Healthy Blog Reviews

Whether it’s the real year of mobile or not doesn’t matter much really. Although we like to try to pinpoint these types of ‘movements’ by some magical moment in time where the switch was suddenly turned on it’s not how it happens. What does happen is year over year signs and hints appear saying that shifts are truly taking place and we just slide into a new era of communication regardless of what name we give it. A study by Gartner shows that in year over year numbers there was increase worldwide in number of mobile phones purchased. In fact that number was up 17%. In these uncertain economic times it is of interest to see what people view as essential beyond the obvious food, clothing and shelter. Apparently, having a mobile phone is pretty high up the food chain. The chart below tells a story that will interest many especially in the US. While Nokia still is the worldwide leader in mobile phone sales (does anyone in the US still use one?) the real trend is in the proliferation of iPhone and Android OS devices. Note that all other OS’s for mobile platforms experienced a drop in market share year over year but the jumps by Android and Apple are striking. I suspect that when we see the numbers in Q1 of 2011 that there will be an even greater closing of the gap between other operating systems and the two up and coming powerhouses. With Android running on multiple manufacturers’ devices it is likely that there will be significant gains that may even help it pass the Apple especially as the folks in Cupertino continue to make moves that keeps Apple in its own, albeit a highly successful and profitable, box. Who’s going to be the biggest loser? I have my money on RIM. The image of Blackberrys being the corporate “go to” for mobile communications is quickly losing its shine. Android devices, in particular, continue to strengthen its ability to deliver SMB and small enterprise services that Google supplies to millions of businesses. After all that is part of Google’s play. In the world of “It’s the application, stupid!” Google is positioned well and RIM is simply not. Where the iPhone falls on the corporate use continuum is a wild card for sure. So how do see this playing out and how will it impact your marketing efforts? What kind of apps and services have you engaged in to spread your brand into the mobile space? Who will be the winners and losers from your perspective?

Tags: Apple, corporate, food, Local/Mobile, marketing, money, numbers, operating-systems, proliferation, real
Posted May 19, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

Since Facebook has added the “Like” button to the whole Internet (and now the real world ), the social feature is seeping into other sites, especially third-party search results. OneRiot, which indexes the real time web, has already started indexing Likes . The strategy is a marked shift for Facebook, notes VentureBeat . It’s the first time the service has allowed even its public social data (ie anything beyond the basic profile search page) to be indexed by search engines. Even last year, Facebook only allowed access to its walled garden by signing search deals. OneRiot can sort links shared in real media time by chronology or popularity. Tweets, Diggs and now Likes count toward that measure of popularity. It may not be one of the big three in search—but their results should be. After a real-time search deal with Yahoo last fall, OneRiot is supposed to provide real-time search results within Yahoo’s results, including Twitter and now Facebook likes. However, just over a month later, Yahoo moved in on Twitter , and now it appears that Twitter is the only site Yahoo recognizes for “real time results.” Which is really disappointing, actually. If anyone can find some non-Twitter real time results on Yahoo, let me know. But then again, research has shown that real time search results, including those from Twitter, may not be useful at all . What do you think? Will the big three follow in OneRiot’s footsteps?

Tags: facebook, real, results-should, Search, search-results, signing-search, since-facebook, Social, Twitter, will-the-big, Yahoo
Posted April 28, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

Google really created quite a buzz around Buzz when it was rolled out in February. The first wave of buzz (pun intended although the whole Wave thing is another story altogether) for Buzz was reasonable and was more about “What do I do with it?” than anything else. That was soon followed by the privacy outcry that became deafening and forced Google to admit that it had committed a major privacy faux pas. Well, it appears that Buzz is still creating a stir this time at SXSW when a panel of Gmail and Buzz Googlers had to face the music, so to speak. TechCrunch reports Google Product Manager Todd Jackson said that Google had learned a lot from the incident, acknowledging that Google was in error when it made the assumption that users wanted to move their email and chat contacts over to their Buzz social graph, and auto-followed them. To make sure that kind of blunder doesn’t happen again, he revealed that Google may start pre-releasing new Buzz features to small subsets of users. Certainly a pretty big error for sure but things seems to be calming down a bit around that furor (or is that just because less people care about Buzz and decided to not talk about it anymore…I don’t know). Google is trying to do the right thing now by talking like they may actually test some stuff before they cram it down our throat roll it out. Awful sporting of them, wouldn’t you say? It appears as if the internal testing that took place in Google itself produced results that were not representative of what the real world would do. The folks at the Googleplex were thus perplexed when the real world users didn’t react the same way as Googlers did on their jobs. Really?!?!?! I wouldn’t have seen that one coming either would you? So why exactly did Google Buzz launch with some key social features missing? Jackson said that while Google employees were testing out the product internally, they never had much desire to mute any of their coworkers, and that their email contact list closely matched the people they wanted to follow on Buzz. Obviously, that wasn’t true for most people once the product was released outside of the Googleplex. Which is why Google is considering pre-releasing new Buzz features to a few thousand opt-in users long before they’re rolled out to the public. This whole admission makes me wonder just how disconnected Google actually is from real world experience of their products in general. If this is any indication then it’s a red flag of sorts because anyone who had their Google thinking cap on should realize that they are not living in the real world at the home office. They created it to be that way so Googlers would have a unique experience, right? How then could you assume that what happens on that campus has anything to do with the real world? It seems like every company no matter how big and powerful and cool eventually jumps the shark. I’m not saying Google is there yet but it sounds like they may be ready to make a run at the shark tank that would make the Fonz proud! Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!

