible where.

All very interesting given the war of words between Google and publishers calling the search engine giant all manner of nasty names (nobody likes being called an intestinal parasite), a charge now led by Rupert Murdoch, who’s elbowed the Associated Press aside to head the brigade. This war has intensified of late, with word of talks between Murdoch’s News Corp. and Microsoft that could see News Corp. remove its news from Google in favor of Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine — and mutterings that News Corp. might challenge whether fair-use laws apply to aggregators. Google has fired back, in its blandly live-and-let-live way — I was amused to note that Google couldn’t resist making publishers look backwards by noting that they’d already been able to request being left out of Google News.

This is interesting political theater, but like a lot of political theater I maintain it doesn’t mean much.

First off, publishers’ paywalls aren’t fixed now, but then they weren’t cracked before in any meaningful way. On Computerworld, Seth Weintraub notes that “it is only going to be slightly more difficult to get around paywalls using the Google trick” — for instance, you could evade the five-articles-per-day limit by using a different browser in which you’re not logged into your Google account. Weintraub notes that “you know your sneaky little trick of getting around the Wall Street Journal’s paywall is mainstream if they demonstrate it on the NBC primetime show the Office,” which naturally leads to an embed of the now-famous clip in which Jim gets through to a paywalled Journal article in seconds flat. All true, but I think this misses something: In the show, only two of the assembled Dunder Mifflin employees know the paywall trick. As long as those percentages hold up, publishers with paywalls aren’t actually concerned about leaky paywalls, except for their usefulness in crying woe and trying to extract something from Google. This is the same misconception I objected to when NBC consultant Jeff Gralnick recently raised the specter of “some smart 12-year-old” getting around technological barriers — folks interested in digital journalism like playing around with technology, and so we tend to forget that most people don’t. (And I bet Computerworld bloggers run rings around us.) The idea of technological barriers isn’t to keep out the Jim Halperts of the world — that never works. Rather, it’s to keep out the Oscars and Dwights.

Nor am I worried that alliances between publishers and Bing would lead to a world of Balkanized search, a scenario raised by Ken Auletta in a New York Times conversation between him and Fred Wilson, moderated by John Markoff. The reason is the growing power of social search, which I explored in my last post. Auletta discusses social search too, asking, “Would you rather have the advice of 20 friends whom you know and trust and who share their experience with cameras, or 20,000 or so links from a Google search?” He’s right that we’ll opt for the former, but it’s not an either-or scenario: As Wilson notes, “I don’t see search and social as disconnected islands. I see them as connected important features that complement each other.” I’d take the metaphor a step further and say social search is the water that will connect all the islands. The speed of social search is uncanny — a good Twitter news feed will deliver the desired information from a vast range of sources, making the question of which engine indexes that information irrelevant.

Pandia Search Engine News, a blog specializing in search engine technology, writes that the “new LeapFish has a place among the Top 5 sites for social search”. The post notes that not all social search engines present real-time results, but LeapFish, in addition to having real-time text results, also has real-time results from a number of other sources, including multimedia.

Excerpt from the Article:

“The core functionality of LeapFish is still search, but the search box now has two buttons: ‘Real Time’ and ‘Search Web.’ The ‘Real Time’ button leads to a mosaic of real time results: News, trending topics, relevant top stories on Digg, fresh tweets and video results. In spite of the large amount of information, the search results are easy to navigate.”

Click here to read the entire Pandia Search Engine News article:

http://www.pandia.com/sew/2250-search-the-real-time-web-with-leapfish.html

Search e social search è uno dei temi rilevanti su cui si giocano più partite. Non solo per  motori di ricerca. Ma per tutti noi utenti e addetti ai lavori del web.

Credo che siamo troppo ancora in mezzo al percorso per capire cosa verrà fuori, val la pena però ascoltare e leggere le diverse opinioni per formarsene una propria.

The Future of Search is More than Social

è una delle opinioni di scenario interessanti. Fa fare un passo avanti alla considerazione che social search significa avere come rilevanti o più rilevanti le opinioni della cerchia degli “amici” . La sfida futura potrebbe essere che il mestiere del motore di ricerca diventi quello di setacciare e restituire quello che a noi come persone interessa combinando e valutando il peso delle fonti.

Combinando i risultati “neutri” di Google con quelli a forte influenza dei social media (things + people). Per fare un passo più in là. Gooogle sviluppa un’applicazione people based che non legga solo le “quantità” ma anche il livello di prossimità tra la fonte e chi fa la ricerca.

