Google is in the process of launching their new attempt at challenging Facebook, let’s hope that they have learned from their first two attempts, Wave and Buzz, which were both terrible launches and complete disasters for users.

So a client asked me what makes this one different from the rest of Google’s social media attempts? Well they are allowing you to essentially divide up your social groups, which could either be really good or a terrible idea, time will tell.

So what do I mean by divide up the social group? Google calls this “Circles”.

Just think of all the times you’ve heard people say “my mums just joined facebook and wants to be added to my friends list” who knows what stuff you don’t want your mum to see or comments from other friends she’s never meant that show the wrong side of you. Sometimes there needs to be boundaries and this is essentially what Google thinks will make them different from the rest.

In theory this is a good idea for cases like that, but will it work in the real world? Only by getting enough people on the system and actually using it will we know if it’s a hit or not.

They bring a few other things to the table that are of interest like “Hangouts”.

So a few of you are online at the same time, wouldn’t it just be easier to set up video chat with everyone, but that’s usually a one to one affair, not with Google Huddle apparently you can do more than 2, how many more? well apparently up to ten, which is quite impressive, but will it work or kill broadband connections all over the place, guess we’ll find out soon.

So what else do they bring to the table well something called “Huddle”.

Have you ever been trying to arrange a night out with 4 or more people and had trouble with everyone knowing what’s going on then plans change and you have to do the round robin nightmare again to make sure everyone knows what’s happening. Well Huddle is apparently the saviour by letting you group everyone together in one big chat room. Problem solved, everyone now gets the same information as everyone else and can contribute to the chat without messing up your profile with useless chatter. This could be very useful to many people.

Maybe not as social right away “Sparks” is the next thing on the list.

This is basically a way for Google+ to suggest things you might be interested in from your searches. either it will work really well and you’ll discover lots of great new things or it will very quickly become spam and peeve you off.

They actually have a whole load of other things like privacy settings that are both easy to set and in your control, the ability to download all your photos and Google+ profile data so that if the service ever got canned you would have all your information – this is a nice touch, but something Facebook will probably be able to add easily enough.

Google+ will also be on pretty much every smart phone out there so it won’t matter if you have Android, iOS, Win 7 Mobile, Blackberry or Nokia Symbian.

So lot’s to take in and consider there for Google+, but do we need another social network?

I think it can’t do any harm to make Facebook take notice that maybe their position isn’t fixed at number 1. They will ultimately improve themselves as a result and maybe even simplify things like their privacy policy when they see how others approach it.

The consumers always lose out when there is only one of any service, so I would say try out Google+ and see if it is a worthy alternative for your life and business, if not, Facebook aren’t exactly going to kick you out!

1. A good description is key as it tells everyone in a very short time what you do or who you are so it should include the keywords you want to be found for. Here’s my twitter description: Website Design Glasgow, Websites, Content Management Systems, Search Engine Optimisation & Social Media Marketing, Branding, Flash & Mobile Applications.
2. The first 25-40 characters should contain your keywords to be effective in Google searches but make sure it still reads well for your audience.
3. Link to your own twitter profile where you can. For example if you are getting new business cards made put it in the contact details part, but only if you intend to keep it up. Otherwise a dead page won’t look good to your prospect.
4. Tweet often, but please make sure it’s relevant, don’t tweet for tweets sake, also try to be as current as possible, think daily news of your industry, client issues or resources for your prospects, not what you had for breakfast, well unless you are a celebraty and your promoting something like healthy eating.
5. The more followers you have the bigger the boost to your ranking in Google for your Twitter account, but beware of following people, you know you don’t have to follow them because they followed you. Make sure you keep the quality high on who you essentially are giving a “I like this person”. Just in case you are interested you can find my twitter account here for Alan Fair Web Design Glasgow.
6. Use a URL that’s been shortened like www.bit.ly, http://goo.gl/ or http://tinyurl.com/ this basically takes a long URL that you have and gives it a code to make it as short as possible. It also ensures you have more characters to type on your tweet with so it’s worth the extra effort.
7. Don’t spend more than 1-2 hours a week maximum. If you have a clear Twitter strategy it should only take a few minutes each tweet, so even if you do a lot it shouldn’t take a bite out your week to get on with business.
8. Here’s a secret one most people don’t know about, make sure that the image on your profile has its filename edited to include your most important keyword or two, but don’t make it too long Google probably won’t like that. For example I have web-design-glasgow-alan-fair.jpg I would say that’s about as long as it should be. Don’t foget it needs to at least be descriptive of the image, so think very carefully about what you call it and what image you put up there.

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If you need help setting up or creating a twitter strategy give us a call on 07793 544 852 or 0141 246 5743 or email us info@cmmc.co.uk

Here is the link to the video and the rest of the article on Googles own blog.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/01/google-seo-resources-for-beginners.html

Alan

What this means is that there will be a lot of bounced emails across the globe until they do something about it, especially for us companies who use the lists to reduce spam on our servers.

So if you use SORB.NET blacklists you should remove them from your server for now. If you are one of the big three above, get yourself off the Bl***ing list it’s your responsibility to do so.

I’ve known that Yahoo have been on it since last Friday (15th Jan), but thought they would have fixed it by now. It does however seem very odd that all three of these email giants are on the list, could there have been a security breach on the SORBS.NET list? If so I hope they know about it!

*This info is correct at the time & date of this post.

Alan

I’ve had lots of clients that are confused by it all as they can’t figure out how it’s all related to each other. I have also attended a couple of network meetings that had some talks on the subject, these highlighted to me a need for a simplification of the concept. So I thought I would make a visual representation of the most popular abstract concepts.

The image below shows the main/popular methods and essentially how they can relate to your own website. There are many more options that could be added, but these are the ones mostly talked about by my clients.

One of the biggest realisations of the visual below is that Social Media is fast becoming it’s own form of a people and content search engine outside of search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Why don’t you make a comment on the post and I’ll try to update it if there is space or I’ll create a second one to cover the others, like say traditional marketing media (flyers, brochures etc…).