No, I’m not talking about Google being talked up in the news, blogosphere, or twittersphere.  Although I do think Google’s new Buzz concept is newsworthy.  I haven’t really caught any “little b“ buzz about it except within ”big B“ Buzz itself (although there are some news articles to be found about it).  Buzz is Google’s answer to Twitter and Facebook’s news feed.  I’m a longtime GMail user, so I saw it when it rolled out to most users yesterday.  I guess I did see one tweet and one GChat status about it when it apparently soft launched on Tuesday, which had me investigating in advance.

It was interesting yesterday to see people experimenting and wondering what it was all about, through the Buzz interface itself.  It’s apparently not totally intuitive for everyone.  I generally like it and get it though, and I’m not the only one.  There was a lot of people posing questions or concerns through Buzz status updates, and other folk responding back about how they thought things worked and made sense.

So what’s it all about?  Well, there are basic status updates, like Twitter or Facebook.  You can also import your Twitter feed, blog feeds (the first post in the screenshot below is from my blog), and feeds from other sites like Flickr.  Anything that includes an attached or linked photo or video gets it automatically turned into a thumbnail that you can then see larger, inside the page, in a really nice way.  If you clicked the photo in the screenshot below in Buzz, it would expand quickly to fill the browser screen, dismissible with a click.

As a GMail user, you automatically get set up to follow the people you chat or exchange emails with the most.  So you will see all their updates, can comment on them, and will see their comments on your updates and those of others you both follow.  There is then a really nice collapsing organization of related things that GMail users will recognize and appreciate from their email interface.  See how the comments on my blog post above get collapsed.  And then below that, two successive posts from one person get collapsed as well.

You can decide whether your external feeds (like from Twitter or a blog) and individual updates are public, or only go to a particular subset of your contacts.  It is indeed a little complicated.  There are a lot of moving parts.  But I think generally they make it easy to grasp, or at least to have someone else explain easily if you wonder ”out loud“ about it on Buzz itself.  Which as I mentioned I have seen multiple cases of already.

Having played around with it for a few days,  I only see a few significant problems.  One is that the pulling in of external feeds like blogs needs a little tweaking.  When I initially set it up, it pulled my latest blog post as if I had just posted it.  But it was from the day before, and so the content was slightly confusing.  Then I saw it later randomly pull a post from the day before that.  So there’s some issues to be tweaked there.

The other problem is that only GMail users get to use this.  For reasons I won’t speculate on here, most of my friends are gmail users.  So that’s cool for me.  But I think it would be hard to convince a non-GMail user to join just for Buzz.  It’s the same with GChat.  I guess Google is adding more things like this in the hopes that more people will have critical mass peer groups that are all users.  But it will never be universal.  I’m not sure how they get around that.

One big bonus however that comes with anything Google is search.  I can now search for keywords in GMail, and have emails, chats, and buzz posts come back, quickly and easily.  The paranoid will of course speculate about how Google is now increasing its share of your information that it owns, and can serve ads based on.

If someone walks into your store with a problem, you fix it immediately. If a customer calls you on the phone, you talk to them (hopefully) immediately. But what if someone posts something negative about you on Twitter or to an Internet Forum? What then?

Real time search allows you to monitor those types of interactions, complaints, and complements. It’s still your responsibility to respond, but the time needed to find such messages has been greatly reduced.

The lines between marketing and customer service are blurring. Quickly responding to someone on their own turf in a respectful manner has potential not only to set them straight, but also increase the likelihood they will tell other people about your remarkable effort to make it right. And your public response will serve as a permanent record for anyone else who sees the comment.

Twitter is currently the primary source of real time content, but expect others to get on board quickly. Twitter’s success has driven the major search engines to add real time search features to their products. But Twitter still manages the majority of real time traffic, so you can use Twitter’s built-in search engine as a place to hear what people are saying about you. Otherwise, expect popular online listening tools to start accommodating real time search in the near future.

This certainly won’t pre-empt any traditional forms of customer service, but people are out there talking about you online one way or another. You’ll be better off if you’re aware of it, since it’s not just going to go away on it’s own. At the end of the day, you should view this as an opportunity to serve people better.

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Real time search is getting to be a quite the buzzphrase in recent months. But what is it really?  The simplest and most familiar example is Twitter’s search feature, which provides almost instantaneous access to anyone’s tweets.  But given the recent implementations by the major search players, Google and Microsoft’s Bing, there appears to be some disagreement on the finer points. This article by Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land analyzes the concept in a really nice way that I tend to agree with. It also delves into a lot of other specialized tools for real time search, but I’ll stick to the big names here (Twitter, Google, and Bing). Sullivan maintains that real time search is only truly “real time” when its sources come from microblogging services that provide a real time feed of the activity on their networks. For the most part right now, that means Twitter. There is just no single place for search engines to constantly look for updates from news sites or long-format blogs. So they have to depend on being alerted to updates by such sites, or actively crawling around the entire internet looking for new content. Neither of which is reliably real time in the up-to-the-second way that Twitter is.