“Google could create a people-rank API, so other sites like Tweetmeme could rank their content not only based how frequently it is retweeted, but also how it relates to you, and to other people.

o far Google has been really good at things, places, sites or pages, but it lacks relevance because it doesn’t know people. Twitter have the people element (although Twitter search doesn’t extract any meaning from it), same with Facebook, comments on blogs, reviews on product sites (from real people), rankings, and general activity.

Combine all that and you got the future of search. It is not social, not traditional – but both + it’s targeted to you. And it can be used for more than simply searching.

I found this extremelly interesting article on Socialized, please enjoy :

1. Augmented Reality Applications Will Start to Go Mainstream

Augmented Reality (AR) is the ability to place computer-generated information, such as text and labels, on top of live real world data, such as video from a smart phone. Most AR applications in 2009 were quaint curiosities designed to demonstrate the AR concept. It took a lot of hacking and ingenuity to make these a reality since most consumer platforms lagged (but not by much) in features (think video finally coming to the iPhone) required for AR.

A few AR applications have been rolled out by progressive marketers and other organizations this year, but 2010 will be the year AR explodes. Expect to see applications from major corporations, municipalities, and institutions of higher learning. Some of the most interesting applications will be outside of marketing and promotion. These might include realtime campus maps and guided tours; theme park guides; capital equipment location and inventory; and even applications in which the operator makes computer-based notes on top of realtime images, which would be useful for things like home inspection and insurance claims estimating.

Geekspeak marketing and lack of public awareness will hold AR back. Verizon was featuring AR capability (by name) in its Droid spots, and one can only assume this was to attract early adopters and gearheads, since most consumers have no idea what AR is or what it can do.

2. Location-Based Applications Will Dissolve Into General Social Networks

Location-based applications like Foursquare and Brightkite will not be the darlings of social media as some predict, but will instead turn into features and dissolve into general social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Twitter recently rolled out its Geotagging capability on a limited basis. Features and capabilities help grow a network’s user base in infancy; huge subscriber numbers grow it to adulthood. Services that are specifically location based will not experience the kinds of growth achieved by general purpose social networks. Additionally, other than location information, specialized location-based services have little to differentiate themselves from mainstream social networks. These companies could end up being acquired.

3. Enterprise Social Software Applications Will Become Commonplace

Large software providers like IBM, SAP and Oracle will launch, or announce, the first enterprise-grade social networking and Web 2.0 collaboration applications/suites that will gain broad momentum and recognition in the marketplace.

Certainly all of these companies are active in the Web 2.0 space. Oracle has Beehive, Microsoft has added social capabilities to SharePoint, SocialText is in the enterprise, as is IBM’s Lotus Connections, but no category killer has emerged. Many enterprises are launching blogs on TypePad or WordPress and building social networks and communities on third-party software or developing it from the ground up using Ruby-on-Rails.

What needs to happen in the enterprise space is for one or two brands to be so well understood, so feature rich, and so commonplace, as to achieve generic status. PowerPoint is ubiquitous. Before we can say the enterprise social software market is mature, enterprise brands must become as generic and pervasive as PowerPoint. 2010 could be the year that happens, or the year we see the first enterprise application/environment that achieves pervasive status.

4. More Social Media Regulation Will Follow the FTC’s October Endorsement Guides

Most social media professionals were surprised when the FTC announced its updated Endorsement Guides earlier this year, which described in great detail new requirements for bloggers and celebrities to disclose their relationships with sponsors, including arrangements whereby companies provide bloggers with products and services for review. Uncertainty about the legitimacy of these arrangements led to the term “blogola,” based on the 1950s record industry “payola” scandal.

The Web 2.0 marketing industry has proposed numerous codes of ethics, such as that of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, but ethical lapses continue to occur and the only answer is regulation. The EU Unfair Business Practices Directive technically banned astroturfing (the practice of company or paid third-party representatives posing as consumers and leaving positive comments on a blog or forum) some time ago.

In the past, print journalists have generally been fastidious about not having these kinds of relationships with the manufacturers of products they review, and have returned products after they have been reviewed. Those that haven’t have been harshly criticized, and there is no reason to expect bloggers to be held to a lesser standard.

