Yearly Archives: 2011

Of course, today is seeing the requisite flow of April fools antics around the interweb. I admit I was duped by Techcrunch's Google Places Filed as Spam post. But in defense, it was a day early and is actually more feasible than…

While we were recovering from ILM East this week, Google decided to unveil +1, the search engines answer to social networking. Not all were impressed. It’s about time, though. We have been waiting for months. While some industry experts suggest the symbol is Google’s answer to Facebook’s Like or Twitter’s tweet, I’m still digesting the impact on local and social marketing and advertising. And just to show Google that people still like it, they really really like it, Facebook announced that it now has more than 250 million mobile users.

On the blog we also covered Closely’s debut of Social Select, a way for merchants to share deals with their best customers that they can share with others. And we uncovered a post by Ross Mayfield, who strikes a chord with insights and anecdotes about how social engagement empowers organizations.

Here’s what we uncovered this week in socialsphere:

Publicar, S.A., a leading publisher in Latin America, announced today a deal with Virginia-based Ya Sabe, Inc. to provide local search for U.S. Hispanics at PaginasAmarillas.com. As part of the deal, YaSabe will operate the U.S. website. The company will…

Google launched +1 today, basically its answer to Facebook’s Like button. When you click on a “+1” icon displayed on a URL, it shows up in Google search results when you are signed in. And if you have social connections within the Google empire (e.g., Gmail contacts) you will see which of your connections has +1’d the URL. While I am digesting the possibilities I thought it might be helpful to summarize some initial reads on the +1:

Meet +1: Google’s Answer To The Facebook Like Button – Danny Sullivan

Google did say that if someone does a +1 on a web page, then that will show up to others who find that page in search results. That’s going to be a huge bribe, in my view, for getting wide adoption of these buttons on web sites.

Now Google Social Search will gain +1 recommendations, content that people are explicitly recommending using Google’s +1 buttons. Google Social Search remains, but in addition to the first two items below, it now gains a third feature:

Show content created by those in your social network
Show content shared by those in your social network
Show content recommended by those in your Google +1 network
Social search signals, including the new +1 recommendations, will also continue to influence the first two things below plus power the new, third option:

Influence the ranking of results, causing you to see things others might not, based on your social connections
Influence the look of results, showing names of those in your social network who created, shared or now recommend a link
Influence the look of results, showing an aggregate number of +1s from all people, not just your social network, for some links

What’s +1 mean for Facebook? A very good chance that Facebook’s seeming monopoly on how people “like” pages will be over.

I just stumbled onto a post (thanks Twitter!) from 2009 by Ross Mayfield, Co-Founder of SocialText, called The Social C.R.M. Iceberg.  It’s a long piece but Mayfield’s insights and anecdotes about how social engagement is empowering organizations is worth the time for any of you who are pondering your company’s social strategies.

Some excerpts to whet your appetite:

Greg Oxton from the Consortium for Service Innovation (CSI) shared with me a model for understanding how engaged enterprises really are:

• 1% of customer conversations are assimilated as organizational knowledge
• 9% of customer conversations touch the organization, but no learning occurs
• 90% of customer conversations never touch the organization

But before you leap into reinventing your processes for transformative value, step back. You can’t collaborate with your customers before you learn to collaborate with your employees. In the spectrum of risk taking, its best to deploy from the inside-out.

In larger organizations such as Intel, if you measure it, you will find people spending a day a week searching for people and information. This isn’t just a search problem, its a sharing problem.

Have you ever asked a question on Twitter?

Sensis, facing an increasingly competitive environment, today announced a new plan to define the business as a provider of digital solutions to small businesses. "The explosion of technology and advertising channels, and the popularity of digital devices, has created a…

A question that's stuck with me since ILM East is whether the Web, in its current form, lacks humanity. Maz Sharafi, Facebook senior manager of local monetizationm raised the question during his keynote, channeling his admittedly Luddite (and local merchant) father. The…