Social media has been front page news this week, yet it’s hard to believe some people are unsure of its potential for their business.

A recent poll of US SMEs by insurer Hiscox found only 12% considered social media essential to promotion, with 50% not using social media in a business context at all.

Among the remaining 50%, there is probably uncertainty about how social media positively impacts ROI, and that it is a ‘fad’ and ‘something big brands do.’

Whether on Twitter, Facebook or Google+, the concept of starting a conversation with your customers, a more direct and instant one than ever before, is here to stay.

The key is to remain focused about your overall business objectives. If you sell shoes, then you need to interact with your customers on social media where they are likely to want to engage with your content and offers.

In the non-virtual world, this is like ensuring your shoe shop is on the high street where people do their shopping, or placing an ad in women’s fashion magazine.

Social media is no different. What you do, say, offer and discuss needs to be relevant, timely and engaging.

It is true that not all your potential customers are glued to Facebook and Twitter twenty-four-seven, so you need to consider social media as part of your marketing mix and get the right strategy in place.

Knowledge is power. And arming yourself with the know-how about what works in social media and what doesn’t is the first step to getting it right.

A major advantage of Google+ over rival social networking site Facebook, has been its promised ability to offer more detailed data on the success of social media campaigns.

But that could change.

This week, Facebook announced a tie-in with consumer audience measurement giant Nielsen which will see launch a new social media measuring tool, Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings.
The service, which launches in the US with a UK rollout later this year, works in a similar way to how TV ad audiences are measured, offering daily demographic reports of data gained from Nielsen’s TV viewing and online user panels and Facebook’s own database.

This announcement comes – with no great surprise – just as Google+ plans to launch its brand pages.

Ever popular Google Analytics is expected to be integrated within the Brand Pages (as well as Google Display Network, AdWords and DoubleClick advertising products) which will make Google+ a very attractive proposition, allowing advertisers to see clearly just who and where their fans are, and what online content they engage with.

Such a level of detail is imperative to help advertisers create more targeted online campaigns, relevant content, and most of all, maximise online marketing spend.

However, with a heavy-weight consumer insight company like Nielsen behind its data analytics, advertisers will have renewed confidence in Facebook, which could mean some hang on for the UK launch of this new analytics tool, rather than transfer their existing loyal and engaged Facebook base over to Google+, at the of risk of losing fans and customers.

Google is reportedly planning a “celebrity acquisition plan” to help publicise its new Google+ social network.

According to US broadcaster CNN, the search engine giant wants its rival to Facebook to become popular amongst actors, musicians and other public figures.

CNN says that it found out about Google’s plans via a number of emails from Google.

The emails detail a new system that aims to verify the identity of a public figure when they sign up for Google+.

The system follows the model of that operated by Twitter, where celebrity accounts are authenticated and then stamped with a “Verified” icon. Twitter’s system was introduced after a number of fake accounts appeared purporting to be those of various well-known figures.

Experts speculate that Google may verify celebrity accounts by asking them to fax over official documentation proving their identity, such as their driving licence.

A number of celebrities have already joined Google+, including Ashton Kutcher, Taylor Swift and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Google remained non-committal on the subject in an official statement, merely saying: “We aren’t yet sharing any details on future plans around Google+. We plan to add a lot of features and functionality to Google+ over time.”

Meanwhile, regular users are clamouring to join the site, which has already amassed 10 million members.

Google+, Google’s answer to Facebook, launched last week, creating a frenzy amongst internet users desperate to get their hands on an invitation.

Such was the huge amount of interest in the new hotly anticipated social networking site that invitations to join had to be closed down in a matter of hours.

That hasn’t stopped Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg from joining: he’s one of the few thousand lucky users who have managed to join up in full.

Those who successfully joined Zuckerberg as members of Google+ were greeted with a well-designed social networking site which some say might eventually overtake Twitter and Facebook altogether.

Google+ is centred around the concept of Circles. This concepts is a further extension of Facebook’s straight friending system, where you see people you know and send them the same simple friend request whether they are your best friend, your mother or your boss.