I have always held that new media doesn’t require new ethics, but in the relentless quest to grow revenue and acquire customers, some still have ethical compasses unable to find magnetic north. As more and more non-social media savvy consumers come into contact with Web 2.0 marketing, there will be problems in areas of disclosure, privacy and fair competitive practice. Expect the proposal and enactment of new regulations in 2010.

5. Social Search Will Shake Out, and the Search Metaphor Will Change

We’re nearing the end of the hegemony of Google Search. This is not to say Google is in immediate trouble, or some other search engine will take its place, but traditional search is becoming irrelevant, and other kinds of search will begin to challenge Google. Even Google, a Web 1.0 company — or Web 1.5 company at best — recognizes this, and launched its Social Search experiment. Technorati, an early leader in social (media) search, could have owned the space, and maybe they did for a while, but not anymore.

Microsoft’s Bing was the surprise hit of 2009, and has started to erode Google’s share of search. Bing has some social features, but expect some big news in social search in 2010. Facebook and Twitter both offer “interesting” ideas in social search, and both are sitting on top of mountains of social data, but both have taken an incidental approach to social search.

The whole metaphor for search will change. Search won’t be a separate function. Instead of going to a site like google.com or bing.com, users will receive meaningful, personally relevant search results within the context of whatever they are currently doing.

If you’re writing a term paper, you’ll be presented with links and summaries that point to information directly related to the topic and content of your paper. If you are browsing items on eBay, you’ll see list prices superimposed, Craig’s List listings for the same and similar items, and maybe user reviews. You won’t type into a search box. Search results will come to you based on your needs. This isn’t 2010 stuff, but things have to move in that direction. The conventional Web 1.0 search engine is irrelevant, and merely adding social features to these outmoded services does not make them the next generation tools people will expect.

http://om.ly/calC

With in excess of 70 million YouTube videos, more than 130 million weblogs, in excess of 1,1 billion tweets to date, 10 million Wikipedia articles and more than 1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion!) unique URLs in Google’s index  according to the FutureBuzz –  it’s a truly insanely staggering amount of data and information that humankind is producing. Content is king. Is it?

From retrospective knowledge management to real time insights
Less than one decade ago, knowledge management experts and solutions aimed at making implicit or tacit knowledge – stored in the heads of experts – explicit in some form of content management system. Intranet, extranet and other solutions were implemented to help enable the corporate flow of data, information and knowledge within and beyond corporate boundaries. The digital role of the community was known yet undervalued. Overtime the ever increasing amount of content, added with the difficulty of keeping everybody disciplined in posting regular updates, has given rise to more emphasis on the network or community of people. Rather than making all content explicit, wouldn’t professionals be better off having a transparent and actual rather than retrospective view of who does and knows what? Here is where communities come in and why social media have started to play such a dominant role in sharing and exchanging views, information, experiences on a whole host of topics including services, products and the companies behind these.

If Google can’t answer the need for social search, who can?
Google has only been around for some 10 years and has become one of the most successful companies on the planet as @JeffJarvis brilliantly describes in What Would Google Do. Besides rumours on an updated search interface, Google has recently announced social search, by which insights from one’s network pop up to the search to complement historical, 3^rd party sources as traditionally displayed. Yet, as the Socialized blog wants it, there are new kids on the block. Microsoft’s Bing has made a successful appearance on the search scene with more relevant social search value to be announced in 2010. Integrated into Bing, Wolfram Alpha has the built-in power as ‘computional knowledge engine’ to provide the one and only just answer to a question submitted rather than generating thousands or millions of hits for the users to filter. As the amount of content and the number of sources themselves become overwhelming, the human inclination may well be to simply ask for advice or recommendation in one’s own small circle. From a consumer point of view real time answer to a quest for the ‘best’ product or service then simply comes from the most recent blogs, facebook posts and tweets generated by one’s inner circle of friends and followers. I agree with @lewmoorman in his blog Beyond 140 that Twitter therefore becomes a serious alternative to Google. In quest of relevant, authentic information and real customer feedback when researching companies, products and services, breaking news and live events/conference updates, Twitter search is a fine place to go.