Twitter of course has its own search feature. Bing and Google’s real time search features have access to what’s known as the Twitter “firehose,” which is the live stream of all tweets that Twitter is providing to certain third party services like those search engines. For now, Twitter’s own search feature appears to provide the fastest updates of new tweets. Google and Bing seem to have a bit of a lag, and this is possibly due to the fact that they are preprocessing tweets in an attempt to filter out duplicates and spam. As far as I can gather, Twitter’s search does not do any filtering. And spam can be a real problem. Among many other nefarious strategies, people can set up programs that watch for trending topics on Twitter, then make them automatically post fake tweets about those topics. These tweets can have disguised links to sites that may download malicious software to your computer. And despite Bing and Google’s efforts to filter out spam, it will always be a bit of a cat and mouse game, and is definitely not currently perfect.

Bing and Google have quite different approaches to real time search, as I hinted at above. Bing seems to take more of a purist approach, separating their Twitter search feature entirely from regular web search. Bing currently also only gets its real time results from the Twitter firehose. Google on the other hand will automatically include real time search results for keywords that have a lot of recent activity. And beyond that, they mix in all kinds of content in that automatic view, which they call “Latest Results”. You will likely see tweets there, along with news and blog results, or even any old web page with new content that Google recently became aware of. However, you can filter down to just “Updates” which for now means Twitter and a few other similar microblogging services like FriendFeed. See the article by our Tom Lynch for more detail on how that works.

Google and Bing both recently made deals to gain access to Facebook updates. It is unclear how Microsoft will integrate them into their real time search feature, since it will certainly have to be rebranded from “Bing Twitter” to something else more generic. Google’s future integration of Facebook updates seems more natural. But interestingly, their deal with Facebook only gives them access to updates from Facebook “Pages,” not individual personal accounts. Microsoft’s deal will allow them to include any Facebook updates marked as visible to “Everyone,” which seems a clear advantage.

As you can tell, this is quite an evolving field. Google and Microsoft will continue their arms race, and other dark horse innovators will crop up on the sidelines. So look for more interesting developments to come.

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To see it in action put in a Google search for: Coke, or Ford, or even Elvis Presley Lives. Then click “show options”, a new series of “options” will populate the left rail. Scroll down to “Any Time”, and click “Latest”.  A new page will load of all the latest stuff. And if it’s hot it you will start to see the news scroll by. And when aren’t Elvis sightings hot news!?

From an SEO perspective it’s a way to watch the conversation on Google and participate in real time. Twitter is probably the fastest way to get into the stream and make some noise if you choose.

Google put together a video on the new search feature. If you want more click the start button on the embedded video below.

Happy Birthday Elvis!

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Google knows what we searched for, and if we were we naughty or nice.  Check out Google Zeitgeist 2009.

The top searched public figures in 2009 that made the headlines and probably didn’t like the news:

IE: Naughty

1. bernie madoff
2. mark sanford
3. rod blagojevich
4. john edwards
5. silvio berlusconi
6. r allen stanford
7. tom daschle
8. john ensign
9. bill richardson
10. charles rangel

IE: Nice

One of the fastest rising 2009 Google mobile search terms: CTA Bus Tracker. Makes sense that it’s starting to get colder here in Chicago and patience for a late bus is not the same. What a cool tool to provide some hope to the weary, frozen traveler. Yes my bus is in fact 10 minutes behind schedule and I can at least see where that is on the map in real time. If I leave three minutes from now, I can still make the bus and minimize my frostbite. Excellent.

IE: Nicer

Better news, even a long wait on New Years Eve and early New Years Day is worth it. The CTA is offering penny rides again.

“The Chicago Transit Authority will continue its tradition of offering penny rides on New Year’s Eve beginning at 8 p.m. on Wednesday, December 31 until 6 a.m. Thursday, January 1 (New Year’s Day).”

Full article available here: CTA Ride For a Penny

So take the bus, do some Google Zeitgeist on the way to the party for some interesting 2009 trivia, use the CTA Bus Tracker to know “exactly” when to leave the party, and have a happy and safe new year!

Before we start, a quick note about Wordpress.COM verses Wordpress.ORG – there is a big difference:

Wordpress.com benefits:

• Free, hosted service
• Easiest, fastest, cheapest way to set up a blog
• Ideal for an individual wanting to try out non-monetized blogging

Wordpress.com drawbacks:

• Very limited customization options – You must upgrade to a paid subscription even to change the font colors
• Even with paid subscription, customization is limited
• URL will always display as http://yourblog.wordpress.com
• Limited Widgets and no plugins

To get branded, custom templates and to take advantage of all the amazing, free Wordpress plugins out there, you need to set up a Wordpress.org blog – this requires some programing skills and access to FTP. For anyone wanting to start a blog for their business, we suggest contacting a professional web company (like Astek!) who can make sure your blog set up is done right.

