Specifically, the Social Engagement, Social Actions, and Social Pages reports, which were previously listed in the Audience section, can now be found in the Social section under Traffic Sources.

“Users now have access to both onsite behavior, the existing data, and off-site social activities of partners such as Google+, Digg, and Reddit among others,” says Linus Chou of Google’s Anaytics Team. “Below is a summary of how to access the data from the old reports in the new ones.”

“To access onsite activities use the Traffic Sources -> Social -> Social Plugins report,” explains Chou. “Here you see the social activities broken down by content. Selecting a specific page shows you the social activities by network for that page. Click the ‘Social Source and action’ tab highlighted in the screenshot below to see a breakdown of the itemized activities.”

Last week, Google launched a Google Analytics page on Google+. Here are a couple of the most recent updates:

Google Analytics   25 minutes ago All types of organizations, including non-profits, greatly benefit from effective use of analytics. Learn more about how +PBS and +SFMOMA (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) use analytics to improve their results. 3   0 Powered by socialditto

Google Analytics   23 hours ago "The big question remains however: What is the value of all that [social] activity? While reporting number of tweets and retweets are fine measures, you can go further in your measurement analysis and connect your social activity with your website activity." 3   0 Powered by socialditto

The first links to this blog post, and the second links to this Likeable article.

The company has hired some new engineers and sales staff. Engineers include: Joe Paley (previously of webOS applications at HP), Jonathan Medwig (from Natonal Research Council Canada) and Andrew Prasetyo Jo from Karma (which Facebook has acquired). In sales, Facebook picked up: Margaret Henkhaus and Sarafina Fornara.

Inside Facebook reports that the following positions have been removed from the company’s Careers page, presumably indicating that these positions have been filled:

Corporate Communications Manager, India (Hyderabad)
Partner Engineer – Mobile
Linguist
Head of Retail, Global Vertical MarketingBusiness Operations, Analyst
Compensation Consultant
Sr. Linux Systems Engineer
Developer Advocate, Mobile
Partner Engineer, Marketing Solutions (Sao Paulo)
Partner Engineer, Mobile
Partner Engineer, Mobile (Tokyo)
Client Partner (Hyderabad)
Technology Partner, Sales and Marketing
Associate, Business Operations, Mid-Market Sales
Analyst, User Operations, Turkish (Dublin)

There are still plenty of open positions. Facebook has 386 of them currently listed. These include:

Entity Quality Rater – Contract
Product Manager
Product Manager, Growth/Engagement/Mobile
Product Manager, Mobile
Product Manager, Platform
Product Manager, Platform (Seattle)
Manager, Data Warehouse Operations
MySQL Database Engineer
MySQL Database Engineer (Dublin)
Mobile User Interface Engineer
Advocacy Engineer
Developer Advocate
Developer Advocate (London)
Developer Advocate Manager
Developer Advocate, Manager (London)
Developer Support Engineer
Developer Support Engineer (Dublin)
Director of Partner Engineering
Manager, Developer Support Engineering (Dublin)
Partner Engineer, Games
Partner Engineer, Games (London)
Partner Engineer, Marketing Solutions
Partner Engineer, Mobile Games
Partner Engineer, Mobile, Native Applications
Partner Engineer, Payments (Games)
Partner Engineer, Platform
Technical Account Manager
Data Engineer, Product
Data Engineer
Sr. Linux Systems Engineer
Software Engineer, Database Engineering
Partner Engineer, Marketing Solutions (London)
Security Engineer
Software Engineer, Security Tools
3D Graphics / Visualization Engineer
3D Graphics / Visualization Engineer (Seattle)
Application Engineer, Infrastructure
Application Engineer, Infrastructure (New York)
Build Engineer
Data Scientist
Front End Engineer
Front End Software Engineer, Sales Tools
Git/Build Engineer
Manager, Infrastructure Engineering
Manager, Software Engineering
Platform Program Manager
Platform Support Engineer
Release Engineer
Software Engineer, Ads
Software Engineer, Ads (New York)
Software Engineer, Ads (Seattle)
Software Engineer, Ads Product (Seattle)
Software Engineer, Ads and Pages (New York)
Software Engineer, Compiler & Virtual Machine
Software Engineer, Data Center Tools
Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure Engineering
Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure Engineering (New York)
Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure Engineering (Seattle)
Software Engineer, Desktop Software (Seattle)
Software Engineer, Developer Platform
Software Engineer, Developer Platform (New York)
Software Engineer, Developer Tools
Software Engineer, Developer Tools (Seattle)
Software Engineer, Infrastructure Engineering
Software Engineer, Infrastructure Engineering (New York)
Software Engineer, Infrastructure Engineering (Seattle)
Software Engineer, Machine Learning
Software Engineer, Mail
Software Engineer, Mobile (Seattle)
Software Engineer, Mobile iOS
Software Engineer, Mobile, Android
Software Engineer, Network
Software Engineer, Network, SDN
Software Engineer, Pages (New York)
Software Engineer, Payments
Software Engineer, Payments (Seattle)
Software Engineer, Products
Software Engineer, Products (Malaysia)
Software Engineer, Products (Seattle)
Software Engineer, Sales/Mktg Tools
Software Engineer, Search Product
Software Engineer, Search Ranking
Software Engineer, Test Frameworks
Software Engineer, Tools Engineering
Software Engineer, Web Performance Engineering (New York)
Software Engineering Search Infrastructure
Web Performance Engineer
Manager, Production Engineering
Mobile Operations Engineer
Operations Engineer
Operations Engineer (Dublin)
Performance and Capacity Engineer
Production Engineer
System Software Engineer
Manager, Business Operations Data Analytics
Manager, Business Ops – Global Mid-Market Sales Quota – Setting & Forecasting
Data Center Business Analyst
Associate, Business Operations
Business Operations Manager, LATAM (Sao Paulo)
Business Operations Sr. Analyst
Director, Investor Relations
Finance Manager, Technology Infrastructure & Supply Chain
Manager, Business Operations
Manager, Corporate FP&A
Manager, Global Marketing Business Operations
Revenue Assurance Analyst
Revenue Manager, International (Dublin)
Administrative Assistant, Dublin – Contract
Executive Assistant (Hyderabad)
Operations Analyst
Lead Counsel, Network Infrastructure
Head Of Policy Japan
Head Of Policy Korea
Head of Policy (Italy)
Manager, Corporate Communications – Contract (Toronto)
Public Policy Manager (Sao Paulo)
Technology Partner, HR
Data Engineer
IT Manager
IT Operations Manager
IT Security Engineer
Sr. Linux Systems Engineer
Technology Partner, Billing and Revenue
Technology Partner, Hyperion
Technology Partner, Security
Technology Partner, Supply Chain/Logistics
Law Enforcement Response Team Lead
Physical Security Systems Designer, Data Centers
Security Engineer
Software Engineer, Security Tools
Oracle Application Developer
Software Engineer, Sales/Mktg Tools
Software Engineer, Tools Engineering
Business Analyst, Compensation
Global Immigration and Tax Manager