Consumer trends 2010 & search
Diagonally scanning the well-defined 10 key consumer trends 2010, the new search paradigm to my mind becomes apparent in at least a blend of trends #3 (real time reviews), 5 (mass mingling), 7 (tracking & alerting) and 9 (profile myning). ‘Nowism’ refers to consumers’ lust for instant gratification as well as their almost incessant contribution to the real-time content stream of reviews and write-ups. Searching and finding relevant opinions and socializing online thru social media will lead to more physical mass mingling as people inherently enjoy meeting up with other people. Search has the notion of information pull, yet the growing usage of tracking and alerting may complement the conventional search with a push version, see for example the online tracking programme that reveals New York’s city agency performance. Lufthansa’s myskystatus keeps the family and loved ones up to date on the progress of a journey. Furthermore, data and profile myning (no, not mining) refers to the huge untapped potential of consumers revealing their preferences, needs, wants and full personal profile possibly in exchange for a lower search burden. With the strong human preference for impromptu decision making in combination with getting visual information, the forecast take-off of augmented reality (AR) should pave the way for a new generation of search platforms to be used anywhere, anytime and providing far better visual clues – solutions one could perhaps better refer to as ‘find’, ‘match’ or ‘insight’ solutions in the first place.

The social web has created something new to think about in the online search war – social search in real-time. Blogger, Sally Falkow, discusses that the way people are finding news and information has changed dramatically. Search engines are paying attention to the fact that a very high percentage of people say they are looking for discussions and opinions from others on a subject when they search.

The Google Blog explains that your friends and contacts are a key part of your online life, and most people on the web make social connections and publish web content in many different ways, including blogs; status updates; and tweets. This translates to a public social web of content that has specific relevance to each person, although this information isn’t always easy to find in one simple place. Social search helps you find more relevant public content from your broader social circle. So instead of finding well-known and official sites dominating in your search results, social search personalises the results so that relevant public content from your friends and contacts is highlighted.

The interesting thing about social search is that in some ways it can be seen as moretrusted results made readily available in the search process. This is because the authors of the content being viewed in a social search will be familiar and trusted voices, and these results could therefore be perceived as more valuable to the user. It could also have an impact on several industries, because people making use of social search will be able to read reviews; blogs; and even view pictures and videos from trusted sources who have published relevant content, directly in their search results, rather than having to rely on general review sites with recommendations by people they don’t know. This also puts a greater emphasis on the importance of brands and companies, having a social media presence. At the same time, however, as Newsclip’s Jaco Pienaar points out, social search could also have negative ramifications for academic-based online search, where students may be tempted to use the social search results as an ‘easy way out’, which would result in them using their social contacts rather than academically sound sources as references.

As Sally Falkow puts it, “whether you participate in social media or not, others are,” and these conversations are gaining influence – even more so with social search. As search engines tap into the stream of social content, everyone who does a search for your company or brand could come across discussions about you, rather than the official information you provide for them. As always, however, it remains important to understand the source of the information, rather than taking it at face value. It is interesting to see how search tools evolve, and with the combination of web search and social search, the way that people find news and information is set to change, and hopefully be enhanced.

Recently, I’ve had the opportunity to reflect on being a planner. While it’s what I always wanted to be (since 2001), I think what I want to be, as far as “advertising” goes, is so much more than ” planner.” And in an industry that survives on the fact that situations can be influenced and things always change, do you [planners] want to be what you’ve always been?

Given the rise in social media and the impact of technology on customer relationship management (you can measure almost anything now), it seems “planning” should be broadened beyond brand tracking studies, concept testing, creative briefs and briefings. Given that consumers are expanding their use of technologies and platforms, media, and networks, and that in these new realms they’re discovering new ways to interact with brands – there are in fact, new rules of engagement. And shouldn’t planning guide brand communications and marketing here? Or is that the job the media planners? If so, then why don’t I see any “media planners” in the blogosphere? just asking.

Not to mention the fact that when it comes to social media, we’ve always wanted people to talk about our products. In 2009, not only are they talking about our products, our brands, the services our brands provide, and the general experiences they have with our brands, but they’re talking about every detail of every minute leading up to these kinds of decisions. Isn’t it these insights (aka. finding the “gold nugget”) that have always been at the heart of planning?

If you answered yes, then you stand for evolution of a discipline. Because finding those insights is at our fingertips these days, often for free (just check one of the many social media or real-time search engines). But “the process” will have to change, or your job description will have to change from what it currently is.

As the role and definition of brands change to adapt in a world of new media, who will you be in the next generation of planning?

