Mashable Announces: Unfazed by Facebook, Google Rolls Out Social Search Globally
Posted By Jared Cook:
Here is a recent post from Mashable, written by Stan Schroeder, about Goolge expanding their social search feature to 19 more languages.
Unfazed by Facebook, Google Rolls Out Social Search Globally
Google will roll out its somewhat controversial Social Search feature to 19 more languages next week, the company announced on its official blog.
Launched in October 2009, Social Search is a feature that combines regular search results with publicly available data created by your friends’ social media activities.
Your “friends” are quite loosely defined and include people in your Google Talk friends list, your Google Contacts, people you’re following on Buzz and Google Reader and other networks you’ve linked from your Google profile or Google Account. Google can also find your friends on public networks such as Twitter and Facebook and gather the data from their public connections as well.
The feature was recently the subject of controversy, as Facebook hired a PR company to push negative stories about Social Search in the press. Facebook claims that Google’s practices raise “serious privacy concerns,” and it’s unhappy with the fact that Google can use Facebook data for its service without Facebook’s permission.
For the most part, Google has stayed silent about the issue, although it’s noticeable that in its latest blog postabout Social Search, Twitter is mentioned three times while Facebook is nowhere to be seen.
Social Search should be available in 19 languages next week, with more languages on the way. Check out a video overview of the feature below.
Facebook Drives More Traffic Than Twitter
Posted By: Kerry Phouthavong
Facebook has quickly been emerging to surpass Twitter in driving traffic to their website. Facebook users have been driving traffic to many of the top news sites, making it evident that Facebook’s corporate strategy has been what is differentiating themselves from other competitors, including Twitter. A recent article on mashable.com, written by Sarah Kessler, includes statistical data and more on the significance in increasing traffic.
The study looked at Nielsen data from the 25 news websites with the highest number of unique monthly visitors. About 35% to 40% of traffic to the sites came from links on other sites, as opposed to readers typing in a URL directly or clicking to another page on the same site.
Unsurprisingly, Google dominated this referral traffic. On average, the company’s search and news products accounted for about 30% of all clicks. But Facebook also referred a significant percentage of each site’s audience.
The Huffington Post was boosted the most by Facebook referrals, which accounted for 8% of its unique visitors. The New York Times derived 6% of its traffic from the social network.
For all its success at breaking news, Twitter did not have the same effect. The site with the highest percentage of traffic from Twitter, The Los Angeles Times, could only credit the micro-blogging platform with 3.53% of its traffic. Twitter referred a much smaller percentage of traffic to other sites in the study.
Part of the discrepancy between Facebook and Twitter referrals is their disparate user bases. Facebook has more than 500 million users while Twitter has 200 million accounts— many of them inactive.
Jennings Social Media Reviews Video Interview: Guy Kawasaki Talks With Mashable at SXSW
Posted By: Jamie Sutera, VP of R&D
I would like to share this video regarding well-known author, venture capitalist and former Apple luminary Guy Kawasaki.
At SXSW 2011, Guy Kawasaki sits down for an interview with Mashable’s Christina Warren. In the wide-ranging discussion, he talks about his new book,Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Actions, and points out useful tools he’s discovered at SXSW this year. Along the way, he talks about his two different stints working with Apple, musing about what might have happened if he had stayed with the company (http://on.mash.to/eILzqG).
Thank You to Angle Bush, Radio Host of Your15Minutes Radio, For Interviewing Valerie Jennings, CEO & Founder of Jennings Social Media Marketing, in Celebration of Women’s History Month & International Women’s Day!
Thank You to Angle Bush, radio host of Your15Minutes Radio, for including Valerie Jennings, CEO & founder of Jennings Social Media, during a panel discussion: “Blueprint for Success” with Diane Hansen and Pam Brossman on International Women’s Day in celebration of Women’s History Month (http://www.blogtalkradio.com/your15minutes).
Listen to show:
Here is a partial transcript from the radio interview –
Angle: Valerie, tell us about the beginning of your journey.
Valerie: I started my company when I was 24 and will have had the business eight years this June. It has definitely been difficult starting at such a young age because there were some things that I had to learn and overcome, from being a female business owner to starting at age 24. I will say I had a ton of support from the community and Johnson County, Kan. There were a lot of people who invested time in working with me and it really helped me advance my career as a business owner. To both the men and women who really supported and talked about the success that we had with our clients early on, I just want to say thank you for being so supportive in those early stages and now to all of the wonderful companies we work with today, almost eight years later. It has been a lot of dedication and commitment not only on my part but everybody that works here, which is a pretty small social media marketing and pr firm. There is so much to be learned no matter what age you start your business at. There are some unique challenges when you launch that early in the game.
Angle: So you have gone through some things being 24 with people probably misjudging you like ‘she is only 24’
Valerie: Yes, that is probably fair.
