Estate agents used to say, that if Pizza Express opens in a new area, it’s a sure sign property prices in said area are about to rise; and smart property investors should pay attention.

So I put it to you, if a meme spreads across YouTube, it’s a sure sign that a new trend is forming; and smart brands should pay attention.

Admittedly, there are vast differences between social memes and the property market, but there is also one clear similarity: they are both traded on currency.

Online memes carry social currency, content that can be traded, shared and associated with, as a means of improving – as Pierre Bourdieu put it – “one’s sense of community…helping to form one’s identity, and providing status and recognition.”

And if online social media memes carry social currency, then think of YouTube as The Royal Mint. A quick look at YouTube’s currently most viewed video today reveals that ‘Simon’s Cat in ‘Catnap’ is the top trending video.

With 922,292 views and 26,005 Likes on YouTube alone, the adorable cat cartoon, by animator, Simon Tofiled, has already reached 11,680 people via Twitter. A scan of YouTube also reveals that there are currently more than 1.6 million cat videos currently circulating across YouTube and a glance at the social media staples such as Mashable, will reveal that advertising agency, John St. in Toronto has, in the last two weeks, heralded the age of ‘catvertising’ – advertising that harnesses the cat’s current trading power as social currency.

So, if cat-related content is the latest social currency, should brands be chomping at the bit to invest in cat-related advertising and marketing campaigns?

Probably not. As PR Web wisely pointed out in a recent post, for a brand to adopt a meme, that meme needs to reflect an “image, idea, or phrase that best sums up your brand or product”. It also needs to “focus on the problem that your brand actually solves”.

Millions of memes circulate across the social web every day, as millions of consumers trade on the social currencies that help them form identities and feel included within their communities. When a brand hits upon a meme that bears relevance to their product or service, the result can be marketing gold.

Shoe-horning a brand into a meme that has no relevance to the brand promise or values is about as wise as purchasing a property on the promise that a Pizza Express is on its way to the area.

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Since Google’s  announcement, there has been an enthusiastic response to Google+ branded pages. Generally the

applause has been loud and energetic, with over 600 news articles and innumerable blog posts. The positive response has proved interesting. After all, previously there has been some less than flattering rumours about the newly launched network. Whilst attracting over 40m users, there have been intimations that 83% of them are now inactive. Data analysis has even suggested that the only activity is being led by geeky, early adopter males! The truth is that no one really knows who is using the service and how. And that means we need to look a bit closer at what value a brand can expect from investing in the network.

The Google+ value to your brand

So let’s get to the nub of the issue for marketers: is investing in a branded page going to generate the ‘relationships’ that Google promises in its launch blog post. More importantly, is it going to enable relevant and sustained relationships that add value to the brand. Google+ launched with some key brand pages, so we thought we would take a snapshot of the results just 48 hours in.

Google+ numbers first

This first analysis simply looks at numbers of followers and +1s (recommendations). Yes, this is a blunt measurement. But this is early days and further analysis would be just speculation. And after all, a branded page needs to reach critical mass to maximise the value from engagement. In the table below we examine the launch brands and highlight the top ten for followers and +1 numbers. The Muppets page leads the way. Not surprising, as there is likely to be a strong emotional connection to the brand. Generally though, the results are not bad for two days exposure, but not great either for such an enormously well covered launch and such high profile brand. Many brands may still do better in Facebook when it comes to acquisition.

Where is the inspiring content?

Google makes it clear that the key benefit to marketers is the ability to build relationships. And part of brands building relationships, is to give consumers value through content.  I was hoping for rich, engaging, inspiring stuff – in other words, lots of social objects that would motivate me into a relationship with a brand.

Maybe great content will come in time as Google and brands find their feet.  However, without the facility to run promotions and competitions [Google doesn’t allow it on its pages], brands are going to need to be inventive to capture the attention of the public as more pages launch.

Relationship building aside, content that inspires recommendations is going to be crucial.  Google promises to incorporate the results from +1s into search and bring faster ways of connecting to brands through its search engine (with the ‘+’ search feature).

