Google Plus Numbers? Basically BS

So Google have just released some stats that basically say they have 90 million engaged users ... doubling that they had recently,  I won't go into the numbers much but I would definently read the source article -

Google doubles Plus membership with brute-force signup process


I tweeted the link out which I found via @JamesCoyne who retweeted @SilkCharm  


note - I am no writer and any typos, punctuation mistakes aren't intentional I am getting my thoughts down!


Oddly there was a bit of defence of Google! So my two pence...!

1. I work within a business that does social media so I am biased.
2. I have a GooglePlus account that I lurk within but don't actively post in ... 
3. I use Gmail, Google Analytics, search and more

I believe that Google Plus will be pretty big, I am in circles with most of the people in the office, which oddly enough I am not friends with on Facebook, not because I don't like them but because my Facebook account is dominated by family and old friends, boring child pics!

I don't use Google Plus much and when I log in I personally don't like the experience I see some very good articles by social media / analytics / seo people who somehow I have "aquired" but I don't see 'friend' content in there, no one I know is really sharing in the same way people share Facebook content

For business use it will be massive, until tools are really rolled out I am not pushing for the company I work for to support it as much as Facebook and Twitter. 

According to Hitwise Pinterest has more traffic than Google Plus... 

http://www.hitwise.com/us/datacenter/main/dashboard-10133.html

The article does a really good job of looking into the stats and showing that like for like, they are not, read the source article for this information! 

• Facebook I think is here to stay and whilst I am a predominantly Twitter man, my Facebook account will be the place I choose to share most of my photos / videos, "non proffesionally on brand" humour as well as generally anything of general interest... 
• Facebook is where I organise parties etc... 
• Commercially it is easy to manage Facebook accounts at the moment.
• The GooglePlus android application is VERY VERY bad and kills battery life in hours on a decent phone! 

Should you use it? 

• Any major company (or brand) should have a Google Plus account 
• Any serious journalist / news company should be integrating author profiles 
• If your in a niche, it is probably pretty good (a candidate we interviewed told us it is very good for mixed martial arts) 

Will I use it personally

• Yes, but more like Twitter than Facebook 

Open web? 

Google is far more closed than Facebook and Twitter and has a history of not playing nice with other people! 

CheckIn CheckOff

It seems a long time ago that I started helping a colleague at Adfero with a project "CheckInCheckOff" - a simple idea - a digital challenge / treasure hunt across Leeds ... But with timing, children, developers going missing and a project manager migrating it is unbelievable that it has got this far - now just a week away I am fairly confident that it will not only be delivered but it will be pretty damn successful! We have only got half a dozen teams signed up so far but I know that it will be all right on the night!

It isn't too late to sign up! - checkincheckoff.eventbrite.co.uk 

The people have been involved have been awesome and I need to mention a few of them:

Matt Gardner Epiphany Solutions - has done an awesome job of writing up the games  

Rick Harrison - after our original developer going awol in a bit of a rubbish way, this guy has turned around and delivered an amazing app that allows multi player teams - this framework should be packaged and sold! If anyone ever needs a web mobile app or well anything developed I fully recommend him!  He also happens to be an expert photographer - http://www.fortybelowzero.com/  

Amanda Kouwenhoven @ Adfero has been the project manager through out it all and coping with what can only be described as  an administrative nightmare - trying to get venues on board cope with the various personalities on the project and generally push this through to execution.  

Chris Pool @ Social Loop has also been invaluable experience in event management and promotion has ensured that we have been able to promote this online using a Twitter account that has gone from zero to 400+ relevant followers in a very short time!  

The game has been built around QR codes, augmented reality (provided by Feature Media) and should be seriously entertaining, followed by a gathering and drinks at a an awesome venue which unfortunately can't be disclosed as yet! If you think that you can win this why not enter a team?

Serps Number

Creating a bookmarklet - bookmark any page (even this one) click edit on it, and replace the URL with the below, rename it something useful and bobs your uncle ... 




javascript: var r = /start=([\d]*)/i;var myL = window.location; var match = r.exec(myL) ; if(match)startValue=match[1]; else startValue=0;var searchResults=document.getElementsByClassName('l');for ( var i in searchResults ) { var numberSpan = document.createElement("span"); var resultNumber = document.createTextNode((((parseInt(startValue)+parseInt(i))-0)+1)+'. ');numberSpan.appendChild(resultNumber);searchResults[i].parentNode.insertBefore(numberSpan, searchResults[i]);}










Minor rant about rankings .... 


People are unfairly obsessed with rankings, my personal feeling is that SEO is more about quality traffic and not about rankings, course ranking for the right terms = quality traffic ... 


The 'tail' is usually vastly superior in terms of quality and volume. 

Keys to the media ...

Creating Facebook pages is very easy, in fact I can not do it in about 4 minutes including a logo pinched from a website ... However if it is your business make sure you know who has the login, on Facebook it is typically a personal login and people do move companies, get fired and sometimes even go ill / die.

Peoples accounts can also be deleted, this doesn't happen too often, but you wouldn't want your page disappearing into the mists just because you can't regain ownership ...

