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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There are loads of free tools out there designed to provide insight into what is being said about you or the brands and products you work for on the Internet. One such tool that is worth checking out is G’lerts.  Using Google Alerts as the base of the service it provides you with a daily email (example shown on the right) that rounds up what has been happening on your Google search over the past week.  It includes some simple charts as well as the all important links to the stories Google has found for you.

There is also an online dashboard but this is where things start to get a little flaky in my opinion.  One thing to be aware of is that you only have access to the last seven days information (come on it is free).  So do not rely on this to provide you with monthly reporting. The other is that I have only been seeing results for web, no news sites, blogs or Twitter, which I seriously doubt given one of my searches was regarding flu cases this winter.

Yet, if you are using Google Alerts for tracking issues, stories, clients, individuals or anything else, over the recent past, forget the Google Alerts emails and set this up.  Oh, just watch out for that sentiment analysis. We all know sentiment is nigh on impossible for automated systems to get right – no matter what the monitoring tool guys tell you.

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You may have heard that Google has changed its search algorithm and with that change, instilled the word Abuserank forever into the minds of SEO experts.

According to Google they were spurred into action by the story of Clarabelle Rodriguez and the shocking (and by shocking I mean truly abusive and in some cases illegal) treatment she received at the hands of one online retailer (Decormyeyes.) This retailer had discovered that even the most negative and vociferous online complaints from consumers actually improved his Google SEO ranking. The Google spiders were picking up the negative reviews on high profile consumer feedback sites and so the owner was deliberately abusing customers to farm bad reviews!

Now, according to the Google blog, the coders thought up numerous ways to combat this new and disturbing retailer scam and in the end opted for an “algorithmic solution which detects the merchant from the Times article along with hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide an extremely poor user experience.” Sounds a bit like a black list to me and not as technical as some in the industry would have you believe.

There are initial industry fears that unscrupulous brands might use this new algorithm to try and seed fake complaints on forums and message boards to try and drop their competitors down the SERPs. However, I think Google are wise to this type of system gaming. Also, hasn’t the risk of fake complaints been around since the beginning of retail.

So in truth, if you* refers to you as a brand then online customer reviews are more important than ever and dealing with customer service issues in a timely manner is vital. If you* refers to you as a consumer, with a lot of Christmas shopping to do in the next few weeks, then this is probably something you’ll welcome. But, if you’re a social media agency, then this is just a reinforcement of what we’ve been saying to clients and prospects for years. Online monitoring of and involvement in consumer conversations is vital for maintaining brand position and competitive edge. Plus, we like a challenge!

p.s Oh and in case you were wondering, all the negative publicity (400 high profile articles in the last two days alone) Decormyeyes has received in the last few days hasn’t done its PageRank much good, standing as it is at 1 out of 10. Looks like the algorithm is working for one retailer at least.

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Brands on Facebook are a lot like teenagers in high school; both crave popularity.

Conventional wisdom teaches us that to be popular you need to be seen fraternising with the cool kids.

Clueless (1995)

A recent study by The Daily Beast, however, reveals the quickest way to become popular on Facebook is to do the opposite.

The Daily Beast outlines a one-month experiment into Facebook’s news feed algorithm aimed at decoding why one member’s news is more prominent than another’s.

The experiment centres around a newly set-up page, which is befriended by a select group of people, monitoring to see how much the page features in their feeds.

The Daily Beast found the Facebook algorithm favoured established members over newcomers, with absolutely none of the page’s news appearing in feeds initially.

It was only when the friends began interacting – clicking on the page, browsing through pictures, leaving comments etc. that news started to appear in their feeds; page interaction and news feed visibility was directly correlated.

The Daily Beast also found that a status update carried a much greater chance of appearing in a news feed if it included a link to an external web page. 

Throughout the experiment the ‘popular’ friends never received any of the page’s news, which meant they never clicked-through, browsed pictures, left comments or clicked on links – all of the things that fuel the Facebook algorithm.