Our intention is to benchmark brand pages over the coming months – ultimately we need to evaluate the business benefits in search, engagement and advocacy that will justify the investment.

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In the words of the Content Marketing Institute’s Joe Chernov:

“Without content, social media is a sports car with an empty gas tank”.

No one knows that better than an online community manager. But what that community manager also knows is that accelerating your social media activity straight to sixth gear is risky. Without proper road safety, you might say, that sports car could find itself on a collision course with a ditch.

Continuing our series on online communities, we’ve pulled together our ‘top four road safety tips’ for smooth and secure community management.

1) Stop, look and listen

As Brian Solis said earlier this year, the days of a lone community manager watching out for a few keywords to react to are over. The overwhelming amplification of online conversations has made it impossible for larger and certainly global brands to expect one person in front of a screen to be able to keep track of the potentially thousands of brand mentions taking place on any given day. Today’s community manager needs to listen out for conversations as much as they need to interact with them. Thankfully there are multi-purpose tools that make this more manageable, for example, Lithium combines social media monitoring with a CRM networking solution; while Radian6 offers social media monitoring as well as an engagement console.

2) Watch your speed

If a brand has lots to say and a stack of rich and shareable content, things couldn’t be better for the community manager. But it’s important to resist the urge to shout it all out at once. The content might be flooding in now, but there could well be a drought four months down the line. A clear content strategy and plan will enable the community manager to spread out that content, make it flow in a logical and structured fashion and ultimately make it last. Too many posts in one day can also be seen as ‘spammy’ – so we generally recommend 2-3 a day on Facebook and 4-6 on Twitter.

3) Don’t drive without insurance

In an ideal world your community will chat happily amongst themselves and drop some nice brand evangelism into every other sentence. In reality there will always be the odd trouble-maker, which is why you need to take out an insurance policy: engagement guidelines. By making them clearly visible on your owned social platforms, the community manager is within reason to warn users, remove their posts and if needs be, block them altogether. The Alzheimer’s Society, for example, has a neat Guidelines tab on its Facebook page explaining its rules of engagement, without sounding draconian.

4) Don’t drink and drive

It might sound obvious to say that community managers should always be sober on the job, but the role can require out-of-hours checks on evenings and weekends. Tweeting after one glass of wine might seem harmless enough, but embarrassing hiccups are oh so easy when Twitter platforms are involved. Platforms, such as Tweetdeck, are a great way for brands to keep track of multiple conversations, but when a combination of personal and branded accounts are streaming through a single platform, it’s simple for that manager to find themselves telling their friends about a 40% rise in market share, while their branded community gets informed how pissed they plan to get that evening.

Related articles

• What Exactly is an Online Community Manager? (thesmileystone.wordpress.com)

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Google+ has really got the social media world excited. Twenty-five million users in 6 weeks, makes the growth of similar social networks like Facebook and Twitter look positively stunted in comparison. And the blogosphere is just as fired up – a quick Google blog search for Google+ returns more than 10 million results!

When Google+ launched, every marketeer worth his salt wondered what the network would do about brands; and companies across the globe started chomping at the bit to be the first to interact with the consumer communities on Google+. That privilege has gone to Ford Motor Company, which has managed to gain a corporate identity on the new social network, despite Google closing down all other brand pages. Google says it’s working on a suitable brand solution, but we’ll all have to sit tight until then.

Looking at the Ford page, it’s difficult to find any differences to established Facebook pages. It comes complete with a profile picture in the top right corner, smaller pictures at the top of the page and its ‘wall’ underneath. People can +1 things (akin to Facebook’s ‘Like’) and comment underneath.

