Google Social Search: Helping you find relevant public content from your friends

Posted on January 28, 2010 by Brian Beehler

Today, Google announced that their rolling out a new experiment on Google Labs called Google Social Search. It will help you find more relevant public content from your family, friends and contacts. While surfing, I tend to search for content my social circle has published and to date its been extremely difficult to find that type of information easily from one simple location. With Social Search, Google finds relevant content and highlights it for me at the bottom of my search results.

My first question is, “how is Google going to show content published by my connections based on my search results”. First off, Google explains that I’ll need to be signed in to my Google Account to use Social Search. Once logged in, I’ll need to build a social circle from a combination of my Gmail chat buddies, Gmail contacts, family and co-worker groups, and people I’m publicly connected to on other social sites (such as Twitter and FriendFeed). Now that Google knows my social circle they’ll be able to present results relevant to me thus connecting me to my family, friends, and contacts published web content. My thought is “pretty cool” but is it really. Once Google knows who I am, my social circle, and being the largest search engine in the world, it can easily present me with relevant content. It may not seem to complicated but what appeals to me is it brings it all together in one place.. 

I’ll be testing out the new feature over the next few days. Give it a try and let me know what you think. I would love to share your thoughts with my visitors.

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Is social media influencing online purchases this holiday season?

Posted on December 10, 2009 by Brian Beehler

A recent comScore survey found that 28% of online shoppers were influenced by info on Facebook or Twitter in making holiday purchases.

For the week ending Dec. 6, online shopping sales reached $4.6 billion — more than any individual spending week in 2008.  In its latest poll, comScore found 13% of poll respondents indicated that consumer-generated product reviews influenced their purchases during this period. 11% citied expert reviews influenced their purchases; followed by 7% from a Facebook page, 6% from a Facebook friend’s recommendation within their status update, 5% came from company recommendations on Twitter and 3% from a friend’s “tweet”.  Although there is still 2 weeks remaining, I believe that these indicators will continue to grow as people become more familiar with the tools.  They are simple to use and have become an integral part of our lives.   

Companies must always remember that communication is by far the most important aspect in marketing. If they can make their customers feel safe and that the choice that their about to make is the right one, then more often then not a consumer will share their experience through social media. Social media offers a great opportunity for companies to gain a competitive edge against their competitors who do not believe a strategy is necessary. If you are struggling to figure out what this all means remember that social media is just a bunch of tools – its really “about people”. Once companies realize this fact only then will social media be the influencer I know it is. This is just the beginning and over the next five years e-commerce will begin to redefine itself with social media leading the charge.

comScore survey: U.S. Online Holiday Spending Reaches $16 Billion for First 36 Days of the November-December Shopping Season

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Can social media change corporate culture?

Posted on October 8, 2009 by Brian Beehler

Over the past year the cultural forces of social media has become so great that corporations will have no choice but to have some sort of compulsory involvement. Those that freely use it with sincerity will prosper; those that reluctantly use it because they “have to” will not.  

Most corporations have a top-down approach that typically seeks to maintain tight control over it’s employees, although that’s increasingly difficult these days. This “top-down culture” is contradictory to the fundamental values of social media. Social media are “bottom up” largely — though there are “influencers” that may drive certain conversations. The simple use of social media to drive change can only imply a culture shift within organizations that pushes some degree of authority and control down to front-line employees. Since it also implies more transparency and “openness” we can only assume that it could change an organization’s culture.  

Is it possible?  Well it just might be.  The company I work for has recognized the value of social media to engage employees and drive innovation.  This summer we decided to look beyond our traditional marketing approaches and asked our employees to create a short video commercial about one of four non-traditional services.  The results have been nothing short than staggering: 120 submissions from employees from every business area across Canada such as letter carriers, postmasters, clerks, supervisors and customer service representatives with over 80,000 video views from around the world.  I have received numerous emails stating what a great idea this was and how they felt about creating their video.  Employees also expressed their appreciate for the opportunity to have a say on how we market our services.  However the one thing that made me believe that we may have taken the first step in changing our culture is how engaged our employees were throughout the submission period.  It was exciting to see their enthusiasm, creativity and passion for the company they work for.

Time will tell if we were successful.  My hope is that we will build on the momentum and continue to engage our employees through the use of social media.

Let me know your thoughts – please leave me a comment.