Angle: One of the buzz words that many business owners are hearing at this moment is branding. We had a show on branding, discussing the book by Mr. Damon John, “The Brand Within.” I want to know from each of you, how important is branding and what does branding look like for each of you. When a client comes in and says, ‘I have a business but I don’t have a brand. Right now I’m an item. I haven’t gotten into the branding stage just yet. What do you do to assist that client that has not built their brand and is just starting out?
Valerie: It is incredibly important because without a brand you don’t have a message. There is not a story to share with your audience. There are all kinds of aspects that you need to review when building a brand and one of them is search engine optimization. What I mean by that is somebody jumps on Google and researches either the owner of the company, the product, the service they better find information or that organization immediately. It shows people in about 30 to 60 seconds if you have a brand presence and that you are dominating the search engines on either your company name or the owner of your company.
We spend a lot of time looking at the brand and most of the companies we work with do have a brand that’s been created and in existence for a while. Every now and again there is a startup that comes through here and we talk about how they are going to build up their brand. One of the first steps is to make sure you reserve all of the social networking sites for your organization on YouTube, Twitter Facebook to make sure that nobody else takes it down the road, or that a competitor takes it. That does happen and we see the brand hijacking going on. So once you have your brand going, protect the brand and cherish the brand. You can shift throughout the course of your company and change directions with branding and reinvent the brand. There are a lot of things you can look at overall it is such an incredible component. From a story telling standpoint and a marketing standpoint that brand has to be solid so you can understand how to advance your company farther down the road.
Angle: What in starting your business overall do you wish you knew then that you know now.
Valerie: I think overall it’s a resources concern. It’s one of things that you have to look into multiple components to building the business. I started when I moved into the Kansas City market and I really didn’t know anybody. I wish I would have a little bit better database of connections of people I trusted. I wish I would have been able to call on people who had established businesses that could have been trusted advisors. I felt like I was fumbling a little bit in the beginning because I just didn’t have those resources to call upon people and lean on them. I feel completely blessed to have those types of relationships now and there are so many people that I can call up anytime and I feel super supported. I think that is such a hard thing for many business owners who feel like they are going through this alone and if they don’t have those relationships or resources it can be really scary.
Angle: Last thing I want to know, tell me Valerie, what is your blue print for success. We want to know, how do you become successful when you are pursuing your passion.
Valerie: It’s commitment overall. It’s so hard to stay focused on everything that you want to accomplish. You have to look at the bottom line. If this is what you want then you have to be committed to it and that sounds like a generic response but I just have to tell you that it’s the most important thing to any business owner. If you don’t like what you are doing then you have to change it.
Listen to the Interview: with Valerie Jennings, Diane Hansen and Pam Brossman on International Women’s Day!
Thank You to Maureen Kedes, Radio Host of PR Insider, For Interviewing Valerie Jennings, CEO & Founder of Jennings Social Media
Posted By: Kerry Phouthavong
Thank you to Maureen Kedes for interviewing Valerie Jennings Friday on PR Insider. During the interview, Valerie discussed how she started Jennings Social Media Marketing by transforming it to a more non-traditional way of approaching PR. Although she still incorporates the standard components that make up for a typical public relations company, Valerie embraces her work more through social media and the art of online storytelling. Here’s a brief transcription of the interview.
Maureen: Today I have an expert on the show in social media storytelling. Her name is Valerie Jennings, Founder and CEO of Jennings Social Media Marketing.
Maureen: Tell us how you started before the birth of social media?
Valerie: My background is as a journalist. I was a print reporter and I did some on-camera work. I worked on the government side; I did some public affairs, media outreach. I got more training on the traditional side. Even though I’m not a senior entrepreneur, I started my business at the age of 24. I did give us a huge boost from competitor’s standpoint. When I first started the business, it was traditional PR–pitching, press releases, media coaching, prepping for interviews, and looking at what’s going to sell.
Valerie: We experimented with a PR Web and we used a a lot of search engine optimization to capture the story; what was interesting and what was going to drive traffic.
We’ve continued to expand what we do, and we still do a lot of traditional. But we’ve maintained the social networking side as a way to penetrate some of the traditional aspect. For example, we have a great blog post; we’re a great video to produce for a client. We’re going to maximize that on the client’s Twitter site on a social media press release on Facebook, whatever it is. So we talk about success in an exclusive client list, and we’re really looking for companies that have amazing stories. We try to figure out what is a possibility and we figure out what is trending. As a journalist, if people aren’t looking for it, why would they be paying attention?
Jennings Social Media Marketing CEO Valerie Jennings To Be Interviewed Live on PR Insider by Maureen Kedes Friday, February 25, 2011
Thank you Maureen Kedes for booking Valerie Jennings, CEO and founder of Jennings Social Media Marketing, on PR Insider to review social media storytelling: How To Be The Best Social Media Storyteller
Where Twitter Trending Topics Really Come From
Posted by: Kerry Phouthavong
Trending topics on Twitter can assist marketers or business owners in targeting a certain audience about a particular subject. In a recent article by Ben Parr from mashable.com, he explains how HP’s Social Computing Research Group’s study on trending topics helped to show where the topics really come from and why they are so important.