The takeout for brands on Facebook? Start small. Friends with low-level followings are the crucial first rung up the algorithm, only once a presence has been established does it make sense to go after Facebook popularity domination.

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Can you believe it, it’s the end of October already. Summer days are officially over and the Christmas build up is upon us. We’ve put together a summary of the top social media stories this month, for your delectation and in case you’ve been stuck down a hole for the last 30 days.

The  Social Shopping Explosion

This month we launched our research ‘The Social Shopping Explosion’. As a social media agency, we were interested to examine how social is changing the way we shop so we explored the motivations and mindsets of consumers online. Here are some of the key insights from our report:

• 46% of online shoppers do not have a clear idea of what they want to buy when they go online. Emerging groups of shoppers, termed gatherers and collaborators, are spending time on social platforms researching and sharing information prior to making a purchase
• 60% of UK online shoppers would be more likely to shop at a site that rewarded them for reviews or recommendations
• Retailer incentives do not affect the credibility of customer reviews (32% think better of a brand that has been recommended, 30% when the recommendation has been rewarded)
• Only 11% want transactional rewards (discounts etc.), 82% want both transactional and experiential rewards (private shopping days, product testing etc.)

You can download the report by visiting http://bit.ly/Social-Shopping

Google news and sharing

Google announced a new feature to its News search last week. For some search terms, news results are now displaying a ‘shared by’ number alongside the link. This means how many times the story has been shared on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. At the moment, it seems Google is only displaying these results on the main page, when you click on the News page there are no ‘shared by’ numbers. What remains to be seen however, is whether this new social search feature will affect the way Google ranks results but it’s certainly something that SEO strategists should be aware of.

How not to crowdsource

We all learnt a lesson from Gap this month following the backlash surrounding the company’s decision to change its logo. Gap showcased its redesigned logo but it was met with consumer resistance on Facebook and Twitter. The company’s Facebook page, that has more than 800,000 fans, received more than 1,107 comments when it announced its new logo.  It was even a trending topic on Twitter. Gap then asked its fans for feedback and wanted to crowdsource ideas for a new design.  Gap took the decision to revert back to its original logo at the advice of its online communities and embarrassingly issued a statement from Marka Hansen, president of the Gap brand in North America, which said: “this wasn’t the right project at the right time for crowd sourcing.” This is a good example of the power of online communities. Gap was right to listen to its fans and revert back to the original. However, its reputation could’ve been saved, along with a lot of time and money, if they’d engaged with this community beforehand.

Greater Manchester Police turn to Twitter

With the spending cuts looming, Greater Manchester Police (GMP) took to Twitter to raise public awareness of police work. For a 24 hour period GMP recorded each of the 3,205 incidents they had to deal with on Twitter. From the serious to the trivial, people were encouraged to follow their work using the hash tag #gmp24.  The experiment proved successful with 28,000 additional followers that day. Twitter’s features, such as its live and concise updates, made it the perfect platform for the police’s current activity to be demonstrated.

Chilean miners rescue

The rescue effort to free the Chilean miners finally came to a conclusion this month, when all 33 miners were successfully bought back to civilisation. The social media world was awash with real time commentary about the rescue. As well as the large news sites streaming live videos and updating news stories and blogs, millions of people turned to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter to keep up to date with the rescue mission. Numerous Facebook pages were set up, some with over 2,000 fans, and Chilean miners became a top trending topic on Twitter throughout the day.

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Earlier this week Google added a subtle, but interesting addition to its search function. For some search terms, news results are now displaying a ‘shared by’ number alongside the link. For the searches I’ve tried so far, these ‘shares’ only relate to Twitter but I’ve seen other people comment that it displays Facebook too. Here’s a screengrab of the first page of a search for ‘The Apprentice.’

When you click through into the News page there’s no ‘shared by’ numbers next to the full list of results, so at the moment, Google only seems to be providing these stats as a brief snapshot on the main page.