I came across some interesting facts about women and SEO this week while doing research for an upcoming training that I was going to give my team. The training was going to focus on two of my favourite topics at the moment, SEO and Social Media. SEO and Social Media are actually very similar when it comes to the question “why bother?”, they are also part of our strategy of how to target the female demographic online.  But mainly, both are also fairly cheap ways to get attention online and can be seen as highly relevant parts of the marketing mix,  if used in relevant ways.  

Looking at user patterns and trends in Social Media and internet usage following the rise of the social networks, women are getting online in larger masses all the time. Nowadays there are actually more women than men online, and they are  shaping the online user behaviour to match their likings.  

One of the facts that took me by surprise was that according to the Internet Advertising Bureau UK and Lightspeed Research (2008), 81% of women use Google, with only 19% relying on any other form of search engine. I hadn’t realised that such a large chunk of women  rely on Google as their preferred search engine. So what is it Google has that makes it so popular with the ladies? And how do women actually respond to any SEO efforts? How do they search online?

According to the study, the majority of these women (95%) say that ‘natural search’ results were for them the most relevant ones – while only 5% would consider the sponsored links being so. If ever you need an argument for why you should invest in SEO and consider it while creating content for your site, then this is it.

34% of women would actually also click through three pages of search results in their quest for a relevant site. Digging deeper, 52% of women will actually change their search terms and try again until they find relevant results on the first results page. This is interesting, especially when basing the value of your SEO on how high up you are ranking in the search results. It might not be the end of the world if you are not number one for Bingo or Poker, but it is much more worrying if you do not rank for the more specific search terms and make use of the “long tail of SEO”.

Women in general seem to rely on search engines as their portals to the internet. They are actually more likely to use a search engine to find a company they know the name of (85%) than to simply guess the website address (15%). This loyalty to search engines by women internet users and their great interest in social media makes Google’s plans to move into Social Search an obvious one.

No wonder Google is favoured by women, they are pushing many of the right buttons and developing themselves to meet the needs and wants of their users.

The idea behind MariaBingo is somewhat similar. The community and the social  networking surrounding the entertainment element that bingo brings to the picture is highly relevant when it comes to appealing to women.  Linking your players to each other as well as linking with them off site, in other areas of their virtual life, will prove highly relevant for loyalty as well as for maximising the potentials that new developments such as Google Social Search provides.

The obvious question now becomes, what are you doing to target this user demographic? Are you as in tune with your feminine side as Google is?

I tried to resist the thought, but I couldn’t talk myself out of it: None of this furor over Bing and Google and Rupert Murdoch will matter very much, or for very long.

An astonishing number of pixels have been spilled over social media, with the usual digital mix of interesting insights and wild claims of revolution. But even amid the hype, what’s definitely true is that social media is remaking how we live our lives online. And in some vital ways, social media is back-to-the-future Web stuff, fulfilling the long-deferred promise of Web publishing and search.

The idea that the Web makes everybody a publisher has been around for more than a decade, but for a long time the possibilities weren’t sufficiently supported by the technology platforms for Web publishing to be a truly democratic phenomenon. Sure, you could be an online diarist or cataloger or critic in 1995, but practically speaking you needed coding chops that were beyond most people. Blogging changed that, simplifying the process of creating and maintaining Web pages so that a much larger group of people could become publishers. But even then, setting up a blog was a technological bridge too far for most people — practically speaking, being a Web publisher was still a relatively techie endeavor. MySpace and Facebook and other social-media platforms were what finally married the technology with its possibilities. Setting up a social-media account is dead easy, as is answering the question “What’s on your mind?” with a bit of typing and clicking SHARE. Finally, the idea that we can all be publishers doesn’t sound like an invocation of rhetoric, but a description of reality.

With social media, we’re not just publishers — we’re sharers. And this is back to the future, too. Google’s search algorithms were created to replicate something that literally dates back to the Stone Age: our finely-honed sense of trust and social relationships. All things considered, even socially inept people are born with really good algorithms for figuring out social rank, influence and trustworthiness. Google did a remarkably clever job copying those — and they’ve earned billions upon billions from that foundation — but Google was needed because in the early days of the Web people’s natural social structures didn’t scale. There was too little participation for the Web to be truly representative, and truly participating — by creating information, assessing it and sharing it — was too technically difficult. Most of our meaningful social interactions took place in settings that were simpler — email, then IM and text-messaging. But that was primarily a one-to-one world that stood apart from the Web, which was a vast sea of information crying out for order. Few people had the technical chops to tackle that ordering (recall Yahoo supposedly stands for Yet Another Hierarchial Officious Oracle), the task was too big for people to handle the job anyway, and the results addressed the world in its vast entirety, not the fairly local world with which we naturally engage. Seen from this perspective, a lot of the problems and shortcomings of the Web feel like variations on this scaling problem: For years Google was a great tool for discovering weather patterns in Mongolia but a terrible way to find decent take-out within a couple of miles.