HR Specialist – Contract (Austin)
HR Specialist EMEA – Contract (Dublin)
People Services Rep
People Services Rep – Contract
Design Recruiter
Design Recruiter – Contract
Engineering Leadership Sourcer
Head of Technical Recruiting
Program Manager, Diversity Recruiting
Recruiter – Contract (Sao Paulo)
Recruiting Manager (Sao Paulo)
Technical Recruiter – Contract
Technical Recruiter – Contract (Dublin)
Technical Recruiter – Contract (London)
Technical Recruiter -Contract (Seattle)
University Recruiter (Contract)
University Recruiting Coordinator – Contract
Communication Designer
Content Strategist
Creative Producer
Market Researcher
Mobile User Interface Engineer
Product Design Manager
Product Designer
Quantitative Market Researcher
Software Engineer Research Tools, University – Contract
Software Engineer, Research Tools
UEX Researcher
UEX Researcher – Contract
Data Center Business Analyst
Data Center Energy Manager
Data Center Infrastructure Delivery Supervisor (Lulea)
Data Center Lead (Sweden)
Data Center Network Technician (North Carolina)
Data Center Network Technician (Virginia)
Data Center Technical Operations Manager (Sweden)
Data Center Technician (Ashburn)
Datacenter Optimization Engineer
Infrastructure Construction Manager
Infrastructure Operations Engineer
Network Infrastructure Acceptance Engineer
Site Operations Compliance Manager
Data Warehouse Engineer (Dublin)
Manager, Data Warehouse Operations
MySQL Database Engineer
MySQL Database Engineer (Dublin)
Storage Engineer
Hardware Systems Engineer
Hardware Systems Engineer (Austin)
Manufacturing Quality Engineer
Power Engineer
Power Engineer (Austin)
Storage Hardware Design Engineer
Storage Hardware Design Engineer (Austin)
Sustaining Engineer
Sustaining Engineer (Austin)
Systems Engineer
Hardware Engineer 120501
Operations Analyst
Technology Partner, Supply Chain/Logistics
Manager, Network Engineering, DNE
Network Capacity Planner
Network Engineer, Backbone
Network Engineer, Corp
Network Engineer, SW
Network Security Engineer
Data Analyst, Mail
Decision Support Analyst
Technical Program Coordinator
Technical Program Manager
Application Engineer, Infrastructure
Application Engineer, Infrastructure (New York)
Build Engineer
Git/Build Engineer
Manager, Infrastructure Engineering
Release Engineer
Site Integrity User Experience Engineer
Software Engineer, Compiler & Virtual Machine
Software Engineer, Data Center Tools
Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure Engineering
Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure Engineering (New York)
Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure Engineering (Seattle)
Software Engineer, Infrastructure Engineering
Software Engineer, Infrastructure Engineering (New York)
Software Engineer, Infrastructure Engineering (Seattle)
Software Engineer, Mail
Software Engineer, Network
Software Engineer, Network, SDN
Support Engineer
Manager, Network Services and Equipment Procurement
Sourcing Manager, Data Center Infrastructure Services
Sourcing Manager, Network Engineering
Sourcing Manager, OEM and ODM Servers Group
Manager, Production Engineering
Manager, Site Reliability Operations
Mobile Operations Engineer
Operations Engineer
Operations Engineer (Dublin)
Performance and Capacity Engineer
Production Engineer
System Software Engineer
SMB Marketing Associate – Contract (Singapore)
Manager, Business Operations Data Analytics
Manager, Business Ops – Global Mid-Market Sales Quota – Setting & Forecasting
Manager, Global Marketing Business Operations
Analytics Engineer
Data Engineer, Product
Manager, Analytics Engineering
Mobile Apps Analyst
Product Analyst
Quantitative Researcher
SEM Analyst
Operations Analyst
Analyst, Measurement Solutions (Chicago)
Analyst, Measurement Solutions (New York)
Associate, Custom Market Insights (New York)Attribution Lead, Custom Market Insights (Menlo Park)
Audience Researcher (London)
Custom Market Insights Lead (London)
Lead, Custom Market Insights (New York)
Lead, Measurement Solutions (Chicago)
Lead, Measurement Solutions (Menlo Park)
Lead, Measurement Solutions (New York)
Marketing Mix Science Specialist (Menlo Park)
Measurement Partnership Lead (London)
Measurement Solutions Group Lead (London)
Pricing and Yield Analyst, Singapore
Pricing and Yield Management Lead (London)
Principal, Monetization (Menlo Park)
Senior Analyst, Custom Market Insights (Dublin)
Senior Analyst, Custom Market Insights (London)
Senior Analyst, Custom Market Insights (Sao Paulo)
Senior Analyst, Custom Market Insights (Sydney)
Senior Analyst, Custom Market Insights, DACH, Benelux (Hamburg)
