Will Marlow

One huge myth is that if you use Twitter or Facebook to link to your website from your status updates, you'll increase your Google PageRank (in other words, your website will get pushed to the top of search results), because Google famously "counts the number of links" to your website to determine how "relevant" your website is.  Lots of links = great search engine optimization, right?  But you can think of the major Internet companies as co-conspirators in a plot to determine "relevancy," because back in 2005 they all decided that whenever someone links to a website in the "user generated content" area of another website, they would start inserting an invisible "nofollow" tag.  This means that ALL links in a Twitter feed have a hidden "nofollow" tag embedded in them (same with Facebook), and this makes them invisible to search engines.  To be clear, this means that the target of the link doesn't look any more attractive in the eyes of Google, Yahoo or Bing. 

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Google launched Buzz 13 days ago, and after spending some time getting to know it better, I wanted to write a quick introduction for people who are still wondering (a) how it works, (b) how it's different from other social media platforms and (c) why they might want to use it.

In everyone's favorite list format, here are the answers to those questions:

1. Google Buzz works in the following way: you access your Google Buzz account through Gmail, and the service allows you to post "updates" which have no character limitation.  Your posts can include rich media like pictures and videos.  Gmail has over 200 million users, which means that the scope of Google Buzz is huge, because each Gmail user was given a default Buzz account along with followers from among their email contacts.  As you post updates, the people in your Buzz network can leave comments, register a "like," or send you a message.

2. Unlike Twitter, which has one feed that shows everything you say (whether you're writing your own original post, or commenting about someone else's post), Google Buzz let's you comment on someone else's feed without using your own feed to do it.  This means you can have conversations with thousands of people, while only updating your own feed at your own pace.

3. Unlike Twitter, there are no follow limits on Google Buzz.  This means you can follow thousands of people, and potentially earn lots of follow backs.  Buzz can get away with this for two reasons: (1) 13 days is not long enough for spammers to flood the system with noise, and (2) it is not yet open to third party apps the way Twitter is, so every time someone follows someone else on Buzz, they physically need to follow them.  This places a natural limitation on the amount of following that can be done, which itself is a protection against spam that doesn't exist on Twitter.

4. On the same topic of follower numbers, unlike Twitter (or Posterous), you don't need to display the names of the people who are following you OR the number of people who you are being followed by and are following.

5. If you comment on someone else's Buzz update, you'll start getting updates in your inbox when other people comment on that thread.  This is jarring at first.  It makes it look like you actually have email in your inbox.  However, it appears that Google simply wants to bring these updates to your attention separately from all the other Buzz noise, because if you've commented on it you've highlighted its importance.  This feature will definitely annoy some people, and I wouldn't be surprised if Google introduces filtering options.  Many people consider their inboxes to be sacred and don't want non-email to fill it up.  However, this aspect of Buzz underscores the fact that Buzz is really an "email-based" social media tool, which is where it derives a lot of its uniqueness.  Even if the hype that is surrounding Buzz right now dies away, it may have strong staying power due to its email roots.

6. So how is Google Buzz the same as Twitter and Facebook?  All three platforms occupy the same category: they are all outposts (to borrow Chris Brogan's term).  This means that Buzz is a great place to meet new people, have new conversations, and to develop a new traffic stream to your primary web base, which should be a blog or a website that you use to deliver real value and host your most important work.

7. So why would you want to use Google Buzz?  If you are interested in truly interacting with people, the features on Buzz are creating lots of rich interactions.  I have over 8,000 followers on Twitter, and far fewer followers on Buzz, but I can already see that my Buzz posts are generating as much or more engagement than my Twitter posts.  It is important to avoid fake success metrics like follower counts and fan lists when measuring success in online media.  It's much better to look at the number of comments, clickthrough numbers, re-posts, "favorites," "likes," and links.  These measures are much harder to fake, and right now the features on Buzz (and its early adopter user-base) have made for the most engaged/engaging platform around.

8. The final point I'd make about Buzz is that if you divide the world between Twitter and Facebook, you'd see Twitter as the best tool for "pushing" information to lots of people, and you'd see Facebook as the best tool for "pulling" information in from the people you choose to connect with.  In my opinion, the strength of Google Buzz is much more in its ability to let you "push" information out than pull it in, which makes it more of a threat to Twitter.  But it took more than 13 days to build Google Buzz, and it'll take longer than 13 days to reach a final verdict on where the platform is headed.  I hope this was a useful early analysis for you.

