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Posts Tagged ‘google’

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Google+ Goes Live and the Results are Amazing

We all know Google+ had an excellent invite-only run that not only saw the number of registered users climb to more than 10 million but, not surprisingly, it also created an exceptional amount of buzz. (No pun, intended!)

Expectations for Google+ were extremely high, and they have continued to rise since it went live. Since Google+ went public last week, its stock in the social media world has climbed in a major way. The uptick in traffic was prolific, spiking more than 1200%, according to Hitwise.

Word throughout social media is that on its inaugural day of opening itself up for public consumption, Google+ surpassed Twitter to become the third most popular social media site behind Facebook and YouTube. If this is true (and indications are it is), then Google+ is even more widespread and popular than initially thought.

Google Dominating Some Demographic Sectors

What’s impressive is Google+ is beginning to see some dominance in certain demographics, which will bolster in its future growth and competitive positioning against Facebook. The early metrics suggest Google+ could – and this is a big could – catch up to Facebook in terms of users some time down the road.

Are you becoming a believer yet?

Facebook’s new and controversial Timeline, coupled with growing concerns about privacy and possible membership payment (which will never happen, even though that never stopped people from believing it), could boost Google+ even further into the forefront of social media.

Time to Embrace Google+

The potential of Google+ is fascinating from a competitive standpoint and a user’s perspective. Should we be getting ready to add another social network to our already flooded personal digital agenda? It is beginning to look that way and it won’t be long before those who aren’t on Google+ will be feeling left out in the cold.

Are you on Google+ yet? Has it made you use Facebook less often?

By Mark Evans - September 30th, 2011 - 3 Comments »
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Posted in Social Media

Facebook Mixes Things Up….Again

Update: There was a flurry of announcements yesterday at Facebook f8 conference in which a number of significant changes were unveiled. Some of the changes include:

- A ticker that will display relevant songs, films and news stories based on your social graph, fuelled partnerships with NetFlix, Spotify, Rdio and Yahoo

- A new set of verbs that can be used to interact with content. Instead of just having to ‘like’ a post,  you can also ‘watch’, ‘hike’, ‘cook’, ‘bike’, ‘listen’, or ‘read’ people’s updates.

- A new protocol and API called Open Graph that will make it easier for external Web sites to integrate with Facebook. This will replace Facebook Connect, and, in theory, allow Facebook to extend its tentacles far and wide across the Web.

- Once again Facebook is in a state of flux, with change on its mind.

A New Way to Subscribe

The newsfeed has been altered and beyond that it seems Facebook is trying to raise the bar within the social media world again (or copy Twitter and/or Google+, depending on how you look at it).

Their implementation of a feature that lets you subscribe to the people you find interesting without being friends with them signals a new philosophy.

The launch of the “subscribe” feature felt a bit too muted. While it may not have attracted a lot of attention, it is big deal when you think of how it changes the way Facebook allows us to communicate because we can now cut ourselves off from certain friends and their status updates. It changes the information we will see on our newsfeed and, in general, our newsfeed can be filled with updates from online personalities and celebrities as opposed to our actual friends.

The “subscribe” feature provide some control over your newsfeed, whereas before you were subject to the status updates of all your friends, regardless of relevancy or interest. If there is someone who you find compelling, you can subscribe to them, which means their updates will provide news for your feed.

You can subscribe to people you don’t know, which is a sneaky way of saying athletes, celebrities and journalists (is this sounding a bit familiar?). This makes sense because most celebrities on Facebook won’t friend you, so this opens up a world of access and creates great branding opportunities.

The subscribe feature also lets you dictate how much of anyone’s news will appear in your feed, even if you subscribe to them. Your choices include all, most or important. This shows the technology and its sophistication has comes a long way in the past five years. I am a bit on the fence as to whether control of your newsfeed is aligned with Facebook’s main tenets of connection and communication.

Facebook obsession with constantly re-inventing itself is strange but you can’t argue with results. At the end of the day, it seems that social media is anything but static and the kings of it match the medium change for change.

By Mark Evans - September 23rd, 2011 - No Comments »
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Posted in Social Media

Six Tips to Deal With Social Media Overload

Ever since its launch in June, I have been trying to get my head around Google+.