Data Scientist (Dublin)
Account Manager (Sao Paulo)
Account Manager, Global Marketing Solutions
Account Manager, Global Marketing Solutions (Austin)
Account Manager, Global Marketing Solutions, Gaming
Account Manager, Online Sales Operations, Australia (Singapore)
Account Manager, Online Sales Operations, India (Singapore)
Account Manager, Poland (London)
Account Manager, Tech/SocialCom (Dallas)
Account Manager, Tech/SocialCom (Los Angeles)
Partner Manager, Marketing API Program
Business Development Manager
Business Development Manager, Mobile
Director, Business Development
Partner Engineer, Games (London)
Manager, Mobile Partnerships (Tokyo)
Ad Operations Analyst, Global Marketing Solutions (Austin)
Media Solutions (Austin)
Media Solutions (Buenos Aires)
Media Solutions (Chicago)
Media Solutions (Menlo Park)
Media Solutions (New York)
Media Solutions (Sao Paulo)
Media Solutions (Toronto)
Associate, Global Marketing Solutions, SMB Growth (Austin)
Customer Solutions, Global Marketing Solutions, SMB Growth – Contract (Austin)
Director of Global SMB Growth
Director, Online Sales & Operations, South and Latin America (Sao Paulo)
Strategic Partner Development Manager, Gaming
Strategic Partner Manager, Gaming (Seoul)
Strategic Partner Manager, Gaming (Singapore)
Account Manager – German (Dublin)
Account Manager – Swedish (Dublin)
Account Manager, Danish (Dublin)
Account Manager, Norwegian (Dublin)
Client Partner, Danish (Dublin)
Client Partner, German (Dublin)
Client Partner, Norwegian (Dublin)
Client Partner, Swedish (Dublin)
Manager, API Marketing Dublin)
Manager, Italian Mid Market Sales (Dublin)
APAC Gaming Manager (Singapore)
Account Manager Online Sales Operations (Buenos Aires)
Client Partner (Buenos Aires)
Client Partner (Melbourne)
Client Partner (São Paulo)
Client Partner, Australia (Singapore)
Client Partner, India (Singapore)
Client Partner, Korea (Singapore)
Client Partner, LATAM (Miami)
Global Business Manager, APAC (Singapore)
Head of Sales Australia & New Zealand (Sydney)
Manager, Global Sales Outsourcing (Tokyo)
Manager, Sales & Account Management, Global Marketing Solutions (Buenos Aires)
Manager, Sales & Account Management, Global Marketing Solutions (Sao Paulo)
Sales Manager (Tokyo)
Client Partner (Austin)
Client Partner, Auto (Los Angeles)
Client Partner, Global Marketing Solutions, Gaming
Client Partner, Mobile (Chicago)
Client Partner, National Sales
Client Partner, Politics
Manager, Global Marketing Solutions, Gaming
Manager, National Sales, Global Marketing Solutions
Manager, National Sales, Global Marketing Solutions (Austin)
Partner Manager, Marketing API Program
Operational Data Analyst (Austin)
Manager, Data Warehouse Operations
Manager, Developer Support Engineering (Dublin)
Analyst, Global Sales Reporting (Hyderabad)
Associate, Global Marketing Solutions, SMB Growth (Austin)
Customer Solutions, Global Marketing Solutions, SMB Growth – Contract (Austin)
Lead, Small and Medium Business (Tokyo)
Principal, Global Marketing Solutions (Hyderabad)
Analyst, Ad Review Operations – Contractor (Austin)
Associate, Payment Operations (Dublin)Data Scientist (Dublin)
Manager, Risk Operations (Austin)
Analyst, Platform Operations (Dublin)
Analyst, Platform Operations (Dublin)
Analyst, Platform Operations (Hyderabad)
Manager, Payment Partnerships Operations
Manager, Platform Operations
Analyst, User Operations, Arabic (Dublin)
Analyst, User Operations, Brazilian Portuguese (Dublin)
Analyst, User Operations, Intellectual Property, French (Dublin)
Analyst, User Operations, LatAm Spanish (Dublin)
Manager, User Operations (Austin)
Manager, User Operations (Dublin)
Team Lead, User Operations (Dublin)
Marketing Manager – Contract (Hyderabad)
SMB Marketing Associate – Contract (Singapore)
Developer Advocate
Developer Advocate Manager
Director of Partner Engineering
Partner Engineer, Games
Partner Engineer, Marketing Solutions
Partner Engineer, Mobile Games
Partner Engineer, Mobile, Native Applications
Partner Engineer, Payments (Games)
Partner Engineer, Platform
Technical Account Manager
Manager, Global Marketing Business Operations
SEM Analyst
Event Marketing Manager 120502
Creative Strategist (New York)
Global Customer Marketing Pod Lead (New York)
Head of CPG/Beverage, Global Vertical Marketing
Market Development Manager, Platform (New York)
Marketing Analytics Associate
Marketing Analytics Manager
Platform Developer Marketing Manager
Platform Product Marketing Manager
Strategic Partner Development Manager, Gaming
Head of Retail, Global Vertical Marketing
Product Marketing Manager
Product Marketing Manager, Ads

