[google and your "social circle"]

Via George Siemens:


"Google just announced Social Search. The services helps you "to find publicly available content from your social circle". Google extracts information on your social circle from three sources: Google Reader subscriptions, Google Profiles, and Google chat (GMail). They use the term "surfacing" connections to describe not only adding your friends, but one additional degree: your friend's friends.
This move by Google is a direct assault on Facebook. Facebook has emphasized social connections over content. Google has, to date, primarily emphasized information sorting, filtering, and ranking. Facebook's model of emphasizing social rather than information connections is a problem for Google. What is unique in Social Search is the focus on aggregation rather than place-based interaction. In theory, Google emphasizes pulling together various pieces of online interactions through aggregation, whereas Facebook emphasizes housing interactions in their environment."

[google boggled]

From the BBC: "'Human error' hits Google search

Google's search service has been hit by technical problems, with users unable to access search results.

For a period on Saturday, all search results were flagged as potentially harmful, with users warned that the site "may harm your computer.

Users who clicked on their preferred search result were advised to pick another one.

Google attributed the fault to human error and said most users were affected for about 40 minutes.

"What happened? Very simply, human error," wrote Marissa Mayer, vice president, search products and user experience, on the Official Google Blog.

The internet search engine works with stopbadware.org to ascertain which sites install malicious software on people's computers and merit a warning.

Stopbadware.org investigates consumer complaints to decide which sites are dangerous.

The list of malevolent sites is regularly updated and handed to Google.

When Google updated the list on Saturday, it mistakenly flagged all sites as potentially dangerous.

"We will carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in place to prevent it from happening again," Ms Mayer wrote."


After the BBC story google updated theirs (they noted that changes are marked in blue):

"If you did a Google search between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. PST this morning, you likely saw that the message "This site may harm your computer" accompanied each and every search result. This was clearly an error, and we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our users.

What happened? Very simply, human error. Google flags search results with the message "This site may harm your computer" if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their computers. We maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to come up with criteria for maintaining this list, and to provide simple processes for webmasters to remove their site from the list."

[beer + social networking = more sales]

Coors sees social networking as part of a strong marketing strategy:


From the NY Times:

"BEER has long been marketed as a sociable beverage, from a campaign for Budweiser that carried the theme “When gentlemen agree” to the Löwenbräu jingle that began, “Here’s to good friends.” Now, another beer brand, Coors Light, is extending its presence in the new media with efforts on the social networking Web sites Facebook and MySpace.

The initiatives are part of a campaign known as “Code blue,” centered on a “cold activated” feature introduced last year on Coors Light beer bottles: the mountains pictured on the labels turn from white to blue when the beer gets cold enough to drink.

For instance, consumers ages 21 and older will be able to send friends “Code blue” alerts on Facebook.com, inviting them to meet up for a beer — a Coors Light, natch. They can even use Facebook maps to direct their potential brew crew to a nearby bar. The Facebook feature, or application, is scheduled to start early next week.

[...]

“We talk a lot internally about ‘360-ing’ our innovations,” said Andy England, chief marketing officer at Coors Brewing in Golden, Colo., referring to how executives there seek to use all forms of media to reach potential customers in a comprehensive, 360-degree fashion.

When it comes to the new media, “Everyone, particularly in offline businesses like ours, is still in a very experimental phase,” Mr. England said. “We, along with our agencies, are trying to learn what works best and expand on those ideas.”

For instance, “if you put a viral video out there,” Mr. England said, like the “perfect pour” clips posted on YouTube, “How long should it be? How branded should it be?”

“We place bets in the office about this stuff,” he added.

The Facebook application and the Coors Light presence on MySpace (myspace.com/coorslight453) are results of work that is coordinated among agencies including Avenue A/Razorfish, part of the aQuantive unit of the Microsoft Corporation; Draft FCB, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies; and the Integer Group, part of the Omnicom Group.

“In this new world we live in, it’s something we’re learning to live with,” Bill Lindsey, creative director for the Coors Light account at Draft FCB in Chicago, said of the cross-agency collaboration required for new-media initiatives.

