Where Google Search Plus Your World Goes Wrong

Remember the days of searching places like Yahoo to find the best results that fit?  I can remember painfully clicking link after link to find the relevant search results on my search topic.  Me and the back button?  We considered getting engaged. I came across a Search Engine Land experiment on how the new Google Search plus Your World works. Google has done some pretty unremarkable things in the past (Hello turning off sharing in Google Reader!). The one thing they’ve always excelled at are their efforts to try and improve search results.  For example, Panda was a huge move and it removed some of the most irrelevant sites from the top search results pool (spam, splogs).[.....]

How Klout Scores Could Be More Useful To Marketers

If you want to sell, let’s say, Cat Genie’s.  Are you going to contact every blogger with a huge reader base on the internet and ask them to blog about the Cat Genie?  No. (I hope you said no to that. If you didn’t, you have far more important things to do that do not involve Klout scores.) First you need to know if they have a cat or talk about cats or are influential about cats. Enter Klout.  It has a nice nifty easy number for you to tell you exactly who to approach, right?  Wrong. It doesn’t matter how high a blogger’s Klout score is, if they don’t have a cat or talk[.....]

Monday Morning Brand Quarterbacking

In the rapid fire internet time, brands can’t afford to have a divided message when social sharing.  I can understand why companies think it’s risky to interact online with consumers after watching the Kenneth Cole debatcle unfold on Thursday followed by the Super Bowl ad gaff by Groupon on Sunday. The tweet by Kenneth Cole was in short, distasteful.  The internets were fired up and pointing the blowtorch at Kenneth Cole. Someone deleted the tweet from his stream, followed up with a tweet pointing folks to an apology on Facebook.  As a side note, they can’t seem to get their stories straight.  It wasn’t a joke, it was a joke, it was a prank…..seems to[.....]

How To Market With Google’s Social Search

The past couple days the techiverse has been entertained and/or irritated at Google Buzz, Google’s stab at social networking.  This isn’t another post about Google Buzz, but rather the hidden gem of Social Circle and Social Search. Combined with their acquisition of Aardvark, Google is amassing utilities to enable social search to take social media to the next level. What are social search and social circles anyway? What makes up our Social Circle for Google’s purposes: People in your Gmail (or Google Talk) chat list People in your Friends, Family, and Coworkers groups in your Google contacts People you’re publicly connected to through social services that you’ve listed in your Google profile, such as Twitter[.....]