That’s now changing. The Web is not, of course, truly representative yet — too much of the world is still left out because of economic inequity, illiteracy, the repression of women and other ills. But within vast swathes of societies such as ours, we’re beginning to at least be able to make the claim that it is, and to glimpse a Web that’s accessible from everywhere, not just desks. (Which taken together will really just be the starting gun for what the Web will become — it’s still so early!)

And with participation in social media increasingly becoming the norm, we are reclaiming some of the old ways we naturally sort ourselves out into peer groups and social hierarchies. The nature of these peer groups is changing, of course — we seek out like-minded folks world-wide and build communities of interest instead of geography, we maintain weak ties instead of severing connections, and we leverage friend-of-a-friend situations in ways that were once reserved for people with a natural gift for social connections. But the trend is to return to something much closer to the social ties for which we are hard-wired.

This is why search is changing. With the ability to create strong peer groups online, and to create and share within those groups, we increasingly can use our own innate algorithms for trust and influence instead of turning to Google’s replicas of them. And we are discovering — or, really, rediscovering — that we have an unconscious knack for assembling peer groups that are as good or better at delivering a reliable “feed” of news about not only the subjects we’re most interested in, but the subjects that cross peer-group lines. Peer groups chop the Web down to size, and make the old human ways of finding and exchanging information scaleable again. If we have them, we have much less need for industrial search.

My A-Ha moment with Twitter was realizing that without even meaning to, by following people on Twitter I’d created a feed of information that was an excellent substitute not just for the sites I habitually visit about various subjects, but also for the aggregated home page I maintain for general news. I now routinely get my news from Twitter or Facebook, and reflexively turn to Twitter when news breaks. The combined efforts of all those people I follow add up to something that’s faster than news Web sites, covers more territory and is as reliable if not more so than RSS feeds and mechanized aggregation. The college kid who told a focus group that “if news is that important, it will find me” wasn’t being breezy or lazy — he was describing what social media has increasingly made reality.

That same effect is being seen other places, as people replace algorithms. “Do what you do best and link to the rest” is a strategy based around people, not search — it would work perfectly well without Google or Bing. Curation is about people, not search. Done right, aggregation is about people, not search. Email This and Digg and Share on Facebook are about people, not search.

This isn’t an unalloyed good — whether they’re centered on common interests or geography, our peer groups encourage us to create echo chambers of common creed and aligned opinion. We are correct to see this as a drawback, and to wonder which thin slice of news will find us — and if it will be news at all. But our dislike of the idea isn’t enough to prevent it from happening. We will vote — consciously or not, for good or for ill — for social search over mechanized search. It’s already starting to happen. And that means Rupert Murdoch and Dean Singleton and the AP and Microsoft and Google and everybody else are staking out positions in the last war. Theirs is a sideshow and a distraction. Whether we realize it or not, we’re already moving on.

The news will find me, because my peers will find it. It doesn’t matter whether the news gets indexed by Google or Bing or something else. My peers will find it, either through one of those search engines or more likely without visiting either. Murdoch may squeeze some millions out of Microsoft and wound Google and spark a million arguments about the civic value of how to index information, but none of that is going to make any difference to me. The news will find me.

Social media is going to take budget dollars away from search engine marketing. Already is in many major brands. Simple economics are driving this transition.

If a major ecommerce player is spending 50% of their budget on search engine marketing, website optimization, and link optimization programs, but is losing the war to bloggers in organic search. Why would the ecommerce player continue to spend massive amounts of money on advertising when they can focus on blogger outreach (ethical, not paid) for far less money. Better yet, fix their customer experience and get customers to evangelize on their behalf.  this slide says it all….

Additionally, as we analyze the various social media monitoring and metrics tools, the challenge is pretty evident. Search engines work off of structured data. I can run an advanced search and build filters for my search results. The challenge with social search is that the taxonomy isn’t defined. How you talk about a problem can be completely different than I talk about it. Potential buyers may not even recognize that the problem they are discussing on social media is even in the market. How do you build an automated tracking of taxonomy around unstructured data?