The article states that HP’s research analyzed 16.32 million tweets on 3,361 different trending topics between September and October 2010. HP discovered that Twitter’s Trending Topics algorithm cares more about the specific subject and reach of a tweet than who tweets it or how often it’s tweeted. Around 31% of trending topics are retweets and 72% of those retweets come from mainstream media outlet like @cnnbrk or @nytimes. The Telegraph, ESPN, @breakingnews and The Huffington Post all made the list of top retweeted users in at least 50 different trending topics.
“What proves to be more important in determining trends is the retweets by other users, which is more related to the content that is being shared than the attributes of the users,” HP concludes in its research report. “Furthermore, we found that the content that trended was largely news from traditional media sources, which are then amplified by repeated retweets on Twitter to generate trends.”
HP concludes that traditional media still starts the conversation around the most-discussed topics in social media, not the other way around.
Twitter Launches ‘Connections,’ Its Own Version Of Facebook’s ‘Mutual Friends’
Posted by: Jamie Sutera, VP of R&D, Jennings
Twitter has created ‘connections,’ their own version of Facebook’s ‘mutual friends.’ In a recent article from techcrunch.com, written by Alexia Tsotsis, explains that even though Twitter has experimented with the feature before, the change is a permanent step towards developing a more useful Twitter social graph.
The article states that Twitter has collapsed its “Followed By” and “You Both Follow” features into one area called “Connections.” This allows you to see what users you have in common with other Twitter users. While you still can’t see the number of users you have in common, you can see a complete list of mutual follows and people you are both followed by when you click “more.”
Twitter’s Carolyn Penner says, “By exposing accounts that you and another user have in common, you will now know how those accounts are connected to other accounts you already follow. As a result, you’ll be able to make more informed decisions about which accounts to follow.”
The 5 W’s of Twitter Marketing
Posted by: Jamie Sutera, VP of R&D, Jennings
Now that many social networking sites have evolved, Twitter is capturing interest. A recent article, written by Eric Tsai from designdamage.com, explains the 5 W’s and 1 H of Twitter. These tools will help businesses know why to Tweet, who to Tweet, what to Tweet, when to Tweet, where to Tweet and how to Tweet.
- Why Tweet
- Who Tweets
- What to Tweet
- When to Tweet
- Where to Tweet
- How People Tweet
People love to use Twitter to update their personal or professional lives as well as to comment on a relatively wide range of topics.
Why people follow people?
Another interesting data from Dan Zarrella’s research reveals a list of names you can call yourself to get more followers than the average Twitter account. These names are ‘founder’, ‘expert’, ‘official’, just to name a few. People naturally like to follow authorities that “appears” to have some sort of influence.
Despite its popularity, Twitter has yet to go mainstream. But it’s still interesting to see who is using Twitter to identify the demographic should you decide to focus on this channel. There are actually a much higher percentage of African Americans and Hispanics use Twitter than whites.
The interesting part of it is that Twitter seems to self-segregate around topics and issues with different ethnic groups. So instead of bringing people together in new and innovative ways via technology and Internet, people are more divide as a result.
What should you tweet? Well, it really depends on why you’re using Twitter for what purpose. Needless to say that in marketing “everything is a test” so make sure you are sending out interesting, relevant tweets that communicates value.
If you’ve done email marketing, you know the importance of timely delivery. It’s about being at the right place at the right time and this applies to Twitter as well. According to HubSpot’s report, the best day to tweet is Thursday and Friday while the best times to tweet are 3-5 pm as well as 9–11pm Eastern Time.
Again like the W for “what to tweet” time to tweet serves as a good foundation to start sending out your well crafted tweets. Keep in mind that it doesn’t mean you won’t get retweets or clicks during off peak hours, you just have less traffic to engage with but it also means less competition.
Similar to how often you check your emails, how Twitter users check their tweets also reveals the fact that half of the Twitter users never check their streams which means there is a high chance that they simply won’t get to read majority of your tweets.
Much like the diversity we see in who’s tweeting, the location of where people are tweeting is relatively proportional. Location can be a key piece if you’re business requires foot traffic such as retail stores, restaurants or if you’re selling to a specific geographic. Its just another metric to keep your eyes on and overtime you may see a trend developing that’s worth conducting another split testing.
According to Twitter’s own blog post “The Evolving Ecosystem,” 16% of all new users to Twitter start on mobile now. Besides Twitter app for mobile devices such as the iPhone and BlackBerry being the most popular ways to access Twitter, third-party apps make up 14% of all unique Twitter users.
If you want to build a long term relationship with your customers, focus on relationship not just triggering the buy button. And Twitter is another great platform to cultivate that relationship.
Why are you interested in using Twitter in marketing? Why do you believe you’re better invested there than in other channels of marketing?
At the end, social media is just push marketing with the ability for the other side to push back.
Valerie Jennings 
Cassie Stubs
Katie Stumpf