They’ve certainly come a long way since the days when they were just a few dudes coding in a house (as portrayed in The Social Network).

Facebook has been incredibly busy since the IPO. The company has already announced more than one acquisition, including social and mobile gifting service Karma (which could have big implications for Facebook as an e-commerce platform, and Bolt Peters, a user experience, usability and design firm.

“Some users may currently be experiencing site issues on Chrome; our engineers are working on resolving this issue.”

The desktop version of Twitter appears to be experiencing some outages for some users.

There is currently now message about it on Twitter’s status blog. In fact, the last update was from May 20th.

While it appears to be working fine for me, some others in the office have also been experiencing outages, with the message: “no data received”. I am, however, having some trouble viewing my Twitter lists, as are others.

There’s no question that the Fail Whale makes a lot less appearances these days than in years past, but clearly Twitter is not completely issue-free.

When Search Plus Your World launched, it came with boxes on the right-hand side of some results pages. These were called “People and Pages” boxes. As Matt McGee at Search Engine Land points out, the new Knowledge Graph boxes (which CEO Larry Page calls “Knowledge Panels”) have replaced the “People and Pages” boxes.

Before, for example, when you searched for a term like “music,” Google would show the “People and Pages” box, highlighting specific musicians’ profiles on Google+. Now, they’ll show specific musicians, but rather encourage you to click, bringing up another search results page for that musician (complete with that musician’s own personal knowledge panel).

If you click on Chris Brown from there, you get something like:

So, that’s one way Google has toned down the Google+ in its search results. Of course, with this strategy, Google can point you to a page with an AdWords ad for an “ad related to Chris Brown”. Google+ still doesn’t have ads, so financially, this should work better for Google.

In March, Google made an algorithmic change, which seemed to favor Google+ profiles less as well. That changed was billed as:

Better indexing of profile pages. [launch codename "Prof-2"] This change improves the comprehensiveness of public profile pages in our index from more than two-hundred social sites.

When Search Plus Your World first launched, Twitter complained about Google favoring Google+ pages over more relevant Twitter pages. The aforementioned change seemed to have remedied that. Google+ profiles seemed to be ranking over more relevant profiles in less cases.

Another famous example was when Google was ranking Mark Zuckerberg’s Google+ profile over his Facebook profile. That was also no longer the case. However, the Knowledge Graph has thrust Zuck’s content free Google+ profile back into the spotlight:

If you click on the picture of Zuckerberg in the Knowledge Panel, it takes you to his Google+ profile, though the Facebook Profile still ranks over the Google+ profile in the organic results.

However, nine months deep into 2011, the Twitter Developers blog gave us a glimpse of the new and improved Twitter Analytics. In addition to a good looking layout, and what appeared to be tracking of not only your account but Tweet button stats and API access as well, it looked promising. The post stated that these analytics would be rolling out to everyone “within the next few weeks.” Hmm…2011 came and went and still no native Twitter Analytics.

Now here we are, five months into 2012 and the only word we have about Twitter analytics is that, “it’s taking longer than originally planned to ready for wider use.” Meanwhile both Facebook and YouTube have completely revamped their analytics platforms and delivered deeper insights into the activity on their platforms. This is officially ridiculous.

If history is any indicator, 2012 is going to be gone in the blink of an eye without a real analytics release as well. You would think with all of the acquisitions and rounds of funding Twitter has executed over the last two to three years that they would have found, acquired, or hired someone who could have delivered on this vitally essential feature of any modern social platform.

Why it’s taking Twitter so long to catch up to its rivals, I have no idea. However it’s no secret that Twitter needs to find more revenue streams, and this could be one. By charging a nominal fee to people and brands that care about the analytics, they could start bringing in multiple, small streams of revenue.

What’s so difficult about this? Other platforms, which are far more comprehensive than Twitter, have had at least basic analytics for years. This isn’t rocket science… is it?