It’s not so much the features and benefits but how to fit Google+ into an already crowded and time-consuming social landscape.

It’s difficult enough keeping up with the tsunami of blog posts, comments, tweets, updates, linking and sharing without having yet another social media service vying for my attention.

It means I haven’t spend much time with Google+, although I have good intentions to embrace it or, at least, get a better appreciation of it. But with Facebook, Twitter, LinkIned, blogs and a bunch of content aggregation tools battling for attention, it has been challenging getting Google+ into the mix.

I’m pretty sure the challenges that I’m encountering are becoming more widespread as our use and consumption of social media increases.

According to a recent Nielsen study, social media now accounts for 22% of all time online. The big challenge is making sure that the growing consumption of social media doesn’t become overwhelming.

With that in mind, here are some tips to avoid being overloaded by social media:

1. Be sure to create distinct goals for using social media. It’s about being focused on what you want to get out of social media as opposed to simply using it. Without a plan of attack, there’s a high possibility of killing time with no productivity gains.

2. Be disciplined with your time. Be honest and pragmatic about how much time you can realistically invest in social media to achieve your goals or needs. This has to include your professional and personal activity.

3. Create a schedule for using social media…and then stick to it. Allocate slots during the time to use social media. It could be several 15-minute chunks thorough the day, or 30-minute slots in the morning, mid-day and after work. It might be helpful to look at social media as a reward for being focused for a certain period of time.

4. Pick your poison. Social media is a giant buffet, overflowing with lots of attractive options. And much like a buffet, it is hard not to overeat. To avoid over-consumption, you need to eat enough but not too much. It means picking social media services offering the best bang for the buck, rather than using every social media service on the assumption that more is better.

5. Adopt a one in/one out approach. It’s perfectly acceptable to explore a new service but you may want to consider embracing it only if there’s capacity within your social funnel, or getting ridding of something else that is no longer compelling, interesting or valuable. This helps to keep your social media portfolio manageable and do-able.

6. Use a multi-service management tools such as HootSuite, TweetDeck or Seesmic that make it easy to get a quick handle on a variety of social media services and, as important, let you post to different services at the same time.

How do you avoid social media overload. What approaches, techniques or tools do you employ?

By Mark Evans - September 14th, 2011 - No Comments »
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Posted in Social Media

Does Anyone Care About the Blogger Refresh?

For the interesting services that Google offers, one of the most mysterious is Blogger.

Since Google purchase Pyra Labs, which owned Blogger.com, it is almost like Google has happily ignored it. In the meantime, WordPress has emerged as the dominant blogging platform, while Tumblr has also become popular and Twitter is the dominant micro-blogging service.

The curious part about  Blogger is how Google did nothing with it to the point where it looked antiquated.

It begs the question why did Google has not be more aggressive with one of the world’s most popular blogging services? There might not be a good answer but you can’t help but think Blogger has failed to capitalize on its potential over the past eight years.

This makes for interesting discussion given Blogger just introduced a “fresh new look” with a design overhaul that came after Google did interviews to “identify how to make Blogger even easier and more enjoyable to use”.

The question is whether anyone cares. If you look at Blogger’s traffic, the number of unique visitors in the U.S. has tumbled by 50% over the past year to about six million/month (See the graph below).

The problem with Blogger is it’s not cutting-edge or cool. For anyone starting a blog, WordPress would be front and centre because it offers more flexibility by offering hosted and self-hosted options. As well, WordPress has an army of developers supporting the platform, which means you can do just about anything  imaginable. I’d also pick Tumblr way ahead of Blogger.

WordPress’ popularity and robustness as a content management systems has also seen it become increasingly embraced as a platform for Web sites, not just blogs. In comparison, Blogger, until recently, was pretty much the same as it was in 2003.

Blogger may be the latest property be impacted by a broad design refresh that Google is currently implementing but I doubt it will make much of a difference on how the service is perceived or used.

 

For more thoughts on Blogger’s decline, eConsultancy has a good read asking whether it’s a matter of too little, too late.

 

 

By Mark Evans - September 5th, 2011 - 2 Comments »
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Posted in Social Media

Google+ = A Better Facebook?

