Well, it’s official. Google is getting in on the social media craze. Is there anything that Google isn’t a part of yet? Hey, I’m not complaining. I, like most people I’m sure,  use their services for just about everything, whether it’s for their analytics code or AdSense income. I was wondering though if anyone here has had a chance to check out Google Buzz yet. What do you think?

I’m a big fan of using social networking to market your site and I love the exposure that FaceBook can give you when it comes to your target audience. I don’t mind admitting that I thought it was just a flash in the pan when it first came out. Misplaced loyalty to MySpace, I know. Well I’m amongst the converted now. It’s given a big boost in traffic. Not anything spectacular, mind you, but I say that more visitors is always a good thing.

It will be interesting to see just what Google comes up with. Practically everything they’ve put out has been a hit, although I don’t like their messaging service much, but that’s just me. It makes sense that they would want their own social marketing site too. I’m thinking that the big thing will be in terms of target audiences. They already offer targeted ads through AdSense. Maybe they’ll integrate that into the service. It would be great to have one place where you can do everything.

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Love them or hate them Google have been the number one search engine for years, they have become a brand in themselves and a huge household name.

With the current real time phenomenom, which is completley overated in my opinion in terms of search, Google have been getting into a panic because they think that if they do not stay on top of things they are going to lose out on valuable market share. So how have the search giants responded to this?

• Social Search
• Real Time Search
• Google Wave
• Tons of other products and services

We know that Google do a lot of lab testing, but to see things such as real time search be fed into the main index, sometimes even above the organic listings is absolutley mad! These real time results are in no way relevant to what I am looking for and it just looks like a whole lot of spam.

What really is real time? Why are Google in such a panic? If you are looking for a product or a service, real time results are not what you want to see, what you want to see is trusted sites that give you what you are looking for.

So you ask yourself why has real time communication grown so much? Well, it hasnt… What has happened is that more people are now online than ever before and these people just want to talk to each other, most users on sites such as Facebook and Twitter just want to talk to people and view their pictures etc.

Real time communication has been around since the dawn of the internet, does anyone not remember the old MSN Chat?

Now this was genuine real time communication, where you could talk about all of the lastest and greatest happenings on TV/news etc. MSN Chat was hugely popular/successful and well ahead of its time in my opinion. The best thing was that it was moderated by the community, the community got to decide who entered their rooms and room creators were awarded with gold hammers to moderate the room. (This was infact how I first got into SEO, optimising the chat rooms to appear on the first page of the category).

MSN Chat was a real time community like no other.. So why then did it end up shutting down? One of two reasons really:

• Rooms were getting spammed constantly by advertisers
• Because it was extremeley busy, a big reason for MSN chat shutting down was that it provided another opportunity for pedophiles to have access to underage prey through the chat rooms.

So now if we take a look a Twitter as example, have any of these problems been addressed? No!

Twitter are bombarded with spam after spam and because it relies on users there will ALWAYS be spam. I mean even http://twitter.com/twitblacklist shut down, simply because it was getting so bad and this was in July 2008.  This is why Facebook can avoid this merely because its you talking to people you know.

Real time communication has still got the same interest it always has had, the only reason more and more people are using these services is because there is now a heck of a lot more people online.

But do we need real time spam (which will always be there) among us when we search? No we do not, all people want Google to deliver is trusted sites, in the end this is what people are looking for when they perform a search on Google. By all means use sites such as Twitter to see posts or pages which are being talked about, but including nonsense, spammy and irrelevant personal conversations in the main index is not a good idea. Past experience and internet history has always shown that when you give users full power things start to slide.. Just look at the redundant MSN Chat and MySpace more recently.

Google go back to your roots and display highly relevant results of pages online, use busy social sites as a ranking factor but do not include conversations in the results.

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There is so much hoo ha about Twitter killing Google and Twitter being the future search tool. Every single article that you read about Twitter is that they do things in real time, real time discussions and buzz, which is something that Google’s results do not really do and do not really cater for at the moment.

Google has responded with so many different methods, the most recent being feeding in Twitter results into the SERPs and having the option to bring in results that were updated in the last hour. But in my personal opinion twitter is a social site like any other site. There are some downsides to the service in my opinion, which are as follows.

Information
Information and news is all very well and good being in real time, but what if someone wants to find old archived information or read older stories, can they do that? No they simply cannot, because it’s all in real time and sites are actually never crawled and indexed, it is going to be very hard.