The campaign started with a television commercial created by Draft FCB that shows a man in a bar sending “Code blue” text messages to his far-flung friends. Curious to learn why he is so urgently signaling them, they find him in a bar, eager to share with them cold-activated bottles of Coors Light."

More on the NY Times site.

[social media: metrics and analysis]

As we gear up for the upcoming (June) NLab conference on Social Networks and Business I'm more than ever on the prowl for interesting posts/tweets/rss updates that tackle these issues. (nb: find NLab on facebook and upcoming) I've just come across Ryan MacMillan's (a digital marketing consultancy) "Contagious Report" on social media, methods and metrics.

Some interesting parts:

"The four qualities of Social Capital The similarity to economic capital only goes so far. SC has the following four qualities:
Utility through Accumulation: Like economic capital, the more SC an individual accumulates, the more easily that individual is able to affect their environment.
Inequality of Distribution: Like economic capital, SC is differently available. Some individuals have a lot,others less.
Expiration through Under-Use: Unlike economic capital, which expires through over-use, SC expires through under-use. 'Use it or lose it'.
Based Upon Trust: Regular capital is merely the exchange of agreed values as
guaranteed by a central authority. SC, however, is a stockpile of trust, which is
guaranteed only by the exercise of reciprocal actions between
diffuse individuals within a social network."

"Measuring Social Capital Any planned social media activity by a brand within an OSN must be measurable by the way in which it increases or depletes the brand's SC. Measuring a brand's SC, particularly in reference to their online SC, can be
achieved through analysis of online sentiment and influence.This in effect is a measure of the 'tone of voice' that online conversations about a brand have. Sentiment metrics describe the level of the 'stockpile' of trust which constitutes SC: how trustworthy is the brand understood to be, and how useful or desirable is its
content or activity?

Influence metrics describe the efficacy with which a brand is able to make use of that trust in order to (positively) affect their environment: how easily is a brand able to share its knowledge around its social networks?"

Read the whole report here.

[business + social media = search engine optimization]]

Reading Blogstorm and I see Patrick Altoft talking about the possibility of SEO resistant searches. In other words, searches can be powered by what Altoft calls the "social graph" but that doesn't mean the death of SEO, just a different kind of instantiation:

"Imagine how hard it would be for a commercial site to get high rankings on a search engine powered by the social graph. The marketing department probably wouldn’t have a clue where to start and are likely to be labelled a spammer at the first social network they target. The only way for a commercial site to see good results would be to hire a social media consultant / SEO to create a long term social media strategy for them.

Search can’t ever be SEO resistant because any signal can be manipulated - a good SEO consultant will figure out what the search engine needs to rank a site highly and give it to them. No tricks just give the search engines what they want whether it’s links, keywords, bookmarks, RSS subscribers or anything else."

Tyler Banfield, one of Altoft's readers draws our attention to a post by Vanessa Fox where she sums up her view of SEO rather well:

"The bottom line is this. Yes, if you want your customers to find you using search, then you have to understand search engine optimization. And you should want your customers to find you using search because search is the entry point on the web. But if you are operating an online business, you absolutely should understand online marketing. I don’t understand people who say it should all just work and they should be able to concentrate on their core business. (Looking at this from a search engine’s perspective, however, I think they should and certainly they are working on ways to make sure it all just works, because it’s in their best interest to provide searchers the best content on the web, whether the owners of that content understand SEO or not, but that doesn’t negate the point.)

If you have an offline business, you have to understand offline marketing and customer engagement. If you are opening new stores and your core skill set is painting, you will likely hire others for other aspects of your business: determining the best location for the store, branding and advertising, merchandising. You will probably ensure your store is attractive, both inside and outside. You’ll arrange merchandise on your shelves so that people know where to find stuff and can easily reach it. You’ll make your aisles wide enough for carts.

You wouldn’t open your paint store with no sign and a broken door in a back alley that had a brick wall blocking the road. Why would you do the same on the internet and then blame Google?"

The cool image is from RagePank.