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Google’s Marissa Mayer talked with the Telegraph recently about her vision for Google’s future—and not surprisingly, she has an expansive vision for what information Google should index and provide to us. An “omnivorous” Google, she calls it. Somehow, I don’t think it’s entirely accidental that she sees a Google that eats everything (rather than, say, knows everything [omniscient], considering the interpretation is apparently “one which is able to take a user’s total context – where they are, what they were just reading, which direction their mobile phone is pointed and so on”). One of the most important sources she wants to tap for better search results is social networks—and while they have already made deals with Twitter for up-to-the-minute results, she wants something a whole lot more “personalized.” Mayer thinks the key will be when Google can include people’s friends’ personal updates from social networks such as Facebook in search and serve these results personally to the correct people. Right now Google can only include the updates and information from these networks if the users’ privacy settings are ‘public’. According to Mayer – the ideal will be to get access to your friend’s updates in search: “Understanding the social network structure and the permission rules around social networks status updates when they are not public – will really empower us in terms of search.” That means digging behind (under?) the walls of privacy that social networks like Facebook have set up to mine your friends’ data (including status updates and events, most likely) and serve those up for what they think are your relevant searches. I don’t know about you, but when I google [a doll's house], I’m not looking for my friend’s status updates on the gift he’s building for his daughters. If Google wants to help us find and organize information, status updates probably aren’t a good way to do it. (The Ibsen play. I’m looking for the Ibsen play.) Interestingly, Facebook is pushing a new privacy system these days—and the default settings are set to “Everyone” for several options (easy to change, of course, but the push is still there). All right, all right, I know I’m apparently the only person on Earth who doesn’t want to see every single friends’ crazy dream status updates when googling [dream interpretation], but will you be giving Google access to your social networks?

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Google Wants Access to Your Private Social Networks

By Sherice Jacob – web designer, copywriter and author of Get Niche Quick! Follow her @sherice Did you know that your Twitter tweets are ripe with search engine juice that you can put to use to get more marketing exposure? Of course, links you post on Twitter, including links in your bio, are automatically no-follow, meaning the search engines will follow them, but “link juice” (like Google PageRank) isn’t carried over. That doesn’t mean the party’s over for optimizing your Twitter page though. Search engines do index Twitter tweets (through “statuses” – which look like this ). So how can you help ratchet your tweets up into search engine results as well as increase your number of followers? By including relevant keywords within your title on your status pages. Twitter creates the title for your status pages by taking up a slew of characters for itself. You can’t change that part (such as Twitter / Sherice Jacob) but you CAN change what comes after it. There are only about 27 characters available for you to use (and you thought fitting something into 140 was tough!), but every little bit counts. In addition to showing up in search engines, when you include keywords in the titles of your status pages, you also become more visible through Twitter’s own search interface, as well as the many search sites out there that comb through Twitter posts and tweets for certain keywords – like this: If I were looking for twitter tips, and these tweets came up in the results, would I want to follow these people to see what else they had to share? Absolutely! And if you click on “View Tweet” for any of these results, you’ll be taken to – surprise! The status page! Status pages are static – which means they will stay there forever unless you delete them or Twitter disappears from the face of the Earth (not likely!) – so use them to your marketing advantage and start including a few keywords in your titles and tweets. Now that you know how to better leverage your titles and statuses, get to work and start optimizing those pages with every link you post! © 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips . How to Squeeze Every Last Drop of SEO Juice from Your Twitter Page

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How to Squeeze Every Last Drop of SEO Juice from Your Twitter Page

