Posts Tagged social networks
Google is launching Google Profiles … A Facebook killer ?
Posted by Frederic Nuyts in Articles in english on April 22, 2009
Typing your name into a search engine is a great way to find out what the Internet thinks of you–at least until the first page of results shines a spotlight on that embarrassing episode from your misspent youth. Now Google, though, is offering people who share their profile information with the search giant more control over how they appear in its results.
Google has a complicated algorithm for determining which Web sites show at the top of its search results, presenting the top 10 picks on its results page. But in what amounts to an admission that this doesn’t fully satisfy all the needs of people searching for a specific name, Google now will show a separate 11th result–a special “onebox” that presents links to people with a particular name and links to their Google profiles.
Google “is giving people more of an opportunity to have greater presence and to surface the most relevant content about themselves in a way they have some say about,” said Joe Kraus, director of product management in Google’s apps group.
To illustrate the utility of the feature, Kraus brings up the example of Brian Jones. If you happen to share the name of the Rolling Stone’s deceased founding guitarist, you don’t have much opportunity to show up high on Google’s search results for that name. That changes with the new people-search feature, he said, though it doesn’t affect the regular search results above.
There’s a quid pro quo, though. To appear in Google’s special people-search results you must set up a Google profile. The more information you include on your profile, the better your odds that your profile will appear among the four names that can appear in the special result, Kraus said.
At least for now, Google profiles are a collection of information you are willing to share publicly–photos, interests, Web sites about yourself. Through integration with your Gmail contacts, which lets you identify people you trust and share contact information with them, Google’s profiles are gradually becoming a deeper reflection of ties called the social graph.
Kraus wouldn’t comment on how the profile page fits into Google’s social strategy, though he did say in general that Google’s strategy in general focuses “not on how you make any one site more social, but how you make the entire Web more social.”
One thing is sure, though: spotlighting profiles this directly in search results, given Google’s immense search clout and people’s concern about their self-image, extends much greater power to the profiles site.
To lend even more prominence, Google is beginning a “Google Me” promotion in which people who search for “me” will get an opportunity to see their profile or sign up for one.
Article by Stephen Shankland on CNET.com
Firms urged to embrace social networks for marketing
Posted by Frederic Nuyts in Articles in english on March 12, 2009
Failure to take on social media could damage business, say experts. Experts speaking at the Social Networking World Forum in London this week warned that delaying the implementation of a social networks marketing strategy could be damaging to business.
Dirk Singer, co-founder of brand marketing firm Cow PR, said that the longer that marketing managers leave it to take on social media, the tougher it will be to form an effective strategy.
“I may be preaching to the converted, but you may have internal clients who may be a bit more apprehensive. There’s a lot of recognition of the space, but not a lot of immediacy,” he said.
Businesses that delay deployments risk being met with cyber squatters when they finally launch into the social network space, according to Singer, who pointed to a number of examples to illustrate his point.
Sainsbury’s Twitter account is unlikely to be an official profile page for the retailer, since the location given is ‘In ur fridge’ and there has been only one update since July 2007.
South West Trains’ Twitter account, meanwhile, reads ‘Not actually anything to do with SWT. Just a spiteful commuter playing around’. The page documents hiccups and delays in the train provider’s service.
Singer also said that a Flickr account with the user ID name Starbucks shows celebrations taking place in Italy, while the user ID name Starbuckscoffee is dedicated to a Red Cross fanatic.
Twitter and other social media sites are normally good at helping firms resolve such issues, but Singer maintained that companies should go into social media “by choice and then you can form your own parameters”.
He also highlighted the cost savings companies can realise from marketing on social networks rather than through traditional routes. “When times are tough people stick to what they know, and firms keep asking me why now when budgets are tight,” he said.
Singer added that a company with a £100,000 marketing budget can either spend it on two spots on ITV, or employ a “gold standard” social network strategy.
While debate raged at the Social Networking World Forum on whether the much publicised Skittles homepage revamp at the beginning of March was short-sighted, Singer suggested that the move was “incredibly brave”. Skittles was rewarded with 4,000 mentions in the news following the launch, including in The Times, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal.
The homepage revamp involved Skittles changing its traditional homepage to become an online portal of feeds from Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube.
Andrew Weinrich, chief executive of mobile dating site Meetmoi, agreed that Skittles was on the mark with its revamp because the type of social networking strategy companies should employ depends on their industry.
“I love silly promotions for candy, but there is a big difference between a candy manufacturer arranging its site around social media and a bank doing so,” he explained.
However, Sanjay Dholakia, chief marketing officer of Lithium Technologies, which builds and operates social networks for enterprises, described the move as reckless and warned that social networking strategies need to be thought out in detail.
Dholakia was likely to have been referring to Skittles having to change its landing page shortly after the launch from a Twitter feed to a Wikipedia entry because of negative Skittles comments being so visible to web surfers.
Article by Rosalie Marshall, VNUnet.com