After the initial euphoria about the launch of Google+, the social media landscape appears to have settled down.

And as much as the impact and size of Google+ is still being assessed, it is becoming increasingly apparent the biggest beneficiary is Facebook. Faced with the threat of a strong and legitimate rival after MySpace became a second-tier social network, Facebook has announced a flurry of new features that smack of a competitive response to Google+.

The latest is yesterday’s launch of new privacy settings, new ways to share content and tags, and options on how/when to tell people where you are located. These are major changes that at first blush seem pretty user-friendly, although it is difficult to completely think Facebook is acting in your best interests when having more of your data public serves their financial needs and those of their advertisers.

Nevertheless, it is another example of Facebook being forced to do things to counter features being offered by Google+. As much as Facebook may want to deny this is the case, real competition changes how a company operates. After MySpace stopped being a threat, Facebook could do pretty much whatever it wanted, even if it meant running rough-shod over things such as privacy. Facebook made mistakes but it was able to quickly overcome them because there were no alternatives for people who didn’t like what Facebook was doing.

With the arrival of Google+, this isn’t the case anymore. Facebook not only needs to take into account what Google+ is doing but it also has to pay more attention to what consumers want and, as important, don’t want.

You could argue that Google+ is keeping Facebook honest, which is a good thing for consumers and the social media ecosystem. With more than 700 million users, Facebook is a Goliath with lots of power and clout. With a social networking rival, Facebook can no longer do what it wants so, if anything, that makes Google+ a success.

By Mark Evans - August 24th, 2011 - 2 Comments »
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Posted in Social Media

Google + Motorola Gets People Talking

The future is mobile. We hear that all time in the social media and tech fields, and if it wasn’t very apparent before, it became so this week. In a huge move, and the biggest business story (so far) this week, Google made it’s place in the mobile space even larger by purchasing the mobile division of Motorola. Motorola was most known for their cell phones, especially in the early 2000′s. Recently they have been manufacturing devices that run their own operating system, but have been doing a lot of work around phones and tablets running Google’s Android OS. Now Google has made a power play in the mobile space by purchasing the phone and tablet maker rather than only putting their mobile OS on other peoples hardware.

This event wasn’t taken lightly in the business world, nor by the techies in social media. I decided to take to MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics platform, to see just what people have been saying about Googles latest acquisition. By looking for posts in the past week that contained both Google and Motorola I found over 23,500 blog posts, 22,800 online news articles, 14,000 forum posts and 111,600 tweets.

While my search was done to look at the past week, a view of all these mentions graphed out over time shows that most, if not all, of the talk occurred in the past few days. The highest peak being the morning of the announcement.

To get a sense of just how big this news was, I looked to see how far the word had spread. Usually tech company stories tend to be talked about a lot in tech areas of the world, but when you’re Google and make a big move such as this, it gets a lot of people talking. The map bellow shows where tweets that contained Google and Motorola were coing from round the world, and as you can see, the deal had people around the world talking.

Next I decided to look at what people were saying about Google’s acquisition. By pulling up a buzzgraph, which shows us the words used most in connection with our search term, I was able to get an idea of what all the posts were talking about quickly. It seems that “12.5″ seemed to be the most talked about thing, which is the price in billions that Google paid for Motorola’s mobile arm. From there we can see that the most connected words are “mobile” and “Android”. Another word with a strong connection is “patent” because a lot of people were speculating that Google purchased Motorola Mobile more for the patents they own on mobile hardware than the actual phones they’re producing now. Interestingly enough, we can also see that there was a great talk about Google’s competition such as “Apple”, “Microsoft” and “Samsung” (which runs Android OS, and isn’t full competition yet, but may become so now that Google will be manufacturing hardware to run Android as well).

Finally, I looked at the sentiment that surrounded all the posts. Looking at this we can see that a lot of people think that Google buying Motorola Mobile was not a bad idea as only 9% of all of the conversation was negative.

By Sheldon Levine - August 18th, 2011 - No Comments »
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Posted in Samples, Social Media, Technology

What’s Next for Social Media?

There has been a lot of excitement about the recent launch of Google+, fueled by several factors.