In a word: branding. As a brand, both through their own efforts and through sheer luck, Google has been able to position itself as the #1 online brand in the US according to Forrester Research . Others among the top ten, including Yahoo, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft, have generated some of the same emotional responses from their fans. The top ten brands (note that respondents selected two from a list): Since 2007, MySpace suffered a precipitous fall in brand favoritism. Yahoo and eBay also suffered. Amazon saw sufficient growth to move from distant third to nearly tied for second; Google grew significantly in its #1 spot. Facebook and YouTube (and what the crap, Sony?) joined the list. Interestingly, both Microsoft and Apple saw small growth over that time. So what qualities made these online brands stand out in respondents’ minds? Forrester points out that we might expect attributes like prestige, popularity, speed and “the social.” And we’d be wrong. Interestingly, some of the same characteristics that associate well with offline brands: trustworthiness, helpfulness and relevance to the consumer were the top-named attributes of these brands. (In case you’re wondering, Amazon was voted most trustworthy, Google most helpful and Yahoo, Amazon, Facebook, eBay and Microsoft most relevant.) There is one point that the report makes that I don’t know if I buy: Yahoo! gets it right with “Y!ou” re-positioning. Yahoo!’s brand revitalization strategy is right on target, taking rivals on directly and clarifying its fuzzy image. Its core focus is on “relevance,” a top-tier attribute that currently doesn’t have a clear online leader. Yahoo! rivals Facebook and Microsoft show some traction here, but relevance is a relative weakness for Google. Yahoo!’s new $100-million advertising effort also highlights “fun,” another critical attribute where Google comes up short. To drive its global revitalization, Yahoo!’s new CMO brought in Landor Associates and Goodby, Silverstein & Partners to work with its main agency, Ogilvy & Mather. It launched its campaign with big TV and outdoor buys to “root the brand position.” It is following this with multichannel messaging — including explainers on its own site — around product proof points. I agree that Yahoo’s image had grown fuzzy and that taking on its rivals directly would be helpful, but are we thinking about the same campaign? Has there been more to the campaign than that one cringe-worthy commercial? (Because seriously, I wince every time I come across it on a Yahoo property.) It didn’t say “fun” to me (well, I guess it did, just not that “fun” had anything to do with online) and it definitely didn’t clarify their brand image. (How is emphasizing that “we’re as diverse as every single human on the earth—I mean, we’re just like you!” clarifying anything?) I guess we’ll have to see the “explainers” and “product proof points” to see if the rest of the campaign is effective. But so far, I’m not buying it—especially not when Yahoo’s brand has taken a hit in not only this survey, but others that correlate directly with the campaign timeline . What do you think? How have these brands acquired these attributes? Is Yahoo repositioning itself to take on more favorable attributes?

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Why People Love Google

Ok, let’s get everything out on the table before we really get going here. Social media helps brand build a following of people who believe in the brand. It creates little armies of brand zealots that do all the promotion for you on a grassroots level. It is the next level of the evolution of the online commerce experience because Internet users are so savvy that they will understand that to experience a brand is to live the brand is to make the Earth safe for the rest of us mere mortals! Oooops. Sorry. I got a little caught up in the hype of social media. Now for the reality check? Social media users like deals. Sure they may ‘engage’ with a brand a little more but they are really just looking for a deal. A coupon. A discount. Not brand nirvana. At least that’s what a study from Razorfish as reported by MediaPost is telling us. Much has been made of the ability of social media to help brands connect with consumers in new and deeper ways — to establish a “dialogue” with users through various interactive tools that blend seamlessly into their online activities. But a new study suggests the key to engagement on social properties comes down to old-fashioned direct marketing techniques like offering discounts and special promotions. “Based on our research, it’s not so much about some type of ’shared passion’ for a brand’s values. Largely, it’s about deals — pure and simple,” states the 2009 FEED report from Razorfish examining consumers’ digital habits and attitudes. What the ……?! Are you trying to tell me that when I put my head down on my pillow at night I really am not smiling about how much Dell, Zappos and Rackspace care for me on a deeper than e-commerce level? You mean it’s because I am just using them for their discounts? I feel so cheap. Makes sense though. Maybe we need to take a step back on this whole social media deal and understand what is really going on. Sure there are levels of engagement that could not be experienced by brands or their users until the Facebook’s and Twitter’s of the world came along. What we need to be careful of is forgetting that human behavior doesn’t just change on a dime. In fact, I would posit that this is going to be how the VAST majority of people embrace social media for the foreseeable future. Not because they want to engage with a brand but because they want the brand they like for less cash. Some other quick findings included Of those who follow a brand on Twitter, for example, 44% said access to exclusive deals is the main reason. And on Facebook and MySpace, 37% cited special deals as the main reason they have “friended” a brand. The report points to companies such as Starbucks, which has amassed nearly 5 million fans and soared to the top of Facebook brand pages by offering coupons for free pastries and ice cream. Razorfish identified customer service as the other key driver of consumer interaction in social media, with 33% friending a brand on Facebook and MySpace for that purpose, and 24% on Twitter. Companies such as Comcast, Zappos and Virgin have all gotten high marks for using the latter as a customer relations management (CRM) tool. Now, this is where you create the brand zealots. When you solve their problems using social media then you are on to something. To think, though, that social media is selling more product because of the buying experience is a bit much when you are talking about the masses. So for all of you who are seething at my position that the ‘feel good’ side of branding with social media is over-hyped please make your case with your comments. Meanwhile I am off to Dunkin’ Donuts for a discounted dozen beauties followed up by a dollar off cup of something from somewhere.

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Are Social Media Users Just Technologically Advanced Coupon Clippers?