Effective lead generation program within social marketing require human knowledge of your solutions and also the ability to follow discussion threads to identify contextual relavence. Over time, you should be able to fine tune the algorithms for your social monitoring programs to become 80% accurate, but the most successful programs are leveraging human knowledge to make social marketing engagement programs to become discoverable, impactful, and actionable.

Otherwise, you get the the large number of costly “unqualified” leads that flood into websites similar to the search engine marketing programs. These programs either make it up in volume or work the “long tail” of key words to reach better qualified buyers. Social marketing can get you to the “long tail” faster as most buyers start with questions in the long tail when they do not know what they are looking for and leverage the expertise of others to become more specific as they learn what they don’t know.

3 Video/Audio Series:

The hosts of Webmaster Radio’s Townhall Radio podcast spoke with Ben Behrouzi to learn about the new LeapFish social search engine.  Behrouzi unveiled LeapFish’s multi-media and real-time search, communication and sharing platform, and discussed why and how search needs to change to keep up with today’s living, social web.

Excerpt from the Podcast:

“This is a major leap forward in the way we look at major applications we use everyday. I use web search everyday, I use social media, I am looking for video, audio and social media results. In my world, having it at my fingertips immediately is critical and finally someone has done something about it… LeapFish.”

“You’ve worked around the information overload problem. You guys are packing a ton of information on the page and it doesn’t feel too busy.”

“Having the real-time search features that give me direct access to breaking information.”

Listen to Part 1 of the interview here:

Listen to Part 2 of the interview here:

Listen to Part 3 of the interview here:

Click here to hear the entire Webmaster Radio podcast:

http://www2.webmasterradio.fm/townhall-meeting/2009/leapfish-launches-real-time-social-search-engine/

Search Engine Watch, a blog covering search engine news, recently reported on LeapFish’s recent real-time and social search engine launch. The post by Frank Watson notes that “LeapFish offers a start page for web users where they can watch their Facebook and Twitter accounts as well as set up feeds for news, entertainment, sports and other services”

Excerpt from the Article:

“The site offers some very interesting possibilities. It has some similarities to iGoogle but has managed to integrate social media faster than the search giant ”

Click here to read the entire Search Engine Watch Article:

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/091112-224356

SEM Synergy, Bruce Clay, Inc.’s weekly podcast on WebmasterRadio.fm, recently featured an interview with LeapFish CEO Ben Behrouzi addressing the significant changes on the Web in the past few years, thanks to social networking and community platforms.

The broadcast covered the current state of the Web, consumer behavior and LeapFish’s new offering in the Search space.  SEM Synergy reported “The recent public launch of LeapFish boasts a number of features that help users search and share content across popular sites, locate real-time content and create a custom search experience fitting of online life today.”

Excerpt from the Article:

“LeapFish has been designed with the new Web in mind, culling content from traditional, social and real-time Web sources into a customizable interface that acts as a dashboard for the Web”

Click here for the Bruce Clay radio broadcast and article :

http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/archives/2009/11/information_con.html

Bub.blicio.us, a Web 2.0 news blog run by social media expert Brian Solis, recently covered LeapFish’s new social and real-time search engine. The bub.blicio.us post highlights the LeapFish move to real-time and social search, and its potential to create an “invaluable hub for information sharing.”

Bub.blicio.us writes “Leapfish is hoping to bring the power of social networking to the search scene, powering immediate gratification for our information needs” in reference to the integrated sharing feature for all content and search results to major social sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Digg and more.

Excerpt from the Article:

“LeapFish is looking to work both the recommendation and search ends, providing sharing tools directly from the site so you can both search and share content you find interesting. The potential for creating a recommendation engine around this could be high, and I think it’s interesting that LeapFish is taking the search engine approach to address this potential.”

Click here to read the entire bub.blicio.us article:

http://bub.blicio.us/leapfish-making-comeback-with-real-time-search/

USA Today recently reported the launch of LeapFish’s new social and real-time search experience stating “First site that lets consumers both contribute and search for information”.  USA Today covered LeapFish as part of their coverage of major changes occurring in the real-time search space.

USA Today technology reporter Jon Swartz writes “the race to offer instant Web search” is on, and LeapFish is a prime competitor. In an article published earlier this month, Swartz highlights the need for real-time search results, such as searching live Twitter postings and multimedia content.