1.  If an agency did it for you, make sure you (company) are also an admin, make sure at least 3 senior people are admins, don't delete the agency til you are no longer in a relationship with them.  
2. If you did it - make sure 3 other people are also admins. 
3. If people leave the company and you can no longer trust them 100% make sure that they can't impact your web presence / reputation 

The sad fact is that it is nearly impossible to regain control of a Facebook page once lost .. I tried for a few hours recovering one or two and gave up (control was lost to an unreachable ex-employee).

Where I work we are frequently asked to create Facebook pages for companies who are convinced that they don't have pages, til we find them and show them to them ...

Apps pose another complexity to it all - if you have put apps or FBML pages on your site - where are the images etc.. hosted, if this isn't under your control, who has got control.

Social Sharing

Sharing buttons help the lazy amoungst us tweet and post to Facebook far more easily - this in turns creates more traffic to your site, there are plugins for it but using the write implementation for your site actually will give you the best benefits. The information on it is here -
http://twitter.com/about/resources/tweetbutton 

Using the available fields will actually increase followers too ...

Authors should have their own branded twitter accounts and they should be in the first box, a second company account should also be in the related box

<a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="vertical" data-via="dergal" data-related="newsreach">Tweet</a><script type="text/javascript" src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>

 In this example "dergal" will be mentioned in the tweet, and after they have posted - it will recommend to follow newsreach ...

Two massive benefits, it will improve engagement with journalists who usually love it and secondly it will recommend following your primary Twitter account which is what you really want!

Demo -

Tweet

Facebook



This is a bit more simple - http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/ - in the past there was a difference between posting to and liking, but very recently it has become the same, liking something will also post to their timeline.

Hope this helps

Gerry

Stuart Baggs the brand Vs Viglen

Working in SEO I tend to spend my life looking at and critiquing websites – after watching Stuart Baggs (the brand) vs Bordan Tkachuk (Viglen) I always like to take a look at the actual products of the two of them – anyone out there who knows what to look for, if you look at the sites belonging to the respective companies it seems that Stuart has created (or at least his company) has created a credible, professional web presence that could do with a tiny bit of work, whereas the Viglen website, well quite frankly it is a shambles, if it was a dog it would be taking a one way trip to the vet. 

• http://www.bluewave.im/ 

• http://www.viglen.co.uk/

I am also fairly sure that Stuart knows what ISP stands for Bordan seemed to think it was Internet Service Protocol (I actually checked this fact for myself, sometimes even I get things like this wrong, but in my office I have earned quite a few 20p bets, being the fountain of pointless facts) slightly worrying for a tech guy.


I won't go into details about the sites now, but whereas sites like Lings Cars deliberately look 'special' Viglen.co.uk is a special website basically because it is falling apart, the code looks like it was cut and pasted from everywhere, designed by someone as part of a college course and maintained by, well no one.

I can’t say I would have kept Stuart in as long as Alan did, in fact I was shocked when Liz went, however I did find his firing disgusting, Stuart had achieved a lot in life whereas I am struggling to see what Bordan has managed to do with what was once a very successful company, I think that Stuarts wifi blimp has far more chance of not being laughed at that the famous em@iler... 

• http://www.bluewave.im/wifi/blimp.php 

• http://www.viglen.co.uk/

Related - 

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2010/12/16/why-lord-sugar-needs-to-fire-his-technical-expert/

Stella seems like someone I would love to work for / with and wish her all the luck in the future, Stuart I can't' exactly say I would like to work with / for him but I honestly believe he has a bright future if he learns to keep 'the gob' in check. Lets face it, compared to Sugar he isn't really that gobby is he? 

Play Nice - FB & Google

This post is more of an answer to a Twitter conversation that I don't think I could answer in 160 words -  "@dergal What is FB's argument for not providing export? I don't know. I'm guessing you can't export all your likes, contacts, etc."   http://twitter.com/GuavaMarkeD  

Its odd how Google always seems to have an opponent, this year they seem to have forgotten about MS and are going after Facebook - there is an awesome blow by blow here http://www.revenews.com/ctmoore/google-vs-facebook-in-2010-a-blow-by-blow-review/

This is the way I see it - I could be wrong but it is about the information source - Facebook & Gmail are two very different things.

Google say you can export all the information whereas Facebook don't really have provision for it...

Google they are talking about your contacts, this is the information you have entered and is automatically scraped into your account, in fact its actually one big mess until relatively recently I had 20 email contacts for most people and it was hard to clean up.

Facebook, well its your contact information but for everyone else, scraping this information out and putting it into another package? I am not sure I would want my private details copied out and scraped into someone elses package without my knowing... my email address alone is worrying...

One thing I should mention is that somehow my Phone is importing contact, pics & bits out of the phone, isn't this a step in the direction that Google is saying FB haven't taken?

Pics and other stuff, if you have uploaded it, then it is yours, you probably should have another copy of it! If it is of someone else this I personally don't want uploaded elsewhere with a different set of rules that I haven't set, I am not a privacy junkie but I do understand why people are, despite this I was very unhappy when Google published all the people I had been communicating with, I actually have an issue with trusting Google... 

I do fail to see Googles point on this one... not sure if anyone can explain it? Or maybe I am confused somewhere....

If I sound like I am a Facebook Fan boy,  I am not really - they have created an awesome platform but they won't let me change a Facebook company page to include the name "printing" or let me talk to a human being about it!!!