Will Marlow co-founded AlumniFidelity to help his clients reposition their fundraising to benefit from Web 2.0 technology and marketing techniques. He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, Bowling Green State University, Randolph Macon College, and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge.  Read more about Will Marlow here, or email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

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Some people have a hard time understanding why Facebook is so valuable.  

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Every so often, I do some quick keyword searches for my company, my clients, and my own name, to see how everyone is doing regarding search engine optimization. 

Two things are notable.

Number one, it looks like the black art of search engine optimization (SEO) is rapidly losing relevance, and it's being replaced by the much simpler art of social media optimization.  Which means, essentially, that search engines will now be able to find you largely by your own social media conversations on Twitter, Facebook, and on your blog.  You still need to make your content "search engine friendly" so that you don't make it hard for Google to find you, but the complicated voodoo is being replaced by activities that you do.

Number two, much to my surprise, when I entered the same search criteria in both Google and Bing, Bing told me something useful that Google did not.  Bing told me that someone had linked to my blog from Twitter without letting me know.  I was happy to find out so that I could thank the person, but the point is, Google didn't tell me about this and Bing did.  Now, it'll take A LOT more than this to win even 1% of my search loyalty, but I was surprised that given the same search criteria, Bing scored a point on Google on my scorecard.

PS - If you ever find yourself in a conversation with someone who tells you that Twitter or Facebook is a fad that could disappear because they don't do anything useful, and you don't know what to say to them, remember that people still pay big money for "search engine optimization."  Twitter and Facebook displace this costly marketing activity with a non-cash alternative.  In other words, rather than paying for SEO, smart businesses are using social media.  That's the opposite of useless.

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I use Google Analytics (often) but on a regular basis I only use it for a few basic things.

If you feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data that Google Analytics presents you with, it can help for you to simply define what you want to know.  For example, here are some things I like to know:

1. How many people visit my web sites each day.  
2. How long the average visitor stays.
3. How many pages the average visitor views before leaving.
4. How many visitors stay longer than 3-5 minutes.
5. How many "New" visitors there are on a weekly basis.
6. I like to see where my traffic comes from (Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc.,)
7. Which pages are the most popular. 
8. If certain popular pages in particular get a high percentage of traffic from referral sites like Twitter.
9. How long people tend to stay on my most popular pages (and to compare that with the average for the site in general).
10.  Which times of day are the busiest.
11. And I am interested in tracking total unique visitors and page views recorded on AlumniFidelity's many donation portals, and I divide that number by the amount of donations recorded to get a "completion" statistic, and I periodically look for events that seem to move this statistic one direction or another.

The value of this data is pretty self-explanatory.  But you can do so much with programs like Google Analytics that I'm just beginning to scratch the surface.  Do you use Google Analytics more extensively?  Let me know if you'd like to discuss ways to draw more from the data.

And: if you could know anything at all about your web traffic and visitors, what would it be?

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The beta tag is one of Google’s brilliant hallmarks.

The beta phase (it can actually last forever) solves one of the key challenges in software product development.  The first challenge (unsolved by the beta phase) is to build software that solves a serious consumer or business problem, which is no small task.  But the second challenge (once your software solve a serious customer problem) is that you can never figure out how human beings will actually use your software once they get their hands on it. That is, unless you have a strong beta program and you watch a large number of your users in action, and you learn from them. 

Google is the master of using emergent data.  Don’t design Gmail.  Let your beta testers play with your new email system until the right patterns emerge, and let them design Gmail for you.  Same with Twitter.  Let the right features emerge, don't airdrop them in from corporate HQ. 

Having a strong beta culture is all about knowing when to stop inserting your own preferences and opinions into things, and letting the end users tell you how the product should be designed.  That’s when the software gets designed right.

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For the last 42 days, there has been a YouTube video of an awesome presentation about trends in high tech by my hero Geoffrey Moore (below). Over the last 42 days this video has been viewed a grand total of 617 times, according to the YouTube statistics.  Anyone who wants to gain a better understanding of cloud-computing, and how consumer software is entering the enterprise world, would be interested in watching this. 

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