Filed under: Social Media | 1 Comment »

Taking some time off…

Posted on July 29, 2009 by Brian Beehler

Just wanted to let you all know that I will be taking some time off for the next few weeks to charge up the batteries.  So no new posts until my return on August 17th.  My first post when I return is to give you an update on several projects that I have blogged about in the past.  There are some exciting new projects in the works that I can’t wait to tell you once finalized.

Be sure to check out the new Twitter homepage.  The new look features a big search box, along with the most popular topics by the minute, day, and week.  I’m digging the new look and how they are now focused on giving users the ability to search right from the homepage.  Let me know what you think!

Please take this time to read some of my archives and don’t be shy leave your comments, I will be answering them while on holidays.

Take care and live your dreams through the eyes of the unknown…

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Ben Parr’s “The Top 10 Social Media Stories You Might Have Missed”

Posted on July 13, 2009 by Brian Beehler

One website I like to go to every Sunday evening is Mashable.com.  On a weekly basis Ben Parr writes a blog titled “The Top 10 Social Media Stories You Might Have Missed“.  It’s a great post that summarizes the week’s top stories in the Social Media world.  On several occasions there has been stories that I haven’t heard about. It’s become a rich resource that has helped me write a few of my blog posts as well as provide valuable information in some of the strategies have built over this past year.  I would like to share it with all you, please take the time to read the post and who knows you may actually learn something new this week.

—————————————

Two big events dominated social media channels this week: the memorial of Michael Jackson and the announcement of Google Chrome OS. Both events captured the attention of people across the globe.

But while the King of Pop and Google dominated the headlines, there was a lot more buzzing in social media circles. We covered everything from ImageShack getting hacked to some absolutely stunning Vimeo videos for design inspiration. Without further ado, here are the top 10 social media stories making headlines this week:

1. Google to Launch Operating System – Google shook up the tech world by announcing Google Chrome OS. Learn about Google’s entry to the OS market.

2. ImageShack Hacked by Anti-sec Movement – Every image on ImageShack was replaced yesterday with a very unique message. Learn more about what happened and why.

3. 12 Gorgeous Vimeo Videos for Design Inspiration – Natasha Wescoat explores 12 breathtaking Vimeo videos that will bring out your inner creative.

4. Michael Jackson’s Memorial: The Biggest Web Event in History? – The response to Michael Jackson’s passing was staggering. Read my analysis and predictions about the event’s impact on the web.

5. Google Chrome OS: Will It Kill Windows? – Let the debate on Google Chrome OS begin! Will it be the OS to beat Microsoft, or will it not be able to run Photoshop?

6. Michael Jackson Memorial: Where People Watched It Online – Michael Jackson’s memorial was one of the biggest events in the history of the web. See who was carrying the feed.

7. Fail Whale in Pop Culture – Fail Whale creator Yiying Lu has opened a new website with a collection of fan-made Fail Whale imagery. You have to see it to believe it.

8. Influx of Twitter Account Suspensions Creating Confusion – A wave of account suspensions hit Twitter last Sunday. Find out what happened and who was affected.

9. 4chan Versus Twitter: Round One – 4Chan was able to spam Twitter’s trending topics. Learn what happened and its implications on Twitter spam.

10. 14 iPhone Apps With Push Notification for Productivity – Elliott Kosmicki highlights 14 useful apps utilizing one of iPhone 3.0 OS’s biggest features: push notifications.

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Using your employees to promote your business through social media

Posted on June 26, 2009 by Brian Beehler

On many occasions I have written about how businesses need to adopt social media tools within the workplace to help facilitate connections between their employees.  Well, this week we did just that by introducing “The super-fun make a commercial and win an awesome prize employee video contest“.

The objective of the contest is to market our products and services to our employees so they are more aware of what we have to offer Canadians. Canada Post has great products like epost, Picture Postage, Xpresspost and smartmoves. Some are more well-known than others, but they’re all worth bragging about.  The contest is all about being creative and having fun in this great age where it’s easy to make and post videos, and use social media to share it!

Employees will be uploading their video entries into the YouTube contest channel where the world can comment, vote, or post video responses. Entries will be received until September 30, 2009 and the submissions will be judged using the following criteria: originality and creativity, brand appeal and awareness. The finalists’ videos will be posted to YouTube on October 12, 2009 where the general public and employees will be able to rate their favorites.  All finalists’ will get a Panasonic HD video camera and the grand prize winners (chosen by the general public and employees) will win a trip to the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games.