Circles, by contrast, sets your networks in circles, starting you off with the default categories of Family, Friends and Acquaintances.

Google+ starts your networks off automatically by showing you your contacts. Unsurprisingly, it shows you your Gmail contacts by default and then gives you the option to search and import contacts from Yahoo and Microsoft. There is no option to import your contacts from Facebook, although there is a (slightly convoluted) way round this: import your Facebook contacts into your Yahoo and then import your Yahoo into your Google+. It’s worth opening up a Yahoo just for this alone – without your contacts, it’s going to be difficult to have the full Google+ experience.

Once all of your contacts are in, you can drag a person into the appropriate circle. This is a visual feature that’s as simple as it sounds.

Updates are a key feature of Google+, much like with Facebook. You will see a stream of posts from your contacts, although the difference from Facebook is that you can filter the stream by the circles you want to see.  Sharing photos is easy too, especially if you are already using Google’s Picasa photo storage and sharing site.

Chat offers more than Facebook chat: there is a Hangout room where you can chat with up to ten of your contacts. You can arrange your chat window into boxes, with each chat participant in a box, meaning that the conversation should be relatively easy to follow. There’s also the Huddle group chat app that works on the Google+ app on Android phones.

Accessing Google+ has been made extremely easy. Google have created a black bar which runs across the top of all of its services. This contains one-click links to all of the other services, including your Google+ profile, ensuring that users will be more connected than ever to their social networks.

It’s still very early days to predict if this will be the next facebook killer (probably not), but it’s certainly worth keeping an eye on, and already here in the NSDesign office we can see some of the immediate advantages (and differences) that Google+ gives us over some of the other big players in Social Media…  Namely more private (internal) communication, and more control of the type of data we share and who we share it with….  interesting times!

Hello again everyone it’s Thea here again. Welcome to the third, and final, installment of my Silicon Valley Diary - it’s part 3.

Today I thought I’d talk about having lunch at Google the other day, and share a few reasons why I think Google is so Cool.

Well I’m not the only one, it seems, CNN Money had a poll of the Top 100 places to work and Google ranked number 4 (to be honest, seeing the three above them, I am rather surprised they’re as low as #4).

So I met my friend M on his second to the last day at HQ. Though staying with the company, he’s transferring out to New York (closer to his family) to work with a new team, but still within in their software division. It was a perfect time to meet him again, as he was very relaxed wrapping up work in California and looking forward to his move back east. It meant that I was able to spend extra time with him to eat, chat, take pictures/videos, and wander HQ.

So here are a few reasons why I love the odd trip to Google’s HQ.

1) The Free Food is Awesome!

It’s an obvious choice, this. There are a variety of different cafes to choose from at Google for whatever you fancy:- salads, burgers, Mexican, pizzas – you name, they have it, and all FREE for, not just employees, but also their visitors! There’s been much controversy over this particular area of Google practices, but I, for one, am a fan of the FREE lunch. (Who isn’t?)

2) They’ve Got Cute Bikes

Because Google’s Mountain View HQ is so spread out – they have cute little bikes that you can ride between buildings. That’s an awesome little nugget but some unscrupulous people have been nicking them and then flogging them on Craigslist which to my mind is rather naughty. Plus how obvious would be out riding a coloured Google-Plex bike (red, yellow, green and blue) in your own random neighbourhood?

3) Entrepreneurial Spirits

There is something rather exciting about being surrounded by all these creative and gifted minds. Google, apparently, chooses its candidates through a highly-scientific methodology and approach to picking staff. So you get a sense you’re among greatness, or at least I do, when I’m there. I end up hoping some of that greatness will soak into me through osmosis.

You may love Google or loathe it, but you can’t deny it its successes.

4) Inspirational Setting

The campus is in a natural green like setting (trees, grass etc). There are beach-like volleyball pitches, swimming pools, an organic garden (which provides some of it’s ingredients for their cafes), a bronze T-Rex dinosaur, and a garden filled with nautical-inspired statues.