One was the obvious move by Google into social media, a place in which it has failed to establish a strong foothold if you don’t account for Orkut’s strength in a few foreign markets and Blogger’s strong presence in the blogging landscape.

There is also excitement about Google+’s ability to, hopefully, become a viable rival to Facebook, whose dominance is impressive but, at the same time, troubling given the aggressive agenda for its social graph.

There is also another important reason why Google+’s launch was so anticipated: the palpable appetite for something new within the social media landscape.

Without being too dramatic, social media has lost some of its freshness and edginess. This reflects the fact we’re five years into the social media “revolution” and the fact social media has become more engrained into the landscape.

Nevertheless, there is a hunger for something new. People are looking for what’s next in social media. It may not be revolutionary but something that would be evolutionary.

One thing that Google+ provides is integration with other Google services. Aside from the interest in Circles and Sparks, it is the black bar that sits on top of Google+ that hints at its bigger and more interesting potential.

So far, social integration has mostly been focused on third-party developers using APIs to build applications and services on top of established platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and WordPress.

But this has, arguably, only scratched the surface when it comes to integration of different services to drive new features, functionality and usability for users, who can leverage their existing social footprints.

The interest in integration also hints at another potential development now sitting on the horizon: social portability, which is the ability for people to take their social identities, networks and data to any service.

This would be a seismic shift because it users would control their data as opposed to social networks controlling the data. Many people forget the fact all their data (updates, photos, videos, etc.) on Facebook, for example, are “owned” by Facebook rather than its users.

In the future, however, social portability could mean people would have the freedom to move their data to any social media network. It may seem like a radical idea given how data is such an important part of how social networks operate but for users it offers exciting opportunities and options.

It is left to seen if Google+ can, in fact, become a social media tour de force. While it has attracted more than 10 million users (or, at least, “triers”), Google+ could hint at bigger and exciting trends within the social media landscape.

By Mark Evans - August 9th, 2011 - 4 Comments »
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Posted in Social Media

Is it Already Time for Facebook to Learn from Google+?

So the jury is still out on how much of the market Google+ will steal from Facebook, and  if they will eventually leapfrog the social media fortress.

At this point, all we know is that Google struck fast and shows few indications of up letting up. Currently, Google+ has more than 10 million users and billions of pieces of shared content shared since its recent launch.

Let’s just state this once again for the record, Facebook will survive and my money is on them finding new ways to thrive.

It might seem radical to suggest the teacher (Facebook) learn from the student (Google+) so soon in its rivalr, but that just might be the case. Some of Google+’s features don’t just mimic Facebook, they flat out trump it.

I would go as far to suggest Facebook is falling into the comfort food category, whereas Google+ is one of those fancy sushi boats, that you can’t seem to take your eyes off of. Comfort food will always have a place, but there is no reason you can’t spice up an old meatloaf recipe.

To the issue at hand, what has Google+ done that Facebook could revolutionize? I would suggest they look at Google+’s features that are less generic and more targeted than Facebook’s current stable of offerings.

For instance, with Google+ you can share photos with only certain friends as opposed to your whole network. As well, the multi-user video chat, “Hangouts”, is a really nice touch to the social connection game, as is the fact you can watch video content with multiple users (who are muted once the video begins).

The best feature that Google+ has introduced is that it curates content based on specific interests, as opposed to Facebook’s broader approach. This is called “sparks” and, in theory, Google+ helps cultivate or “spark” your interests. I can’t remember the last time I clicked on a Facebook ad, because it was actually targeted towards my interest.

By Mark Evans - July 28th, 2011 - No Comments »
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Posted in Social Media

The Fuss About Google+ (Plus)

Just over two weeks ago the world found out just exactly what Google’s secret social media project is with the debut of Google+. Some have said it’s the Facebook killer, some said it will replace Twitter, a bunch of others can’t figure out what to make of it or how exactly to use it and even more are still waiting for their chance to get invited into it. One thing’s for sure though, people are talking about Google+.

For today’s post I thought it would be interesting to look at just how much talk is going on and what is being said about Google+ using MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics platform. In 15 days since Google+’s world debut on June 28th we found almost 107,000 blog posts, 30,000 online news articles, 153,000 forum posts and 1.9 million tweets about the new social network.