Ok, now that that is cleared up, here are Katie’s 8 easy tips for a strong start to a personal blog on Wordpress.com:

1. Set up a blog and choose a theme.
   • Follow the instructions at http://wordpress.com/
     
2. Change the subtitle
   • Where to find it: Settings
   • (Bonus Points: use keywords that relate to your blog topic in your subtitle for a bit of SEO help)
3. Make sure your “Display Name” is how you’d like your name to display.
   • Where to find it: Users, select yourself
   • Some people prefer to use a “handle” to add a layer of privacy, but if you are trying to build content to help your ego Google, you should consider using your real name.
4. Customize your sidebar.
   • Where to find it: Appearance / Widgets
   • When you’re in there you’ll see a sidebar on the right side. Click the down arrows on the widget bar to open a widget so you can customize or remove it. To add a widget, drag the bar from the center list and drop it in the sidebar where you’d like to see it – you can drag the bars up or down to reorder the items in your sidebar. Here are my suggested sidebar items, but play with the widgets to see if there’s more you’d like to include:
     • Remove the Blogroll (unless you are ready to populate it with links to other, related websites)
     • Remove Meta items
     • Add a “Text” section right at the top and put a sentence or two telling your readers what your blog is about.
     • Add Blog Subscriptions and RSS feeds so people can follow your blog via email or on an RSS feed reader. This is very important as this is how people gain a following for their blog.
     • You can keep “Archives”, but I usually replace it with “Recent Posts”
     • Make sure Search is somewhere in your sidebar

     

5. Add 5-10 categories.
   • You can do this under Posts/Categories. Once you’ve added some, categorize all your posts (a post can have more than one category), un-check the “uncategorized” category on any post you’ve already put up and then go back and erase “uncategorized” as a category. You can always add or change categories later so don’t fret too much. If you’d rather, you can just remove categories from your sidebar all together, though “uncategorized” will still show up as a label on all your posts, which is lame.
6. Use Photos & Videos.
   • Not strictly necessary, but it can help give your blog a lot more “pop”. Get a subscription to a cheap stock photo site like istockphoto.com and choose a fun pic to go with each posting.
7. Download Journaling Software.
   • Again, not strictly necessary, but software like MacJournal (or WinJournal if you’re on a PC) will make your life a LOT easier and save you tons of time. It’s $40, but completely worth it – especially if you are going to be writing for multiple blogs. You can download it and set it up in just a few minutes. It’s a much more user-friendly writing environment than Wordpress, you can drag and drop and resize photos right in your post and then you just click one button and it posts automatically to Wordpress, uploads all your photos without you having to do anything.
8. When someone comments on your blog…
   • If you know them personally, resist the urge to respond to them in a personal email. An active discussion in the comments section is a sign of a healthy blog. Response by personal email should be reserved for conflict resolution and the exchange of personal or sensitive information (personal email addresses, phone numbers, etc).
   • If you are replying directly to something someone said in a comment, be sure to “reply” to that comment specifically – you should see the option to “reply” on the same page you “approve” comments.  Everyone will see your reply, but it will be directly under the comment you’re replying to and indented slightly:
   • Example:
     

My prediction – Facebook is about to put some heavy restrictions on Event invitations.

I don’t know about you, but I get about 6-10 invites a day – about 90% of them the equivalent of spam or non-events (“You are invited to the event Donate to my favorite charity” or my personal favorite… “I lost my phone so send me your phone number! Will you attend this event? Yes/No/Maybe”). This is a complaint about Facebook I am hearing more and more.

Facebook grew to its #1 status and has held onto it for years by not falling victim to the mistakes of MySpace and others – it did not become the playground for spammers and weirdos. Almost every post in my news feed these days is stuff I care about – Since the last major up date to the News Feed I hardly even see those annoying quizzes anymore. The same cannot be said for the “invitations” I receive to “events.”

The problem is that individuals and Fan Pages have figured out that event invites are one of the only ways to get a message right to the inbox your entire friend (or fan) list. Regular messages have restrictions of 20 carbon copies. It’s not unusual for FB users to have hundreds of friends. This is resulting in people (myself included) “inviting” people to non-events just as a way to send a mass email to all your Facebook friends.

Too much abuse of this “privilege” and Facebook is going to do what it has always done, restrict, filter or otherwise stop those who attempt to game the system – most likely without warning. And even if it makes my job as a Social Media marketer a little more difficult, I can’t say that I will be sorry to see them do it. Making changes like that is what keeps Facebook a vibrant social networking site and fertile social media marketing ground!

• Facebook will be removing regional networks
• Facebook will allow you to set privacy settings on “each individual piece of content you create or upload”
• “In the next couple of weeks” you’ll be prompted to review and update your privacy settings.

Whether you use Facebook for business or strictly limit your “friends,” privacy settings are an important part of managing your online reputation. When you see the prompt from Facebook to “review and update” your privacy settings, take the time to consider how your Facebook content will impact your professional reputation and adjust your privacy settings to appropriately protect or promote yourself.

Mark’s letter can be found here: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=190423927130