So, even though there are no signs of Twitter ever getting their act together and giving us marketers a native analytics platform to work from, there are options available. Thanks to Twitter’s mostly open API, there are several sites out there that will help you monitor and analyze the progress of both you and your competitors’ Twitter efforts.

1. Manual Tracking
Setup a spreadsheet and track all of the metrics applicable to your brand. RT’s, Mentions, Followers, Following, Lists, etc. If it’s important, track it. Just be sure to update it weekly so that it doesn’t become an unmanageable amount of data.

Pro Tip: Updating weekly spreadsheets is a great task to delegate to interns to familiarize them with the platform and progress tracking.

2. Topsy
Track mentions of yourself and two competitors for up to 30 days and see the top links for the past 24 hours. If you’re prepared to do some manual tracking, you can use Topsy to look at domains, keywords, brand names, hashtags, etc. and track the results.

Pro Tip: Topsy is a great supplement to any manual spreadsheet data aggregation.

3. Twitter Counter
Compare up to three brands side by side. Under the free plan you can monitor Followers, Following, Tweets, and a mix of Tweets and Followers for the past three months. If you upgrade to a paid option, it includes Mentions, ReTweets, Your Retweet, and Your Mentions, and can go as far back as six months.

Pro Tip: This tool is great for researching competitors and tracking your own progress.

4. TweetStats
Get your Tweet Timeline and see what month, day, and time the account is most active. TweetStats collects information on daily tweets, hourly tweets, replies, RTs, Friend and Followers stats, and even see what interface(s) were used to tweet. It’s also possible to create a word cloud comprised of the most used terms and hashtags by the account.

Pro Tip: In addition to account stats, you can pull current stats on Twitter for wide trends and platform usage!

5. Xefer
Xefer will provide very simple analytics. It will show you some stats for around the last eight months or so, depending on the activity level of the account. It breaks tweets down into the time of day and day of the week so you can see the timing and volume of interaction. Also included on the page is a reply explorer so you can see high engagement users and view those conversations.

6. The Archivist
Look at Tweet volume, top users, tweet vs retweet, top words, top URLs, and platform. Each of these graphs can be expanded to show more detail. Below the graphs is a stream updated with mentions of the account. It’s a good way to get a quick snapshot of an account or topic and gage the relative health of the account.

7. MentionMap
See who and what a user mentions the most and follow the trail to see how topics and people are connected. You can map the activity of your account and the hashtags associated with campaigns or promotions.

8. TwentyFeet
Track a variety of details about your Twitter account and even competitors. TwentyFeet uses publicly available data and private data (after you authorize it) to find reputation indicators, influence indicators, conversations, following analysis, and more.

Pro Tip: You can also add Facebook, YouTube, Bit.ly, MySpace, and Google Analytics accounts to be tracked.

9. Export.ly
Export.ly serves up a polished report that you can export to Excel or Powerpoint. It’s free with a Tweet so long as the account you’re looking at is under 10,000 followers. Above that you’ll need a Simply Measured account to access the report. You can also get detailed reports for Facebook and Google Analytics.

Pro Tip: Exporting the report to Excel makes it easy to tailor the presentation with your own company colors and deliver a great looking report.

10. SMMS analytics
Many SMMS platforms (Social Media Management Systems) have analytics built into them. Check out platforms like Hootsuite, Shoutlet, Sprout Social, Argyle, and others. Not only do they allow you to interact and post directly from the platforms, but will track your progress and allow you to pull reports from their platforms.

A slide show available from Slideshare.net, featuring research by ABLE social media marketing has provided us with some interesting details about how prominent social marketing has become in the wine industry and the amazing results the efforts have yielded.

To get things rolling take a look a this chart revealing how many wineries are on Twitter and Facebook. The study focused on France and the United States, but I am limiting my discussion to the United States only for now.

Here’s the same information for Fickr and YouTube:

Half of the wineries form the survey have more than 500 fans on Facebook and well over a third have at least 500 followers on Twitter. The survey creators wondered what contributed to wineries having many fans. The answer? Almost half of them have dedicated marketing managers that create and promote advertising on social media platforms.

About 30% are using Facebook ads for promotion and 47% of them say the ads actually do attract business. 28% of the wineries report that Twitter helped draw in some new business. Both platforms scored in the mid 60% range for engaging customers in a winery brand. Facebook ads resulted in people visiting the winery in 58% of cases and Twitter did the same in 45% of the cases.