While the aesthetics might be similar, there are a number of features we’re keen to start trialling and we’re excited to see what Google has in store for branded profiles. With the network looking set to spice up the social media marketing mix in the not too distant future, we take a look at what brands and businesses could be doing with Google+ in the coming months:

1) Hangouts

Customer service is one of the key areas we encourage our clients to explore and consider for their social media strategies and the Hangouts feature of Google+ could potentially revolutionise online customer service. The likes of Vodafone and ASOS are doing a great job on Facebook and Twitter already; and a number of companies offer instant chat via their websites. But, Hangouts could provide brands with the opportunity to chat to customers directly via video chat, making the whole experience more personal and friendly.

From a PR perspective, Hangouts offer some great opportunities, such as video roundtables with key influencers, and live customer events. This feature will get creative juices flowing as brands think of ways to engage with consumers using this new medium.

2) Search

As a search engine, it’s obvious to point out that Google’s strength lies in search. Google has already temporarily stopped its real time search function with assumptions that it will be restored with results from Google+.

Users can also +1 things, equivalent to a ‘Like’, and this will determine a website’s social value. This could potentially mean that the more +1′s a website has, the higher up it features in the rankings, affecting the SEO tactics we’ve become accustomed to. Google+’s Circles feature can also affect the way we search online, as recommendations from people in our circles, i.e. our trusted sources like friends and family, can feature in search results.  Social search is also beginning to affect the way businesses look at SEO. As well as +1′s, Facebook ‘Likes’ and re-tweets on Twitter can influence what we look for online. As this evolves, the customer experience has never been more important. You need to ensure you give the best experience possible to help encourage social recommendations.

We’re also keen to see the insights provided by Google+.  Facebook Insights are great but can be limited when it comes to identifying key influencers. And there are a number of Twitter apps and tools that give us good information but not all in one place. Monitoring and listening play a crucial role in informing your social media strategy so with Google’s background in analytics, we’re hopeful Google+ insights will provide the information brands need.

Time will tell if Google+ lives up to the buzz it has already created in the social media world. It may take time to become mainstream but, if and when it does, it’ll definitely make its mark on social media marketing.

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If you type the name “Roland Bunce” into Google you return 41,600 searches. According to media reports, Roland Bunce is a 24-year old computer science graduate, who has entered fashion and homeware brand Next’s online competition to find the next model.

Despite being atypical model material, he’s won public hearts and minds and is currently the frontrunner to win the competition, having received the most votes thanks to widespread social media support, along with some 54,000 Facebook ‘Likes’.

It doesn’t really matter whether Roland is a real person or not and it doesn’t matter if Roland Bunce is just a pseudonym. What matters is that social media has handed the public the power to make an unconventional underdog the winner of a high profile modelling competition. And the public loves it.

People from as far as Australia and Brazil have left comments of support on the Facebook group wall which has been created to raise Roland’s profile. A sense of camaraderie and communal anti-establishmentarianism is spreading across the social space.

I love a good revolution as much as the next person, but I can’t help feeling there’s a bit of a pack mentality starting to form. Look at the a recent comment left on the Roland Bunce To Win next model 2011 Facebook wall on Tuesday.

The comment was admittedly antagonistic towards Roland’s supporters and with emotions running high retaliation was to be expected. Someone creating a new Facebook profile taking the commenter’s name and adding ‘is an ugly shallow whOre’ to it solely to throw abuse back at the person starts to make things look ugly.

It’s interesting that Next has abstained from commenting on Roland’s rise to fame when the brand could surely turn this round into a positive PR story or at the very least put out a few of the negative fires that are starting to spread online.

It’s also sad to see the collective psyche taking a beautiful sentiment and turning it into an ugly mud-slinging match.

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Social media likes to give and take with both hands. It gives you innumerable ways of getting your company’s voice out to your target market, managing your reputation and adding value to your business. And then it takes. It takes all the content you can possibly feed it and it always asks for more.

Quality content, as Jason Miller at Social Media Examiner recently wrote, is the “fuel for your social media rocket ship”. So if you need a constant stream of content filling your social platforms, where exactly do you get the constant stream of ideas?