YouTube is only one of the social media platforms that will be used during contest.  Twitter and Facebook will be used to spread the word virally to as many people as possible.  A contest page has been setup on Facebook for people to become fans and to receive real-time updates from YouTube.  Twitter will be used to transmit the updates from YouTube into Facebook.  Because we have automated the process of publishing updates the contest will utilize two social media platforms at the same time thus increasing the viral factor.  Spreading the contest virally is a great way to “personalize our brand” and is a great strategy to get the word out about our products or services. This contest has the potential to drive a massive amount of traffic and awareness to the four products being advertised in this campaign.

It is uncertain how this will all play out with our employees but I’m excited that they’ll be able to participate in something that could actually make a difference and at the same time have fun doing it!  

Please take a moment to watch our introductory video to the contest and leave a comment to tell me what you think.

Your probably asking yourself “how can I follow the contest on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter?”

Here are the links:

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/yourownvideo

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Your-Own-Video/90582651503

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/yourownvideo

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Battle of the Giants – Microsoft (Bing) vs Google

Posted on June 18, 2009 by Brian Beehler

Just wanted to post something quickly and make you aware of a new search engine that may give Google a run for it’s money…

Approximately two weeks ago Microsoft launched a new search engine called Bing and early numbers indicate that people are visiting.  This may be attributed to Microsoft’s recent advertising blitz, spending a reported $80 to $100 million.  My guess people are visiting out of curiosity and if Microsoft doesn’t deliver, visitors will be easily turned off.

Over this past weekend I conducted a test using a tool that I found that compares Google and Bing side by side.  I ran my name “brian beehler” as a query and it seemed that Bing returned more results than Google.  I then refined my search by adding “ottawa” to the string and Google returned more results.  I also ran several other queries and it seemed that Google and Bing evened out in the end.  Right now I think it is too early to say whether Bing is a real threat to Google, but it does look like it will give Google a run for their money.

Give it a try, Microsoft is going in the right direction and if they are going to be successful they’ll have to continue to build on a great foundation.

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Riding the Google “Wave”

Posted on June 5, 2009 by Brian Beehler

Again today in a meeting someone asked me if I heard about Google Wave.  So I decided to write a quick post about Google Wave and give you some of my thoughts. 

It was last week when I first read a blog post from Mashable.com about how Google unveiled Google Wave an in-browser communication and collaboration tool that could redefine email and web communications within the next year or so.  Google has defined a “wave” in their “About Google Wave” section of the website as follows:

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

From what I could gather from the various posts I read, Google Wave could work in the following way: Once logged into Google Wave you would create a wave and add family, friends or colleagues to it.  Once the people you added receive the wave everyone on your wave could then use various media formats to reply or edit at any point within the wave.  As people reply, add, or edit the wave you’ll be able to see it happen in real-time since it is in real-time conversations could occur as someone contributes to the wave.  At any point you’ll be able to rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

Ben Parr one of my favorite social media bloggers recently wrote about Google Wave.  In his post titled “Could Google Wave Redefine Email and Web Communication?”  he gave a great illustration on how it could be applied in a business environment:

The key to it all is the faster line of communication. Attaching documents, like you do in email, is unnecessary in Google Wave. Real-time conversations and collaboration make it an ideal tool for business teams as well. Imagine an entire office having Google Wave open to quickly share and receive files. It combines some of people’s favorite aspects of many different web communication tools.

After reading his statement I suddenly started to day dream on how Google Wave could solve many of my web development issues.  Google Wave could potentially allow my team to collaborate with clients directly and in real-time during the User Acceptance Testing phase in any web development project.  If we could have the ability to see proposed changes in real-time and apply the edits as the client sees it happens, we could save valuable time and money.

Google Wave could very well redefine email and web communications but I see it as a valuable tool that will allow me to connect, communicate, and collaborate with colleagues. Until it is available to the general public at the end of this year, we can only speculate how it may revolutionize communications on the web.  I can’t wait to start using it!

Make sure you watch Google’s video presentation, a little lengthy but worth the time.

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Asking the right questions – computing knowledge…

Posted on May 24, 2009 by Brian Beehler

As you are all aware of I tend to research social media websites and tools during my weekends.  This weekend I came across a website that could increase your overall IQ and knowledge if you ask it the right questions.  

