How Google Buzz Hijacks Your Google Profile

Google Profiles existed long before the launch of Google Buzz earlier this month. But since that time, Google Buzz has hijacked Google Profiles in a way unmatched by any other Google product. That’s bad news for those who want to fully opt-out of Google Buzz. Doing so kills your Google Profile. It’s also bad news [...]

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The 3 Biggest Risks You Take With Social Networking Profiles

Online reputation management isn’t always about big corporate brands. In fact, half of my book Radically Transparent is dedicated to building and managing personal reputations.

Just in case you’re not convinced that you need to worry about your personal reputation online, you might want to check out the interview I did with WCCO Radio:

Listen to the Radio Interview

In it I discuss three important themes:

1. How your social networking profiles can hurt your career and job hunting.
2. How debt collectors are tracking people down via social networks.
3. How scammers and thieves are praying on the naive.

If you’re not an audio person, the same advice was recently published on Yahoo Finance via an interview I did with Bankrate.com.

Drop a comment with any case studies or other risks you can think of. Thanks!

How Newspapers Use Twitter

2009 cannot be over quick enough for the newspaper business. The year was full of bad news, followed by worse news, which in some cases, ended in business ending news. The prognosis for the future is not real rosy either so what can the reeling industry do? One thing is to erect pay walls but we’ve heard enough on that one. One thing that the industry can do is embrace social media and in particular, Twitter, to get the attention of the digitally inclined.

The Bivings Report decided to do conduct an imperfect study of the use of Twitter by the newspaper industry. To their credit The Bivings Report themselves noted that the study was imperfect which shows some considerable integrity and makes their findings of greater interest to someone like myself. Their blog states:

…..we decided to closely analyze 300 profiles from the top 100 newspapers in the country as a way of getting a sense, in aggregate, of how the media is utilizing Twitter. Among the things we look at in the study are whether newspapers link to their Twitter accounts from their website, how often and the manner in which the accounts are updated and whether newspapers are using their Twitter profiles to interact with readers or to simply promote their site content. While the study isn’t perfect, the results provide a compelling jumping-off point for additional thought and discussion.

So the results are just that: thought provoking. Here is a sample.

• Only 62% of the newspapers included links to at least one of their accounts from their website – A head scratcher for sure. Why wouldn’t you promote your use of Twitter?

• 56% of newspapers maintained a directory of their Twitter accounts on their website – Another curious thing since most major newspapers can have several accounts for individual reporters etc. Wouldn’t it make sense to make it easy t find these people. The study noted that the LA Times does a nice job of this.

• The average account has 3,447 followers if you removed 4 statistical outliers who had over 100,000 followers. Include the outliers and the average jumps to over 17,000 per account. Gotta love statistics!

• The Twitter profiles of the newspapers send out an average of 11 tweets per day. Tweet frequency varies from 1.1 (The Boston Globe’s Big Picture, The Denver Post’s Woody Paige, and The Akron Beacon Journal) to 95.5 tweets/day (The Boston Herald).

• 51% of Twitter accounts were updated primarily through Twitter’s web interface.

The findings also showed that the interactivity of the newspaper Twitter users was not very high but it also was not completely void. The fear of most is that the newspapers were simply automating tweets but that didn’t appear to be the case.

So this certainly shows some areas of hope for newspapers since they seem to be adopting Twitter as a resource to reach potential readers. It also shows that there is a ways to go before the full impact of a service like Twitter may be felt in the newspaper industry.

Do you follow any newspapers? Do you care to do so if you are not currently? What would be your expectation of a newspaper’s Twitter feed? Give us your opinions as quickly as possible so we can put the print edition of Marketing Pilgrim to bed. Oh that’s right, we don’t do that. Sorry.

Twitter Integrates into Google Friend Connect

That’s right—Twitter is integrating more with yet another popular search engine. Yeah, it wasn’t enough to promise quasi-real-time results from Twitter in Google results, now Google has convinced Twitter to join Friend Connect. Now your Twitter login will work on any Google Friend Connect site.

It’s been a year since Twitter joined Friend Connect, but that initial membership meant only that site followers could use their Twitter profiles and avatars on GFC sites they joined. Now, however, the integration is more complete, integrating Twitter into websites more fully.