Miller provides a series of really insightful tips, including the use of RSS feeds, identifying blogs which are relevant to your business and subscribing to their feeds for inspiration. He also suggests jumping into relevant LinkedIn groups to see what people are discussing; as well as searching forums, crowdsourcing topics that your audience would actually like to read about by posting up a tweet or FB post and even listening to industry audio books when you’re on the go.

With the Google Panda update which came in to play in February – followed by further changes in April – ‘quality’ content is more important than ever; and social media has become an even more valuable means of sharing content and securing search visibility.

Content isn’t really a conundrum. All it takes is a clear strategy and a pre-planned calendar. With these in place, you always know where your next content is coming from and you ensure your website content is aligned with and pushed out via your social media platforms to increase that all important Google visibility.

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Google’s ‘Panda’ update is receiving a high level of search, SEO and even mainstream media attention, but the repercussion for brands engaging in social media is one can of worms begging to be opened.

Big fat juicy worms, like will sites currently considered valuable for brands to engage with suddenly lose their influence?

And has Google search become a crowdsourcing exercise, enabling uninitiated users – or even deliberate hacktivists with a bugbear – to hypothetically ‘block’ a credible brand website out of search?

Malcolm Slade sheds light on the latest Google algorithm, summarising as Google’s effort to provide better quality content-rich results and flush out the thin, low-value ‘spammy’ ones.

Known as the ‘Panda’ update, the algorithm launched in February and lowers the rankings for sites deemed ‘thin’ (affiliate-based, link farms, those with too much mirrored content). According to Google, this impacts 11.8% of queries.

Though we’ve yet to see the function rolled out in the UK, US Google users can now ‘block’ sites they consider to be of little value and in so doing, reduce a site’s rankings.

Without clarity on the algorithm, it is still unclear how UK sites are already caught up in the cross-fire; though Searchmetrics analysis indicates that the impact on a number of UK sites is both intuitive and surprising in equal measures.

While online newspapers such as The Independent, The Metro and The Mirror have all improved in rankings – unsurprising given their rich and frequent content – influential tech and gadget sites such as Zath, Pocket Lint and Electric Pig have significantly dropped in rankings.

Our sources tell us that some of the sites reported to have dropped in rankings are also seeing their traffic plummet as, one can only assume, a direct result.

It already looks like rich-content sites, which built influence through SEO link-building are now becoming the victims. Google itself, acknowledges this, by stating on Google webmaster central that if anyone “knows of a high quality site that has been negatively affected by this change, please bring it to our attention in this thread.” To-date the post has received 1620 replies.

It’s easy to see SEO and content as a chicken-and-egg dilemma, but if the latest Google update highlights anything, it’s the necessity to make creating rich content priority number one.

Source: Holistic Search Marketing

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You may have seen news of Google’s latest attempt to introduce social recommendations to its platform. +1  (US only service at the moment) allows people to up vote any website they like; this can then be seen by their social connections on Google in much the same fashion as you might like a friend’s post on Facebook. This can be considered a blatant, somewhat belated, but very welcome addition from Google in the social media arms race, but it also throws up a number of questions.

Could it be gamed?

I’m positive Google’s beta testing will place lots of whiz bang algorithms to stop unscrupulous people +1ing select sites to death. But, it does raise the query: will brands who have worked hard to appear in the Google Golden Triangle through great stories, competent SEO practices and positive reviews see smaller sites leapfrogging them in people’s search due to lots of local +1s?

What would motivate someone to +1?

Your +1s can only be seen by your Social connections on Google.

• People in your Gmail & Google Talk chat list
• People in your “My Contacts” group in Google Contacts
• People you follow in Google Reader or Google Buzz

But, how many friends do you currently have on your Google profile? Is this group big enough to provide meaningful search impact? In addition people currently understand, or have been taught to understand the motives for liking something amongst their social group, but does this motivation transfer to search?

The upside

I may have seemed pretty critical of this new service, but I’m sure Google will iron out these potential issues. +1 in search can only be a good thing, we have been saying for months that human recommendations need to be considered in search; it shouldn’t just be down to algorithms and will combat SEO blackhatting.