Mashable.com recently wrote an article about a website that has figured out how to make knowledge computable. After reading the article I quickly went to Wolfram Alpha to discover if the website could do as the article says.  Well, I was thoroughly impressed with the capabilities and how precise it answered my questions.  

In my quest to discover new tools to measure and monitor Social Media, I used Wolfram Alpha to compare Facebook.com and Twitter.com.  I typed both URLs in the query field as one string and the results separated each website into two columns with statistics appearing for both.  It also allowed my to expand the results further to view server locations and traffic fraction.  To top it off, it gave me the option to download my results as a PDF.  An extremely useful tool in analyzing site traffic and particular trends on the internet, however it fell short in delivering Social Media data.  In a recent interview with Wolfram’s founder Stephen Wolfram, an author from Mashable.com asked “Does social networking data have a place in Wolfram?”, here is how Dr. Wolfram answered the question; 

Does social media have a role in Wolfram Alpha? In Dr. Wolfram’s mind, social media has several big roles to play. One of the biggest is using community feedback and tools to help improve the computational engine:

“Since Wolfram alpha went live…we had 49,000 pieces of feedback from people. … One question that we have is okay, what is the most important thing for us to do? … We’re sort of hoping that some of these social network and social media mechanisms will help us to organize the things that people think should be in Wolfram Alpha and help us cluster these things and be part of the co-evolution…of what we can actually put into the system.”

Now, if you’re wondering about whether Wolfram Alpha will be taking social graph information or your tweets and using that data to compute useful answers, the answer is that it’s still really early in the process:

“It’s sort of an interesting question to what extent we can take the data of what’s going in social media and make use of that in actual computations we’re doing within Wolfram Alpha. We’ve certainly played around with that; we don’t yet have anything terribly interesting there.”

The technology being used to drive Wolfram Alpha could be very useful in making sense of all the social media data that is being posted on the internet everyday.  One of my objectives over the past year was to develop a tool that can monitor and analyze Social Media and as I continue on my quest to come up with the perfect tool, I believe Wolfram Alpha has taken the first steps in making knowledge computable. To have the ability to organize and plot social media data in a meaningful way without human intervention will allow businesses to monitor, measure and react at speeds much quicker than we know today.  It has been foreseen that computers would have the ability to compute knowledge and as Dr. Wolfram forges forward we may see a revolution occur among search engines.  

Try this for fun…

If you really want to be impressed start asking Wolfram Alpha questions like “How old are you?”, “Can you eat”, “Hello”, and even “Where do you live?“. Let me know what you think and if you feel that search engines may have met their match.

“Live your dreams through the eyes of the unknown”

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Taking the first step – “Connecting business with Social Media”

Posted on May 12, 2009 by Brian Beehler

Here is a brief update as to what I have been up to over the last few weeks.

I have just received formal approval to proceed with a Social Media program for one of our products. The program is centered around developing a presence on Facebook through the creation of a product page and an application. Twitter will also be used to stream updates between Facebook news feeds and Twitter.

The main objectives of the program is to:

  1. Provide our members with a central location were they’re able to connect with other members
    By providing our members a central location to connect with other members we enable each of them to create relationships that may in-turn provide concrete business opportunities.
     
  2. Give us the ability to communicate and connect with members
    One of our main challenges currently is to communicate with members on a regular basis.  Facebook and Twitter offers us that ability thus creating more opportunities for us to build relationships with members directly.  Retain and Grow!
     
  3. Acquire new members to the program
    By branding our product page with the features and benefits of the product, we anticipate to attract new members.  Potential members will be walked through a high powered flash demo and then lead to our sign-up form.

  4. Provide an application that aids members to create their own presence within Facebook
    The application will aid existing and new members to create their own presence within Facebook by walking through the process of creating a product page.  It will also provide tips and tricks and how to attract potential customers to their Facebook page.  In essence, we are providing a Social Media program for their business within Facebook.
     
  5. Give our members the ability to promote their products to potential customers within their own profiles
    When existing and new members add the application to their profiles, they will be given the opportunity to list several products or services to a profile badge.  This badge will be seen by everyone within their network of friends giving them the ability to link directly to their product pages or individual business websites.

The program is to begin in July 2009 and will be the first Social Media program associated with one of our products.  I’m excited about the adventure but nervous about what the end result will be but most of all I hope it is well received.  I have a saying that I like to close most of my blog posts with and it definitely applies here “Live your dreams through the eyes of the unknown” and if we don’t take those steps of faith we will never know what could have been.

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