Excerpt from the Article:

“There’s a new race in the Internet search business and, like most races, it’s about speed. Start-ups including LeapFish… hope to lap the field by supplementing conventional search results, such as what you’d find on Google, with instant access to social networks including Twitter.”

Click here to read the entire USA Today article  :

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/2009-11-03-real-time-search_N.htm

Technology is a beautiful thing. It keeps us connected to those we’ve lost touch with (I found kindergarten friends on facebook!), it allows us to spread content and brand information to millions with the click of a button (hello millions of twitter users), it offers a lasting marketing strategy more useful than direct mail (unique personal websites!)… but through all these connections, does it sometimes feel like we’re keeping everyone at arms length?

Isn’t it easier and more comfortable to send an email or text than to make a phone call?

Social Media is barreling full speed ahead as the top search engines work tirelessly to incorporate real-time search into their results. It’s more important than ever to have a large presence on the web… But will piling in countless cyber-friends and followers just mean that we’re making our in-person interactions even fewer and further between?

I SURE HOPE NOT!

While it is important to fall into social media movement (and make a big splash), do not be so blinded by it’s power that you discount the power of a face-to-face smile and handshake.

Here’s an example of why actual real-life networking is still going to count for something even as social media and real-time search roll on: Local Social Search. Now search engines and social media sites are using location specific trending and social searches to give people the information they seek right from their own community!

This may seem like the perfect opportunity to ditch your neighborhood morning networking meeting and sit on your computer honing your social media brand instead.. but consider this: a consumer is far more likely to trust the opinion and recommendations of their peers, colleagues and friends than of advertisements. SO GO THE EXTRA MILE! The more people that know you in “real-life” as opposed to “real-time search”, the more people that will be giving you glowing reviews.. which means more customers for you.

The web is a powerful tool, and coupled with the power of a little personality– you’re sure to find success.

Let us help you build your brand online: http://www.computerimagesweb.com

Sometimes there’s an advantage to calling something “experimental”.

Google Social Search, the much heralded new way to combine Google results with data from your social networks, went down today, we reported earlier.

Now Google has responded to our inquiry, explaining that the service will be inaccessible until Monday or Tuesday. No reason has been given for the downtime. Google () wrote to Mashable () via email:

The Google Social Search experiment is temporarily down. We are working on it and expect to restore access sometime Monday or Tuesday

What could possibly befall the search experiment such that it takes days to get it back online?

The Guardian technology reporter Victor Keegan has been looking for the next big thing in search and notes that LeapFish is impressive. He writes that search technology has become a commodity, and what’s truly valuable is the usefulness of the search engine, especially in combining real-time search with sharing over social networks.

Excerpt from the Article:

“It is irritating that many searches, especially those with commercial implications, are increasingly dominated by ‘search engine optimisers’ paid to get their company’s results at the top of the stack. Sometimes we don’t just want to see what’s at the top of the haystack but the needle that is buried somewhere inside that no one has linked to. In recent weeks I have been impressed by LeapFish (which) combines real time search with sharing over social networks.”

Click here to read the entire Guardian article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/nov/11/searching-beyond-google

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LeapFish was recently featured by MediaPost, a top online media, marketing and advertising news site, as “iGoogle with a Social Twist.” On November 5th Mediapost covered the launch of LeapFish 2.0, the release of LeapFish’s new search engine that captures multimedia, social and real-time search.

Excerpts from the article:

MediaPost expressed “If you haven’t heard about LeapFish, you soon will” and reported on the numerous innovations that LeapFish introduced to the burgeoning real-time and social search space.

Here is what MediaPost had to say about the new LeapFish Personalized HomePage; “Registering as a member allows you to customize the home page with widgets, Facebook and Twitter feeds. In fact, more than 25 widgets will become available today, including Celebrity News, Hulu, The Onion, and Yahoo Sports. Those who log in can build a social media profile, a sort of LinkedIn for social media.”

MediaPost also covered LeapFish’s new search engine stating; “LeapFish offers two search options — traditional and real-time — to provide a variety of perspectives on news and events happening across the Web. News pulls from a variety of sites. The real-time results from Twitter update as they are posted.”

To read more about MediaPost’s LeapFish covereage visit:

Search Engine LeapFish Merges Real-Time Data and Social Content