When +1 comes to the rest of the web population, what site would you up vote? Oh yeah and Google, where’s the -1?

For further information check out Google’s overview video.

For a more detailed overview of the service there is a great description on Search Engine Land.

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I’ve been reading a lot (and trying out) some new and exciting music applications over the past week or so, with people starting to explore hitherto uncharted territory. Everyone and their dog are launching cloud based music streaming services (Amazon have joined Sony in making theirs live, leaving Apple and Google behind), but the really interesting ideas are all stemming from the different ways that we share music and the situations in which we listen to it.

It all started last year when Spotify added in social elements to its service. We all had fun nosing at other people’s playlists and their most played tracks. We thought carefully about what we would share and who should share it with and made collaborative playlists with people we’ve never even met in real life (IRL.)

Then at the back end of 2010, Shazam followed up by announcing Spotify integration in its smart phone apps. If you never Shazam-ed, it’s a music recognition service which helps you find out what that song is you can hear when in a shop/Starbucks/pub. Last week, Shazam took another big step in increasing its social music service by adding Shazam Friends. It’s a tab on its smart phone app which is integrated with Facebook and allows you to see which songs your friends have tagged recently.

It’s the fact that Shazam Friends recognises the different ways we consume music in the 21st century that’s so interesting. It’s not just about picking a song to play, it’s being aware of the music that surrounds us all the time and taking an active interest rather than letting it wash over us. That’s where my new favourite app, Soundtracking, takes its lead. It’s a way of tracking music across your entire day and sharing it with your friends. In a similar way to foursquare, you have Soundtracking friends, but you can also automatically share your updates with Facebook/Twitter/foursquare. You have three options in the app – the song you’re playing on your iPhone/Touch, tag a song you can hear (like Shazam) or just update manually. When you use the app and stop and think about, we hear a lot of music every day, jogging our memories and playing with our emotions.

If you’re not interested in sharing your musical loves and hates with all and sundry, than maybe Moodagent is for you. Services like Last FM and Stereomood allow you to pick tunes based on your state of mind when streaming through your PC, but Moodagent goes one step further, scanning your library on your music playing device and grouping your tracks according to its index of songs. This Mashable article has the full details, but it shows the next level of music consumption, and the sophistication that listening to music on an internet-enabled device.

Does it mean the death of the classic iPod? Not just yet, but Soundtracking has made this iPod Classic devotee think long and hard about switching to an iPod Touch.

Related articles

• Shazam Interacts with Facebook Friends (musicbusinessheretic.wordpress.com)
• Amazon Cloud Player lets you play your music from anywhere (cnn.com)

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I came across an infographic entitled, ‘Fear Google’, yesterday. I first spotted it on imjustcreative, who in turn credited the source as onlineschools.org.

Using bold red colours and imagery of a laughing devil, the infographic warns of the power of analytics and user data. Step by step, it takes you on a journey through the process of how Google comes to acquire user data.

The infographic highlights international government requests Google received to disclose user information between July 1st and December 31st 2009, (the UK government requested details of 1,000 users); as well the specific data Google collects from, for example, a Normal Google Search, (query, IP address, country code, domain name, browser) verses a Google Personalised Search (content analysis of visited websites).

What’s the story here? Google knows everything about you, Google has unlimited power and Google is everywhere. IMHO big deal.

Let’s play devil’s advocate. According to ‘Just How MASSIVE is Google, anyway?’ another infograpic on computerschool.org, you would need 1.2 million trees to facilitate the amount of paper needed to print out the 24 petabytes of information Google processes daily. At least human privacy loss is the environment’s gain.

Then there’s the Christchurch Google Person Finder, the free tool helping people caught up in the New Zealand earthquake. In this instance human privacy loss becomes the facilitator to reuniting loved ones.

For better and for worse, Google has become bigger than we can comprehend. Here’s a final thought to make the mind boggle:

If it took you one minute to search each page on Google it’d take 38,026 years to look at them all. It takes Google 0.5 seconds, tops.

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