Products
Now this in my opinion is the main killer for Twitter and it’s something that Google are doing wrong too. Google are now trying to bring in more real time results and results which are current that people have just posted or talked about. Every non tech person (the mass user) I know uses either EBay, Google or Amazon to buy something, with Google probably being the first choice. They do this because one, it’s easy just type into the search and away you go. Two it’s relevant, Google have never let me down when I want to buy something, they deliver the most trusted sites to me. Now what could these product searches do instead? Search on Twitter and get conversations? No thanks, or create an account and ask your 0 followers to help you out? Or I know, grow your network communicate with people you do not know and ask them, but why? Why would anyone do that? People have busy lives and they do not have enough time to constantly update their tweets. What easier solution then to go to Google and type in what you are looking for, does it have to be real time. No, not at all, trusted products from trusted sites which have built that trust with hard work and clever advertising.

Now do not get me wrong twitter has a place in the market for news and stories, but Google is so much more than that, maybe they are beating Google on the news front and if Google want to jump on that bandwagon and fill their SERPs with real time STORIES then fine, maybe it would be a better way for them to earn revenue. I mean what a clever idea to fill the SERPs with ever changing info and letting the businesses (products), battle it out on the PPC side of things. But I can tell you they are going to lose a lot of users if they do as Google is not just an information engine. Twitter is a social site just like any other that we need to use in conjunction not against. MSN Messenger does exactly the same job for me but better, I talk to people I know in real time and can ask them anything I want. I do not think Twitter can ever overtake Google, but can be a useful tool to use if you have the time, which a lot of non tech people do not. I mean was MySpace not a Google killer? Was Digg Not? Wolfram Alpha, Cuil? Stumble? Twitter is a great real time news and information addition to Google; all this makes Google a better search engine.

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Social media is hot today. There is no internet-savvy person who is oblivious on what social media means. When we hear the word social media, what words do we instantly associate with it? Do you think of social networking websites such as MySpace or Facebook? How about social bookmarking sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon? And who can forget about the status-updating and microblogging website called Twitter? All of them may be designed differently as well as serve different functions but they all have a common element for them to be regarded as a group.

Social media pertains to websites which has a community of people that shares information through the website. In this situation, the website acts as the medium to get the message across. That is why it is called social “media”.

With this in mind, social media have been utilized by people for various reasons. Mostly, it is used for businesses for it offers a targeted community which you can easily reach out to through messaging. Others have used it for its sheer power of promotion. There is a part of the community, however, that is called as social media addicts. These are people who stay at that particular website for the whole day and concentrate their promotion there.

This behavior is good and bad. It is good because it allows a user to penetrate the culture of a particular social media website in the beginning. This way, he can easily talk to its users regarding their needs. On the other hand, it is also bad. As Kristy Bolsinger said in her article entitled “Are All Your Eggs in One Social Media Basket?“, focusing all your time on one social media website alone will not help you as that website falls down in the future.

Well, we have seen social media sites rise and fall. There are some websites that have consistent traffic and revenue but there are also others which has a decreasing popularity as time passes by. What you need to do is to prevent facing problems in the future and spread your marketing scheme all throughout different websites.

Of course, this does not mean that you have to join every social media website you encounter. Managing 4-7 accounts will do. Besides, you will just create confusion for yourself by joining too many sites.

There is nothing wrong with being a social media fanatic. Participating in social media websites must be done with strategy and care.

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Family relationships have been very popular on Facebook. Not only are its family-oriented applications such the “We’re Related” application one of the most used. Families also constitute the majority of the Facebook population. But recently, these numbers have gone down.

With this, the social network decided to give families a tribute through its new family group feature. This allows users to create groups of their families so that they can easily interact with each other. It is not really entirely different only that a group can be created that is exclusive only to family members.

This is done all because of the recent drop in users from 1.2 million to only 770,000. Facebook is losing numbers and it has to do something to counteract what is happening. Our guess is that people are using Facebook less because of the recent news about selling information to advertisers. Because information have become less private and the trust of users have gone down, people are less likely to disclose personal information about themselves especially that of their families. This new feature is for the goal of encouraging families to participate in the said social network.

However, this is bothering. It is evident that there are a lots of applications for families and having a separate feature for them is just nonsense. Or is it?

It seems that Facebook have found family networks valuable. In fact, family advertising is one of the most powerful viral advertising out there. It is also a nice tool for referral. A lot of people who just joined a particular social network will quickly inform their family members and ask them to join as well. So with this feature, it will not only be a couple of members. Now it can be the entire family.