It seems like it would be rather easy to have a little spot of grass to yourself, in or out of the sun, to work on you work. It reminds me of my own Northern California university days, and that’s a good thing.

5) Google’s Liquid Galaxy 3D Simulator

Arguably the most fun part of the trip to Google was the fifteen or so minutes spent in the lobby. Not only are there cool things to look at, like the hanging plane (aka Spaceship One), but they have the most fun 3D panoramic Google Earth  simulator called Liquid Galaxy. You walk into it, there are panels that wrap around, maybe 100 degrees, and are several feet high (it’s hard to explain but this YouTube video shows it clearly and from the outside).

Most people, apparently I learned, choose to look at their house (which I did too), but really took a 3-D look all around Glasgow as a whole, giving my friend a virtual tour of my fair city.

It’s an absolute blast, if a little dizzy-inducing at times. I wish I had one of these things in my living room!

Anyway check out my ’2-min Tour of Google’ video here to see some of the things I talked about above. Thanks for reading about the little trek to Google’s HQ in Mountain View. It’s worth a little visit if you ever get the chance…

Hey everyone, it’s Thea here again reporting to you live from the valley of silicon.

Well, I’ve been here a week already and it’s been a non-stop trip so far. I’ll reckon I’ll need a holiday to recover from my holiday.

I’ll be honest with you, trips to California always sound much more glamorous than they actually are, for me it’s just going home. But home to a place where every other corner practically has a tech company on it and every daily car ride is, invariably, past at least one of the big names we’re all familiar with now, be it Yahoo, Apple, Cisco, Google, IBM etc.

Something in that still remains cool to my inner geek. It’s a little inspiring in some way to be surrounded by these global companies. It’s like the valley is steeped in an entrepreneurial spirit that isn’t quite the same anywhere else I’ve ever been.

Scotland, of course, has had its amazing contributions in terms of inventions (television; telephones; penicillin; antiseptics,…hello), but, arguably, not particularly in its global start ups.

Nope nowhere else on earth is quite like the valley.

ONE FOR THE BOOKS

My first weekend was spent in Santa Cruz at an intensive writing conference – discussing various project ideas with other would-be writers. Additionally, we heard experiences of authors, editors, agents and marketing experts.

Much time was spent going over the new paths for publishing (mainstream press, self publishing, different types of ebooks, etc), as well as the various opportunities used to promote works through different social media channels.

Did you know there are 1000 books a day published by mainstream publishers? Or that 47,000 novels were published in America last year? Or that on Amazon: Kindle books are outselling all print books?

Well, I sure didn’t…

Over all I have to say that writing conference was an experience that managed to be both inspirational and deflating in equal measure.

WE CAN ALL BE JOURNALISTS THESE DAYS

The past two days were spent at Stanford University attending a conference: the Eighth Innovation Journalism – how innovation is affecting the business of journalism – from mobile publishing to collective intelligence.

At NSDesign we’re lovers of technology, trends, and of course social media so this conference, too, was right up my street.

There were students, technologists, journalists, and entrepreneurs from all four corners of the globe discussing the many ways we’re all connecting and changing history through stories. Not a new subject – it’s one we covered recently here on our blog and how journalists are using social media for news gathering.

Never has this all been more apparent than in the major global stories over the past year – from the Iceland Ash Cloud, to Japan’s earthquake and Tsunami, to protests in Egypt, to the floods and tornadoes across America.

These incredible events, coupled with today’s mobile technology (smart phones, handheld video cameras etc), mean that any one of us has an opportunity become a citizen journalist if we’re in the right (or wrong) place at the time of the event.

The whole landscape of news, publishing, and indeed interaction is changing and what can feel like break-neck speeds. It’s certainly been a thought-provoking and interesting time to be alive, has it not?

In part two of my Silicon Valley Diary, I’ll be sharing some of the latest hot sites and exciting apps that people have been talking about here in the valley.

Check back Monday for that, OK?

So until then, I’m Thea, saying “See Ya!”