So we can see that social media is having a dramatic impact on wine drinkers. Almost three quarters of wineries say they plan to have more activity on social media platforms and the half that currently has no presence on Facebook says they do plan on breaking into social media in 2012.

Photos are a big part of social media, and one message that came through loud and clear based on reports from the conference, is that they’re a big part of Google’s social strategy.

“Photos are the lifeblood of our service,” Google VP of Product Bradley Horowitz is quoted as saying. “We wanted to make the content the hero.”

And why not? Photos have certainly been huge for Facebook. It’s harder to leave a social network when you have all of your photos on it. It’s not impossible, but it takes more effort to do so.

I’m sure you see plenty of photos flowing through your Facebook News Feed on a daily basis. Many are probably from Instagram, which Facebook is paying $1 billion to acquire, by the way. That, in and of itself, shows how important photography is to social media corporate strategy.

Photography has been a big part of Google+ since it launched. Photographers quickly flocked to the service, sharing all kinds of photos, and making user streams more interesting than they would have been otherwise. Google+ has handled photos so well, that Facebook even made its own photo viewer more like Google’s.

The Instant Upload feature of Google+ has certainly been a highlight. Every time you take a picture with your phone, it goes to your Google+ account. No need to worry about uploading it manually (that is if you enable the feature), and of course, this comes with built in privacy control. Just because you take the picture, and it’s uploaded, doesn’t mean it will be shared.

Google is not new to photography, of course. Google’s had Picasa and Picasa Web albums for years, which gained significant popularity on their own. After Google+ emerged, Picasa Web Albums and Google+ photos merged. While you can still go to the Picasa Web Albums site, and access photos, it’s all integrated with Google+ if you’re a user.

Google Glass (or Project Glass), even in its early stages, has already been known to take pictures, further highlighting how much photography is part of Google’s strategy, even in new developmental products.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin, by the way, showed up at the event (wearing Google Glasses):

Google+ Photographer's Conference   6 minutes ago How do you know when your G+ Conference is a hit? When +Sergey Brin shows up to lead a photo walk. #GplusPC 12   3 Powered by socialditto

It’s not the first time he’s been spotted wearing them. Co-founder Larry Page was wearing them at the Zeitgeist conference this week too, for that matter.

Google has even managed to integrate Google+ photography into its core search product. Earlier this year, Google launched Search Plus Your World, which personalizes your results, largely based on Google+ connections and content (though other factors are at play as well). Image search is part of that.

Because of that, I can search for “danzig” and get pictures of my dog (named Danzig), in addition to the aging rock star.

This is actually one of the areas where Search Plus Your World shines.

The Verge interviewed Horowitz at the event, and he is quoted as saying, “This isn’t just about one product, it’s about Chrome and Android and Search and Ads and YouTube and Gmail and all that Google is. It’s a deepening of the relationship between the user and Google that will create services in the user’s service.”

Few things are more deeply personal than photographs, so it makes a lot of sense that this would be at the core of Google’s strategy. Horowitz came from Flickr, so that’s another reason it’s not surprising. The Verge has another pretty interesting quote from him:

If we’re working from fulfilling the interests of the photographers backwards, this is something we’ve heard. [...] Also, just to be clear, I think it’s something Google is good at. We work with publishers worldwide to help them monetize their content. This is not a new endeavor for us, it’s what we do. We don’t think there’s an allergy towards helping photographers be successful with that.

Perhaps we’ll see some new, interesting ways for photographers to monetize their work using Google in the future.

Google’s Chris Cabot, who participated in a panel at the conference, posted a video discussion around Google+ photos tips and tricks:

Chris Chabot   3 hours ago Google+ Photos Tips & Tricks

Yesterday evening +Brian Rose, +Vincent Mo, +Aubrey Gates and I did a panel at the +Google+ Photographer's Conference where we shared some of our stories, favorite tips and tricks for Google+ photos, and answered questions that we got here on Google+ and from the audience.