Tags: google-product, googleplex, googlers, jobs, music, people, product, real, shark, Social, time
Posted March 14, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

Reuters has sat somewhat silently in the background of all the hub bub surrounding whether Google should be able to index stories and make money off that content through advertising. That has been an AP fight for the most part. The strategy has helped Reuters, at least in my eyes, because by staying out of the fray they are implying that they are about journalism first. That’s my take and yours may differ which is fine. What the news organization has not done until yesterday is put out an official social media policy but that’s now complete. Mashable reports Last night, Reuters released their social media policy, which includes instructing journalists to avoid exposing bias online and tells them specifically not to “scoop the wire” by breaking stories on Twitter. The strict instruction makes it clear that even though news continually breaks on Twitter first — especially in disaster scenarios — Reuters journalists are to break their stories first via the wire and not on Twitter. The social media policy in question also addresses a number of other Twitter, Facebook, and online concerns, offering up instructions and recommendations whenever possible. The relationship between breaking news, social media and traditional news outlets is difficult to define. In one way you never want to limit the ability to gather and report news but the integrity of the news has to be kept in place. Hence the rub. While social media may allow for someone to get a “scoop” there is the real danger that it ends up being a scoop of crap versus the truth or a clearer picture of a circumstance. Seeing something happen live is very visceral and exciting but it may only be one small portion of the truth and, in fact, could be completely unrepresentative of the totality of a situation. As a result people are shaping opinions and digesting the news based on a “gut reaction”. That’s important but so is gathering all of the facts and then forming a complete picture of a situation, not just a snapshot opinion. Waiting for a wire version of an event at least allows for some more time to gather data and tell fact from fiction. So having said all of that I think that Reuters and any other hard news outlet is doing something that is essential as we move forward in the new world order of content creation and reality. The integrity of the news has to be preserved and just because social media outlets make it happen quickly in no way makes it more accurate. In fact, it will likely be less so. Since there will be no way to stop the Twitter journalism that is evolving I hope that the main news reporting entities realize that they could be even MORE important in the future if they still take the time to vet information and then tell the whole story behind the pictures and events that are reported “on the scene”. While I know this is a conservative approach I think it will be critical moving forward for consumers to be able to judge what is fantastic against what is really happening and why it happened. Maybe that’s going to be the real purpose of traditional news organizations going forward. To present a truly informed version of events and to help us put together the pieces of situations that are always much more complicated than 140 characters or a photo can convey. I think that is necessary and vital. How does Reuters plan to do this? Through telling journalists to keep their personal stuff personal and to not display any bias that could boomerang on them. Also, having tweets looked at by someone else to ensure everything is above board is discussed. Read the policy if for nothing else to be informed . So what do you think? Is the scoop more important than the whole truth? Is there danger in 140 character versions of events that are often far more complex? How can traditional news organizations maintain the balance that protects integrity but remains timely in the new world order of “report as you go”?

Tags: data, facebook, news, personal, pictures, real, Reuters, Social, Social Media, time, truth, wire
Posted March 12, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

OneUpWeb recently released the results of an eye-tracking study on Google’s new real-time results integrated into SERPs—and it looks like the search giant might have just wasted $15M (the estimated cost of Google’s deal with Twitter ). The study segmented web users into two groups: consumers and information foragers. It took consumers 7.09 seconds to look at the real-time results, even though they’re listed just below the news results and before the organic results. In fact, they scrolled below the fold to view the image results before they fixated on the real-time area, the eleventh area they focused on. Information foragers took slightly longer to turn to the real-time results: 7.39 seconds. It was the thirteen area their eyes focused on—but the first 12 areas were all just above the real-time results in the news results. (The search task here was to research a selected current news item using the search engine of choice—for 89% of all participants, that was Google.) (Side note: I’m not sure why the times in the above graph are so much higher than the numbers OneUpWeb also provided that I used in these paragraphs.) The second search task was segmented by group—the consumers were to look for a product they were considering to buy for themselves or for someone else as a gift. Information foragers were to again look for information on a current news topic. Interestingly, in this second set, consumers were five seconds faster than information foragers to focus on real-time results. Meanwhile, 20% of consumers and 30% of information foragers actually clicked on real-time results, as opposed to 69% of consumers and 60% of information foragers that clicked on the top 5 results excluding real-time. I’ve long argued that real-time results will only be helpful for a very small, select set of data—and for that set, most people would know to go to Twitter or Facebook in the first place anyway. I’m not the only one. The Guardian’s Charles Arthur points to several others who feel the same way, most notably Nick Carr , who sardonically chronicles the efforts to organize the web’s information around 140-character ephemera. And yet Google insists that this information is useful and must be foisted upon the user. Aruther quotes Marissa Mayer last summer: We think the real-time search is incredibly important, and the real-time data that’s coming online can be super-useful in terms of finding out whether – something like, is this conference today any good? Is it warmer in San Francisco than it is in Silicon Valley? You can actually look at tweets and see those types of patterns emerge, so there’s a lot of useful information about real-time interactions that we think ultimately will really affect search. Apparently users don’t quite agree yet. What do you think? Are real-time results useful?

Tags: Charles Arthur, cloud-hosting, facebook, image, organic, real, Research, search-engine, Silicon Valley, study-on-google, user
Posted March 10, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media