Social Media Wars Heat Up

Unless you’ve just emerged from Sleepy Hollow, you’ve heard about Google’s
new social media app, google+.

They’re rolling it out slowly and in phases. They’re cautious, because
their previous entry into the world of social media, Buzz, was a dog. But
google+ is positioning itself to give Facebook a run for its money. (As per
previous newsletter, Facebook stole Google’s chef, and they had the best food
in the Valley, so this is their way of getting even)

Integration is the seduction

The biggest seduction is that Google+ is designed to integrate with all
the other google apps that we use on a daily basis. Millions and millions of
people use Google’s free services (Gmail, Docs, Search, etc.), and with Google+
bound so tightly to them it may be counterproductive to exit to use some other social
site (Facebook) to do your social networking. This is very powerful, and it
reminds me of another software provider that knew all about the power of
integration–Microsoft. We used their operating system and office software, and
I remember when we finally gave up and migrated from Netscape to IE because it just
became a lot more productive.

I’m tired of Facebook’s arrogance

While I think Facebook is fun and has grown to become an important communication
tool, I hate their arrogance–their help menu sucks. Facebook’s attitude seems
to be that if you have questions, you’re stupid and not their demographic–forget
that they change the interface about every 3.5 days. If Google+ becomes easier
to use than Facebook, I will have no moral issues about migrating into the
integrated Google environment. Whatever happens, it will be fun watching these
companies duke it out.

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Google’s new Also Include field: What were they thinking?

I have one question: What were they thinking? A few days ago, I clicked on “Compose” to send a email to one of my colleagues, and I noticed that there was now a new field at the right hand side of my screen on the same line as the CC and BCC fields that said: Also include, with the names of several people whom I often included on emails to this colleague.

When I clicked on these live email addresses; they were inserted into the CC field. I tried deleting them, but these guys weren’t going away. I totally freaked out. I thought that now whenever I sent an email to this colleague or any other who was project-related, these other names would appear. I went to google’s Help section, and clearly, I was not alone in being horrified at this new functionality.

I wanted to send an email to my friend Jim, but it was personal, and I didn’t want his grown children who showed up in the Also include line to be cc’d. I was frustrated because I just wanted to send him–just him–an email, and couldn’t figure out how to do this.

I reached out to a techie colleague and a big gmail user, and he did a little research and figured out that google was just suggesting these names. Unless I clicked on them and inserted them into the CC field, they would NOT be included in the email. I did a few tests, and, thankfully, he was right. But the fact remains that this is a very confusing feature. It’s easy enough to create a distribution list or just start typing the names of those whom you want included into either the To, CC or BC fields of an email.

I think rolling out this feature without any kind of warning is very, very bad policy.

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Save the moving parts for the circus–not your website!

I just talked to another potential client who is thinks he needs a new website. Great. I do that and it’s a good project for my team and me. But what he wants is more flash elements. He thinks he needs to emulate his competitors who are enamored with multiple moving parts.

Is he crazy? It’s very simple: these sites don’t load. People go to your site to get contact information because they want to talk to you about doing some business, but they lose interest while your site is loading and find someone else. This is a tragedy. There’s a lot of competition out there in a really crappy economy. Don’t sabotage yourself. Stick with clear, illustrative images that synchronize with your content. They do not need to move.

I did some googling for this guy’s site, and he doesn’t show up in search engines, so what he really needs is some comprehensive SEO work. (his old site shows up and it’s really bad. This puppy needs to be disabled.) He could also use a rewrite on the site’s content. Way too dense. It could benefit from breaking down information into bullet points to make them more visually accessible. A few crisp case studies would go a long way towards telling his story as well.

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SEO and Those Pesky Algorithms

In case you missed it, google changed its algorithms. I know, who cares. Search engine optimization has always been a little voodoo to most of us, but not to me–at least not anymore. Not since I sat down and registered my website on more than 100 website directories. Difficult? No. Tedious? Oh, yeah. But everyone tells you that this is one of the things you need to do to show up in a search.

So now they’ve changed the algorithms, which means that those directories may not longer be relevant. Before falling on my sword, I did some reading, and all may not be lost. Think publish. Publish everything and publish often. The reality remains that the more content you have in online environments, the more likely it is that you will not just show up in search engines, but have a high ranking on the first page or two rather than in Siberia.

Publish means articles, and you can upload these on many of the directories on which you registered your site. The format varies a bit, but you have the ability to create a bio, upload a picture of yourself, (don’t forget to label this image–it counts as online content) identify keywords, add your website and then drop your article into the appropriate field.

Get serious about blogging. In a recent article on Hubspot (http://www.hubspot.com), they reported that in more than 1,500 small-medium sized businesses, those companies that had a blog, on average, had 55% more website traffic. The experts agree that content remains the constant. If you’re not yet doing a newsletter, blog and frequent social media updates, ask me about how I work with my clients. It’s time to embrace these electronic communication channels.

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