Facebook may soon overtake Google as the leading referrer to news websites if the trend pointed out by a new study continues.

Researchers at the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism examined the ways in which online news consumers in the USA reached their favourite sites in the first nine months of 2010.

They monitored the 25 most popular news websites in the States and looked at behavioural traits including how users reached the sites, what amount of time they spent on the sites, the depth to which they investigated each site and where they went on to when they left.

According to the stats, it seems as if social networking sites will have an increasingly important role to play in traffic to news websites over the coming years.

Researchers found that Facebook was either the second or third most important driver of traffic to five of these top 25 news sites.

These click-throughs formed part of 40% of the overall traffic came from outside referrals, with Google Search and Google News being the biggest traffic drivers.

The authors of the study said: “If searching for news was the most important development of the last decade, sharing news may be among the most important of the next.”

The Huffington Post, the leftfield news and aggregated content website, was the most popular site in terms of Facebook referrals. Eight per cent of its visitors arrived through the social networking website.

Friendster, the original social networking site and precursor to Facebook, has finally shut down after eight years of business.

It will officially closed down on 31 May after years of struggle against its competitors.

Despite a steady decline in user numbers in the past few years, Friendster launched extremely successfully. It was founded in 2003 with a US$ 12 million investment by Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, Benchmark Capital and private investors and continued to receive hefty dividends for the next few years.

The founders were Jonathan Abrams, a computer programmer and his friend Peter Chin. Their aim was to found a site that would provide a safe and effective environment for people to meet and connect with each other by browsing user profiles.

Google made the management team a US$30 million offer shortly after its launch. This offer was declined.

In 2009, the site was bought for US$40 million by Malaysian internet firm MOL Global. The site had stayed popular in Asia despite its decline everywhere else: nearly all of its 19 billion page views came from the continent, especially the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia.

Friendster has now been bought by Money Online, a Philippine-based company which plans to convert it into an online gaming site geared towards Facebook users.

Google has revealed how it treats URL shorteners in terms of SEO in a new video released this week.

In the latest video in his YouTube series, Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, took time to answer the following question, which was sent in by one of the many web professionals confused about Google’s new algorithm and how it impacts on URL shorteners: “Since Google is now using Twitter and Facebook links as ranking symbols, will custom URL shorteners be looked at as providing anchor texts for links?”

Cutts explained that custom URLs work in same way that most redirects do. This means that using custom URL shorteners or keyword-rich custom URL shorteners shouldn’t have a negative effect on SEO.

He said: “Custom URL shorteners are essentially just like any other redirects. ”If we try to crawl a page, and we see a 301 or permanent redirect, which pretty much all well-behaved URL shorteners (like bit.ly or goo.gl) will do, if we see that 301, then that will pass PageRank to the final destination.

“So, in general, there really shouldn’t be any harm to using custom URL shorteners in your SEO. The PageRank will flow through. The anchor text will flow through, and so I wouldn’t necessarily worry about that at all.”

The explanation will be of use to anyone who uses the likes of bit.ly and tiny url to direct surfers to their website on bookmarking and social networking sites.

As if Google hadn’t done enough recently to revamp the way SEO works with its search engines, it seems that more changes are on the way.

Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, has released a YouTube video in which he suggests that the search engine giant may now turn its focus towards keywords in domain names.

The video, entitled ‘How important is it to have keywords in a domain name?’ sees Cutts explore the practice of using keywords in domain names and how a new algorithm might stamp it out for good.

Cutts says in the video: “We have looked at the rankings and the weights that we give to keyword domains, and some people have complained that we’re giving a little too much weight for keywords in domains.”

“We have been thinking about adjusting that mix a little bit and sort of turning the knob down within the algorithm, so that given two different domains it wouldn’t necessarily help you as much to have a domain with a bunch of keywords in it.”

So if your SEO strategy relies too heavily on keywords on your domain names, you need to start thinking of your plan B – and fast …

Watch the video at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAWFv43qubI&feature=player_embedded