What’s interesting in this example is that The Guardian and Entertainment Weekly are not the top results in a Google News search. Is this new social search feature therefore going to affect the way Google ranks its results? It’s unclear at the moment whether this function will be further rolled out across all news results and/or into other search areas i.e. blogs but it’s certainly something that could have an impact on brands’ SEO strategies in the future.

What do you think of this new function? Should sharing be a key factor in Google’s mysterious ranking system?

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I attended the interesting, informative and insightful Social Collective (see #socol for tweets from the event) last week. One of the subjects touched upon was how far negative comments/activity on social media impacted a brand’s reputation. It got me thinking about some of the brand “gaffes” that have happened since I’ve been working in the industry.

For a while, I’ve been somewhat suspicious about the actual impact of these so-called reputation destroying moments. To those of us working in the social media industry, we relish the chance to say ‘I told you so’ to non-client brands and spend hours waxing lyrical about what they should have done i.e. set employee guidelines, listen before engaging etc. But I have a sneaky suspicion that in most cases, the damage ends there. Your average Joe consumer is unlikely to read about the incident and even if they do, it probably won’t have a long-term impact on them buying the products or services.

Let’s take the Vodafone tweet incident as an example:

Recap – employee posts inappropriate tweet about homosexuals and beaver

Brand reaction – Vodafone tries to delete the tweet and then spends the rest of the day @replying a very repetitive apologetic tweet to everyone

Results – the tweet is captured and circulated furiously via Twitter. Numerous blogs pick up the story as does Guardian Tech and The Register

In summary, the story was picked up by influential blogs and did cause a storm on Twitter. However, a Google search for the week following shows virtually no posts on the subject and the results for the term “Vodafone” actually return the story “Vodafone is UK’s most valued brand” as one of the top results.

I realise this is only one case and an analysis of other social media gaffes may tell a different story. But, it does illustrate the point that the stories that make headlines in our social media bubble are not necessarily having an impact on consumer behaviour. Use them as case-studies yes, but not to scaremonger clients into a situation where they are terrified to put a foot wrong for fear of the backlash. Experimentation is one of the most exciting things about working in social media and we should encourage our clients to take some risks. They might end up being the next Vodafone, but there’s a chance they may become the next Old Spice!

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A few weeks ago Google‘s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, suggested people may be forced to change their names in order to escape youthful misdemeanours immortalised online on social media sites, like Facebook. As a university student looking for a placement for my third year, I found myself doing some housekeeping, but there was nothing I deemed bad enough on my profile to warrant a name change.

Schmidt’s comment provoked a vast debate on the volume of information we freely publicise, which is next to impossible to eradicate. He told the Wall Street Journal:

“I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time.”

As someone who has grown up using social media, I certainly understand where Eric Schmidt’s suggestion comes from. My generation spends a vast majority of their day logged on to social platforms, such as Facebook, where they document every aspect of their lives, without supervision or thought as to who their information is available to.

An Independent article including the story of a trainee teacher, unable to complete her qualification following a comical picture online of her captioned, “Drunk Pirate”, is a stark warning. Therefore, Schmidt has a good point.

But is this suggestion relevant to companies?

Brands might be attracted by the idea of a new identity, but is this possible to achieve when an online reputation can last forever? If the internet behaves as a public archive, is it possible to turn public opinion around? And is damage to brand reputation ever enough to warrant giving up brand awareness?

When Aviva changed its name two years ago, from Norwich Union, members of the public polled by the Guardian, thought ‘Aviva’ was a bus company, not the UK’s biggest insurer. Brands need to consider social media as part of their campaign management strategy and a channel to manage any risk to reputation. Name changing may be an option for individuals, but the cost to businesses can be much higher.

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Another weekend, another football sex scandal splashed all over the front of the Sunday tabloids. This time it’s the turn of Wayne Rooney who allegedly paid for sex with a prostitute whilst his wife Coleen was pregnant.