That’s quite impressive numbers seeing as there was absolutely no talk of Google+ by name before June 28th. As you can see from our popularity chart below there was a huge spike the day and day after the announcement. Talk then dropped off for a few days, but seemed to pick up again as more people were able to be invited and gain access to the service.

More interesting are the words I found being associated with Google+ as people talk about it through social channels. Right in the center of our buzzgraph two main topics seem to jump out. The first is obvious as it’s about some of the features of Google+ like “hangout,” “circles” and  even “invite” as people seem to be dying to get invited for their chance to try the new social network out. The second topic I really notice is the comparisons being made between Google+ and other already established social networks like “Facebook” and “Twitter.”

While some people are completely in love with Google+ and others are trying to understand how to really make use of the network, a look at our overall sentiment shows that most things being said across all mediums are still of a positive nature. With only 15% of all talk being negative we can give Google+ at 85% favourable rating.

If you’re one of those people deep entrenched in the world of social media it may seem like Google+ is all anyone can talk about these days. However, I decided to compare talk of Google+ along side the two other social media giants, Facebook and Twitter, and found that Google+ isn’t being talked about nearly as much as either of them. In fact, Facebook is being mentioned over twice as much as Google+ and Twitter is being mentioned almost three times as much.

While it may seem to some that Google+ is all that’s being talked about in social media right now, it’s actually far from the truth. Perhaps it may pick up more as brands and more people are allowed to enter the network though.

Have you gotten into Google+ yet? What are your thoughts on the service? Is it going to really be a Facebook or Twitter killer?

By Sheldon Levine - July 14th, 2011 - 13 Comments »
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Posted in Samples, Social Media

Wrestling with the Value of Google+

Within the digital landscape, the new kid on the block is Google+, which is Google’s latest foray into the fast-moving world of socia. media. To date, Google has failed to establish itself as a strong social media player in the wake of Google Buzz‘s modest foothold and Google Wave’s failure.

So what should the world think of Google+? Does it have enough to establish Google as a serious social media player? Is it a threat to Facebook, as well as other services such as Twitter and Quora?

Based on a light dive into Google+ after receiving an invitation from a friend, my assessment is an unequivocal “I’m not sure.” Sorry for the lack of a definitive judgement but it is hard to get a good handle on Google+’s potential until it has more time to mature and, as important, attracts a critical mass.

There are some things that I like about Google+. In particular, it’s the ability to divide your social world into different “circles” depending on your personal and professional interests. Rather than putting them into a single bucket like you do with Facebook, Google+ makes it easy to divide your world.

In my case, I created circles for friends, family, acquaintances, clients of my consulting business, hockey and mesh (the conference that I co-organize). These circles make it easy to share information and content with different groups, which means you can avoid posting photos of your family vacation to your clients.

The downside of circles is you need to build them from scratch, manually adding contacts pulled from your GMail account. (You can also pull into contacts from Hotmail and Yahoo). This is a time-consuming process that has a few annoying glitches. For example, there’s no obvious indication a contact has been added to a circle unless you hover over them, and Google+ doesn’t deal with people who have multiple e-mail addresses.

In some respects, Google+ reminds me of Google Buzz, which attracted a lot of attention but wasn’t different enough to establish a strong enough foothold within the social media landscape. That said, Google+ is a different beast from Buzz because it looks and feels more like services (Twitter and Facebook) that people understand and use often.

The big question is whether Google+ has enough to wiggle its way into enough people’s social media portfolios. It is going to be a huge challenge because Google+ needs to convince people it has compelling features that Facebook doesn’t offer. This will likely become more apparent over time, although you can expecte Facebook to counter-attack quickly.

I do not believe Google+ will become a Facebook-killer but it does appear to have enough potential to emerge as a viable rival to Facebook.

More: Robert Scoble has an interesting take on Google+, suggesting it could become a social network for “geeks and early adopters and social media gurus” to “talk free of folks who think Justin Bieber is the second coming of Christ”.

By Mark Evans - July 5th, 2011 - No Comments »
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Posted in Social Media

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