Although the idea is somewhat hopeful, family oriented individuals have started registering just to avail the new feature. it had really triggered the interests on mothers. However, the young people are not really as enthusiastic.

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As the number of new users exploded on Twitter, the Suggested User list is also born. It was not until about a month ago when Twitter released a list of people whom people can follow on Twitter. Their reason is because new users have no one to follow and Twitter is useless if you do not follow anyone. After all, how can you tweet if no one is following you right? No one will read it rendering the website useless.

But then, the release of the suggested users list have raised some eyebrows. As said in the Twitter blog, a particular journalist of PBS named Mark Glaser have questioned the criteria Twitter is considering in choosing this people. In reply to this, Twitter has released an official post on its blog regarding the matter.

Some people may think that Twitter had just randomly chosen the people who are on the list. It may also trigger some questions when it comes to favorites or those who are popular in the industry. But Twitter do have a way of determining which profiles should be included in the list.

Well first, they look at the profile’s appearance. If it looks good and the user is active in the website then there is a higher chance that the staff will pick it. The number of followers along with the conversations are also considered. This will let them determine which accounts will be able to help a new user in Twittering along with providing an interesting profile that people will like to follow.

Other questions they consider are “is the account a good introduction to Twittering for a new user?”, “Does the person or organization running the account have a fairly wide or mainstream appeal?” and” If they are a celebrity or business, have we confirmed it’s really them?”

But one does not need to worry about the accounts posted. They are chosen based on interest and they have not paid Twitter to put them up there. It is just for Twitter’s goal of making their website useful to everyone even to newbies. As all Twitter users can relate to, Twitter really does take some time before you can figure out its power.

The good news is that you can ask Twitter to include your account if you qualified. So it is not really reserved to a few people. However, I think the tool will be more useful if users are categorized according to niches. That way, the following of people who are from a different niche can be prevented.

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A lot of people think that YouTube is free promotion. If you want to show the world about your talent in singing, playing an instrument or acting, you can simply shoot a video of yourself and advertise it on YouTube. Soon you will be a star right? Well, with the recent removal of amateur musician videos in YouTube, that dream will remain impossible to be achieved.

We all know that YouTube is owned by Google. It seems like musicians have a lot of unlucky strikes with Google lately. It was only last month when music bloggers were banned from Blogger because of copyright issues. Now, amateur musicians are also not as welcomed in YouTube for the same reason. Just this weekend, news from the New York Times showed a girl named Juliet Weybret who got her amateur music video of Winter Wonderland removed from YouTube.

It is not that we can blame YouTube for this. They are knowledgeable on the free community they like to create and they do not want to suppress the creativity of their users. After all, their revenue comes not only from the people viewing their videos but also from those creating them. This is the reason why YouTube have decided to negotiate with the major music companies so that they may allow their users to air their content. However, one company do not want to bulge and that is the Warner Music Group.

It was just this December when Warner and Youtube did not agree on their licensing deal. YouTube offered Warner a cut in advertising costs for permission on using the company’s music. Since the disagreement, Warner has always been on the lookout for music videos or even segments of videos that uses their music in the background. YouTube is left no choice but to remove the videos or mute the audio.

As the staff lawyer of Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fred Von Lohmann, said “Thousands of videos disappeared…Either they turned off the audio, or they pulled the video.”

But Will Tanous, the spokesman for Warner, explained their side. “We and our artists share the user community’s frustration when content is unavailable. YouTube generates revenues from content posted by fans, which typically requires licenses from rights holders. Under the current process, we make YouTube aware of WMG content. Their content ID tool then takes down all unlicensed tracks, regardless of how they are used,”

This is just an example of a continuous conflict between public video communities and copyright.

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When I have been surfing the internet for the latest SEO news, I came across this unique list on how to rank in Twitter for a keyword entitled “5 Steps to Ranking #1 on Twitter“. But I’m wondering what does the author mean for ranking #1. Rank where? The Twitter directory? The search engine? or the top Twitter user list?

The author of the said article indicated five ways on how to ‘increase the ranking’ of a person. He cited the name, username, bio, account activity and number of followers. I agree with him that to be able to achieve maximum potential in Twitter, one must optimize a keyword in all these areas. But what he failed to point out is the different forms of search on Twitter.

Search on Twitter is not one-dimensional. It is not as direct as search engines. Twitter can be searched in various areas such as trends, hash tags, and directories. I think the author failed to point out in the area on which his tips will be more useful.