For site owners, the integration works both ways—you can promote your site easily on Twitter and your Twitter profile on your site and among your Friend Connect Followers. You can invite your Twitter followers to visit and join your site, and you can invite your Friend Connect Followers to follow you on Twitter. Friend Connect Followers can also promote your site on Twitter, either posts, pages or comments on the site—and those tweets are broadcast to your followers, too.

Perhaps best of all, if you’re already using Google Friend Connect, you don’t have to do anything to enable the new Twitter features—as Google says in their explanatory video, “It just works.” Overall, it does seem like an easy way to integrate Twitter into your site and make sure your tweeting users can participate and integrate that into the discussion. That alone is a pretty attractive feature.

What do you think? Would you add Google Friend Connect for the Twitter integration? How do you integrate Twitter into your site or blog?

Consumers Sharing Brand Opinions on Social Networks

Performics reports that Twitter may be the place to get your brand mentioned if you want social networkers’ attention, according to MediaPost. Nearly half (48%) of those who saw a brand mentioned on Twitter turned to a search engine to research that brand. Other social networks lagged far behind, with 34% researching.

However, the study of 3000 active social networkers showed that 70% were on Facebook, and 22% were on Twitter. So of those respondents, 32 researched a brand from Twitter, while Facebook sent 714 running to their search engine of choice.

30% of those surveyed admitted they’ve learned about a product, service or brand from a social network (considerably more than the <5% Knowledge Networks reported in May.)

MediaPost says:

The study found that 44% of people have recommended a product on Twitter, and 39% have discussed a product on Twitter. Facebook skewed a bit higher. Forty-six percent of respondents say they would talk about or recommend a product on Facebook.

Online coupons are the best received brand/product messages. However, most of the findings reinforce the need for companies to maintain presences not only on social networks, but also in search engine results.

Interestingly, companies seem to be more interested in where the consumers are rather than where they see the highest percentage of brand interest. MediaPost reports in another story that

Some 83% of consumer-facing companies maintain a presence on Facebook, compared to 45% on Twitter. Usage was more evenly split among business-to-business companies, with roughly three-quarters of firms maintaining profiles on both services.

What do you think? Is it more important for a business to be where more people are or more brand research? Have you researched brands mentioned on social networks?

Facebook’s Facelift (and Changes for Groups)

As we’ve heard before, Facebook is gearing up for yet another redesign. As we saw in leaked screenshots two weeks ago, Facebook is going to start sorting news feeds by Recent Activity and Top News stories (the ones with the most comments or likes). That change is supposed to also reduce load time, and relegates the Publisher box to an “Update Status” button.

So the new news in the latest leaks: Mashable has a four-page PDF from Facebook to its advertisers that outlines the changes they’ve made, and why. In addition to the aforementioned changes to the news feed, they’re adding back a lot of the friend activity information that was filtered out after the last redesign.

Facebook redesigns are notoriously unpopular. Of course, most people resist change, and it’s tough to please hundreds of millions of people.

Other important changes come from the Engagement ads and fan pages. As the PDF for advertisers explains, Facebook is working to help its advertisers receive good placement, so they’re adding fanning, RSVPs for events and virtual gifts to the news feed. (I know, just what you were waiting for.)

This will move these events out of the right-hand column, which would also make ads placed there more prominent.

FB says that their new pages will increase fan signups:

The opportunity to acquire Fans increases with this new home page design. This is due to several reasons including the migration of Fan stories into the center stream, and the increase in “Suggestions” from one to two connections.

They’re also premiering new layouts for Groups (and this one has already rolled out). In a blog post Monday, Facebook said that they’re revamping Groups pages to make them more like profiles and fan pages, and to surface more info to make it easier for members to keep up with group activities. You can also sort your news feed to show only stories from your groups (which isn’t a new feature, I believe, just a reminder).

In all, this “redesign” is more of a tweak to the last one. While no change will ever be well-received 100% by a group as big as FB’s user base, the “less is more” approach will probably lead to less opposition.

What do you think? Will this redesign go over well? Will there be as much protest this time around?

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Grab the Shoehorn! Google Adds Forum Posts to Crowded Search Results

Give it another couple of years and no one will remember the phrase "ten blue links"–especially if Google has its way.