So if you want to pick up a few useful tips and hear a few fun stories make sure to watch the video of the session!

fast forward to about the 2:00 mark to get to the start of the session 23   1 Powered by socialditto

A new study from The Search Agency peels back the skin of the social media onion to find out what places people have designated as their online playgrounds and what places people try to church it up and keep it professional. Some of the results won’t come as any surprise to you, such as Reddit being the place where people go to get their jollies whereas LinkedIn tends to be the professional niche of the net. See, not so surprising, is it? However, that’s merely the first layer of the big old Vidalia internet; the good stuff is many layers deeper.

For instance, the ladyfolk of the internet, of whom there are tons, haven’t really taken so much to Google+. Search Agency found that there’s over twice as many guys +1′ing on the social network than there are women. More, Google+ is also where the students and software engineers tend to hang about.

As for referral traffic driven through social media sites, Pinterest is like a giant sperm whale gobbling up a mouthful of squid because it drives more referral traffic than Google+, LinkedIn, and YouTube combined. Facebook, of course, is the king of referral traffic, but StumbleUpon, which has been quietly indexed as a place people like to go for some good times, is the second highest source of referral traffic after Facebook.

The data collected by Search Agency provides some good direction if you’re looking to market to a particular niche of people. Sure, Facebook and Twitter provide an easy outlet to fire a scattershot of content across a wide swath of people, but if you’re interested in fine-tuning your aim, you might want to focus on a site like Pinterest or Google+, depending on what you’re target audience is.

“By taking a closer look at the dominant audiences on popular platforms, we thought we could show a clearer vision of where businesses should focus their social media strategy on based on each site’s best-selling points,” said David Carrillo, social media manager at The Search Agency. “As marketers, we understand the importance of sewing our efforts in the most effective places.”

So have a look and see if you see yourself reflected in any of the social media profiles that Search Agency has compiled. Groups of people in the physical world always self-segregate into cliques, so why should the internet that all of these people from the physical world reflect anything different?

Social Sharing Button Playground brought to you byThe Search Agency

Virtue is designed to let marketers manages social marketing campaigns across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google+ from one place.

Oracle wrote in a blog post:

The proliferation of social media has changed the way that organizations and consumers interact. Vitrue’s social marketing platform helps organizations enhance their social marketing efforts to the next level of social engagement by giving brands the ability to scale across multiple social networks, target messages from global to local, create unique and consistent brand experiences, and publish content that engages fans and drives leads.

Together, Oracle and Vitrue plan to enable a unified social experience across customer interactions, resulting in meaningful customer engagements with consistent brand experiences across all channels and media; improved return on investment for social sales and marketing campaigns across paid, owned and social media; and enhanced customer service through real-time responsiveness and high touch engagement.

“The world’s greatest brands have been built by creating meaningful relationships between organizations and their customers,” said Virtue CEO Reggie Bradford. “As a part of Oracle, we can help our customers ensure that consistent high-touch social engagement is delivered across marketing, sales and service interactions.”

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, though TechCrunch indicates the price is $300 million. The deal is expected to close this summer. In the meantime, the two companies will continue to operate independently.

This video shows what it does:

While the product launch is interesting itself (it has even raised a $4.2 million seed round of funding), TechCrunch’s Josh Constine reports that Facebook expressed interest in a possible acquisition of the company at one point. There has been plenty of speculation that Facebook could get into the search game, and compete more directly with the likes of Google (not to mention the speculation around a potential AdSense-like ad network), and this will surely only fuel such speculation.

Constine writes, “Facebook was so impressed with how Ark repurposed its data that the social network loosely discussed the possibility of buying the startup or at least acq-hiring its founders. There was no offer extended, but Riley [co-founder, Patrick] tells me, ‘We didn’t even take it that far. We weren’t interested. We wanted to build something bigger.’”

Let’s not forget that Facebook was recently reported to have been working on an improved search engine. This may come as an internal search engine, but with over 900 million users, why would it have to be external to compete with Google? Let’s not forget that many Google users are using the search engine while signed in too.

Ark itself, in addition to just letting you search for people, is planning on letting you search your own social data, similar to services like Wajam or Greplin, according to Constine. The service is currently open to sign ups until TechCrunch Disrupt ends on Wednesday.

On a side note, it’s interesting that Ark has a Penguin for a logo, considering the connotation this bird carries in the search industry.