I also tried the effectiveness of Twitter in ranking in search engines. I have found out how personalities such as Britney Spears, TechCrunch and Kevin Rose have their Twitter profiles in the top 10 rankings when their name is searched.

I have also tried it on myself and yielded the same rankings.

With this, we can say that Twitter can contribute to ranking for certain brands. But how about keywords? I think this can be effective if you put keywords in your username or bio. With hashtag search, you will be associated with a particular term and you may build your credibility on a certain topic based on Twitter conversations. However, I have only tested the search engines on brand search and not on direct keyword search. As for directories, people can control the niche they are associated with because they can freely choose which categories should they belong to.

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Kevin Rose is at it again. Some people have claimed that Twitter have beaten Digg to the ground. It was just this January when Matt Churchill said in his post “Twitter vs. Digg: Measuring Success” that Twitter has equaled Digg in popularity because of a whopping 974% surge in its users thiss year. This was further exemplified with Joe Wallace’s post “Twitter vs. Digg: Social Media Wars” that indicated Twitter had really topped Digg. But what did Kevin Rose do? Whine? Complain? Create another website that will beat Twitter? Hell no. But he did create a website that will help Twitter.

A common error among internet marketers is the search to break new grounds. If you are as lucky as the founder of Twitter or Google, then you may find yourself successful. But then, helping or contributing to what is already out there is a rather wise option to make. That is why we have to commend Kevin Rose for his efforts on this new targeted Twitter directory called WeFollow.

Unlike other directories, WeFollow has this unique feature of getting updated easily. Each entry along with categories are ranked based on the number of followers. All one needs to do is reply to WeFollow on Twitter with the following format:

@wefollow #category1 #category2 #category3

WeFollow have also limited the number of categories you can sign yourself into. I think this is to make sure that the people in each category are somehow targeted. Because anyone can sign themselves to a particular category, there is the danger of irrelevant sign-ups that only solicits followers. If you want to try signing to more than three categories like what @mattcutts did, you will find that only the last three categories were credited.

I think WeFollow is a nice directory especially for those who are starting out on Twitter. Let us face it. All of us want to follow people who are relevant in our field. For example, if you are a designer, wouldn’t you find it more interesting to carry a conversation with a fellow designer than a programmer? Of course, there will still be a connection but not as intense as that of the same niche. Also, this will also be useful for customer targetting. If people are sorted into categories of interests, then targeting them for marketing would be more worthwhile because of better conversions.

In the end, we have to thank Kevin Rose for WeFollow. As Danny Sullivan said in his discussion of WeFollow,

It’s not perfect, but it’s a great start and well worth visiting.

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With the use of social bookmarking sites as a means of promotion, Delicious have been facing a lot of spam problem lately. Their goal of a community sharing the best websites on the internet turned to spamville overnight. People have been submitting links expecting the popular link juice.

With this, Joshua Schachter, the founder of Delicious, announced last 2007 in the SMX Conference that they are going to implement in the nofollow tag. This is to prevent people from submitting irrelevant links just for link juice. This may have stopped some from submitting spam links but it did not stopped all.

So now Delicious have resorted to another way of solving the problem and that is through silent bans. For those people who do not know what ’silent bans’ mean, it is a way of banning by not notifying the person and rendering that person’s activity irrelevant to the system. This is what Brent Csutoras experienced which he shared on his blog on a post entitled “When Did Delicious Starts Silent Bans?“. According to his post, he saw his past bookmarks disappearing from the system as his new bookmarks are rejected. Here is how he relays his story.

Last week while I was attempting to bookmark a page, I noticed that my saved page did not show up in Delicious, outside of my personal bookmarks page. So if you were to look at the bookmark through Delicious, you would not see that I had saved it at all.

I have no idea how long this has been going on, as it appears that once you’re ’silent banned’ it removes all your previous activities from the system.

Brent Csutoras claimed that this is a rather familiar situation. It was not so long ago when Reddit did the same thing. A person who is silent banned submit a particular story to the websites but then the website does not react. It will not submit the story rendering the account of the person useless.

But one question comes to mind with all these things happening. Why do social bookmarking websites such as Reddit and Delicious have to resort to these informal ways of banning? Why do they keep the account but leave the user useless to the community?

Also, as Brent Csutoras wondered, what triggers the penalty? How can he, who rarely use his Delicious account get banned by Delicious?

I guess these are some questions that Delicious must answer in the next conference they are going to attend.

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