The Google search results page is already looking cluttered these days–box results, news item, videos, book results, profiles–now Google wants to add deep links to forum posts to the crowded mix.

This new addition to Google search results applies to sites that tend to have a large number of posts on a specific topic. When several different discussions on a site are relevant to your query, we indent them under the primary result and include the date of each post.

Here’s an example of how it will look:

Now, I know that Google doesn’t roll out anything that adds clutter to its streamlined design, unless it has been rigorously tested and proved valuable, but I wonder just how much more Google can cram in. How much more content can it add to search results before it goes too far–and gives us so many options that we get overwhelmed?

80% of Social Media is About ME

Yes!! Just last week I was lamenting that everything is all about you—but it turns out that now it’s all about me! Or at least when it comes to social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, according to Rutgers University researchers Mor Naaman and Jeffrey Boase (and Mashable).

After analyzing 3000 tweets from >350 tweeple, the study found that there were two basic types of Twitter users: informers and “meformers”—people who broadcast information centered around themselves, and their thoughts, activities and location. Only 20% of users turned out to be informers—leaving 80% as “meformers.”

Okay, so maybe this really isn’t surprising—40% of Twitter messages answer the microblogging service’s question in the box at the top of the page: what are you doing? Perhaps most interesting is their comparison of the two categories’ profiles on Twitter:

Interesting enough, though, the study also showed that the informers have significantly more friends and followers than their meformer counterparts. The median informer has 131 friends and 112 followers, while the median meformer has just 61 friends and 43 followers.

Again, though, it’s small wonder that people who post links helpful to others have twice as many friends and three times as many followers as people who tend to use the service for navel gazing.

What do you think? Who would you rather follow—a meformer or an informer? Which are you?

Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!

Facebook Beacon Bows Out

Announced in November 2007, Facebook’s Beacon integrated advertising and profiles on the popular social network. It initially looked like a great way for Facebook to monetize—but users saw the implementation, where their activities on other sites were broadcast on FB without their consent, as highly invasive. Facebook reformed the program to be opt-in, and apologized. And now, Facebook is ending Beacon altogether.

Mashable reports (emphasis added):

This week Facebook said that it has settled a class-action lawsuit against the product, agreed to shut it down completely, and will establish a $9.5 million “settlement fund” to fund initiatives related to online privacy.

The suit, filed just over a year ago, alleged that Facebook had invaded its users’ privacy, collecting information about them (and others) from around the Internet without their consent. They also said the opt-out was too difficult, since you had to visit each partner site (of which there were 44) to opt out. (However, there was a privacy control to turn the feature off completely).

The settlement must still be approved by the court, in this case, the US District Court of Northern California.

As Mashable points out, however, Beacon’s legacy will live on. By creating partnerships with and data collection from third-party sites, it paved the way for Facebook Connect, which may actually be the biggest feature that added to the site’s global growth.

Twitter Putting the Kibosh on Pay for Followers Services?

Would you pay for more followers on Twitter? Apparently some people would—a few providers have found a way to monetize the popular microblogging site with selling more followers.

uSocial is one such service. For a mere $87, you can get 1000 new Twitter followers. uSocial made headlines recently when they claimed that Michael Jackson’s family bought the late pop star 25,000 more followers after his death. uSocial also claims to strive to match your profile to potential followers‘ interests, and to grow your Twittership over time—a far more organic approach than it sounds like on the surface (admit it—you were thinking they just had thousands of dummy accounts).

But soon, even that seemingly-legit kind of matchmaking may disappear from Twitter. CNET reports that uSocial says Twitter’s gunning for them as spammers.

uSocial issues a press release this morning to say that a brand management firm (MelbourneIT, according to Australian sources) contacted uSocial, concerned about spammy messages the company was sending on Twitter.

I’m sure that many Twitter users will chime in to say just how wrong the practice is—but at the same time, we all want more followers. I would totally understand Twitter taking action against a service using fake profiles to artificially inflate customers’ subscriber counts. While paying someone to find them for you is a shortcut, is it really abusing the system? Or is it worse to accuse uSocial of spamming (when they claim they’re not) and use that as an excuse to shut them down?

What do you think? Should uSocial be allowed to practice its services? Is Twitter using this as an excuse, or is uSocial really spamming?

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