Whatever the truth behind the allegations, the social media world has been revelling in the news since it first broke. At the time of writing this post, Wayne Rooney is a trending topic on Twitter with new updates being posted approximately every 18 seconds (according to social mention). The micro blogging site is awash with comments, jokes and slander from the general public, with everyone offering their thoughts on the scandal.

It’s true that many of the jokes evoke a chuckle but something about the whole situation makes me slightly uncomfortable. Before the days of social media, tabloid scandals tended to be read, commented about on TV and discussed in the pub with your mates for a couple of days after.

Modern news consumption is a totally different ball game, one in which the public has a platform and receptive audience to share their thoughts and opinions. For the most part, this is a positive thing, as citizen journalism in the form of social media has given everyone a voice and the power to help set the news agenda. The downside is that people now feel free to openly share their thoughts, no matter how critical or potentially hurtful they are to those on the receiving end.

For Coleen and Wayne, reading the ‘exclusive’ coverage in the NOTW will not have been a pleasant experience. But, how much worse must it be to see millions of people across the web commenting on your private life? A giant blanket of faceless opinion on the scandal is now forever documented in Google’s bottomless vault of information.

Just recently, X-Factor’s Joe McElderry announced that he was gay, the pressure to come out stemming from constant rumours spread on Twitter. Although celebrities are in the public eye and expect to be the subjects of gossip, it is unsettling that it has now become so easy to pass and share judgement, with social media providing the perfect platform.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a huge advocate of social media; it has changed the way we live and work in an unprecedented way. But the fact that we can publish anything and everything with the click of a mouse has made it easy for people to behave in ways that they might not in the real world. In the world of online communication, is the social sometimes in danger of becoming anti-social I wonder?

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Image via Wikipedia

We’re a faddy lot. Two years ago you couldn’t swing a plastic bag without hitting an environmentalist head-on. Fast-forward to 2010, however, and it’s all gone quiet on the eco front.

The New York Times recently ran an article asking whether the recession had pulverised environmentalism. The article draws on a working paper by Matthew E. Kahn and Matthew J. Kotchen, which correlates higher unemployment rates with a lower interest in the environment. Khan and Kotchen claim that when a (US) state’s unemployment level increases, Google searches for ‘global warming’ go down, while searches for ‘unemployment’ go up.

It might be selfish, but it’s understandable. In the boom years we had the time and the money to ponder ‘global warming’, but now we have something more pressing on our hands – we have ‘global youth unemployment’.

According to The Guardian, 81 million 16-24-year-olds were unemployed at the end of 2009. With entry-level jobs at such a premium, squeaky clean covering letters and CVs are taken as a given – pristine online-footprints become a pre-requisite.

It’s not surprising to read that celebrities such as Lindsay Lohan employ ‘reputation managers’ to maintain their online-footprints, driving positive conversations further up the Google search pages and making negative sentiment ‘go away.’

What’s more intriguing, however, is that parents are now doing the same thing. Companies such as Reputation Defender offer packages specifically aimed at children, monitoring cyberspace for anything that could potentially hinder a child’s school, university and job prospects. The company monitors all posts, private info and photos across the Deep Web – i.e. non-indexed pages, pages that are created dynamically, and pages that require a login – including ’40 of the biggest social networks.’

They then deliver reports highlighting any coverage that might need ‘destroying’ and for the sum of around $30 per item, the offending coverage can just ‘go away’. The ‘destruction’ process takes between 30-90 days and is done using undisclosed ‘proprietary in-house methodology.’

Are children brands in need of reputation management? I got caught out aged 16 playing truant, cigarette-in-hand, thanks to a photo published on page five of the Daily Star, showing the nation – and my headmistress – I definitely wasn’t at home in bed. I got my knuckles wrapped, but it hardly haunted me for life. I learned from my mistakes;  surely today’s children should be given the freedom to do the same.

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