SubscribeI dont know if we need this but I am sure it will be cool and the new 2013 MY 13 SL is one hot ride. Think i might have to pick me up one. Facebook, Yelp and Google will be incorporated into Mercedes-Benz’s 2013 line, the car maker announced at CES Tuesday. The features will be standard in the MY13 SL-Class, in a features package known as Mbrace 2, which launch in the spring. While accessing Facebook while driving sounds unsafe, the company says features requiring text action are disabled while driving. What social features would you like to have in an automobile?
Tom Bianco
Centrum Petere Mercatus and other cool stuff from the web
Yelp and Mercedes-Benz
Google Says Mobile Optimized Sites Will Factor Into Landing Page Quality And Perform Better In AdWords
Google is announcing today that websites that are optimized for mobile will now factor into ad quality. The company says that last year it began to limit ad serving on smartphone devices if they pointed to landing pages with Flash-heavy content, in order to improve the experience for users. Now the search giant will be considering the mobile optimization of a website as a new factor of mobile ads quality for all AdWords campaigns that are driving mobile traffic.
As a result of this change, ads that have mobile optimized landing pages will perform better in AdWords and drive more traffic. The core guidelines for landing page quality apply across devices (on desktop and on mobile) but this consideration will only affect AdWords on mobile devices.
For background, Google’s landing page quality for mobile sites factors in site navigability, simple layout, content prioritization, mobile features, touch features, minimal flash, landing page load time. Landing page quality is one of several factors that determine an advertiser’s keywords’ Quality Scores.
As Google says, a poor mobile web experience can negatively shape a consumer’s opinion of a brand or company and make it hard for them to engage or make a purchase. In fact, 61% of users are unlikely to return to a website that they had trouble accessing from their phone.
Unsurprisingly, Google is pushing its own mobile site creator, through Google Sites, on publishers and site owners who want to create a simple mobile website. Considering the holiday shopping season is getting closer, retailers may want to be sure their sites fit into Google’s landing page guidelines. Certainly, this year more than ever, holiday shoppers will be using their mobile phones for search and purchasing.
Article by Leena Rao currently works as a writer for TechCrunch
Hootsuite, TweetDeck & Other Third-Party APIs Kill Facebook Engagement [Study]
A recent study by Applum, published on their EdgeRank Checker blog, proves a theory widely held in the social media marketing community: auto-posting Facebook updates to pages using a third-party API reduces the level of user engagement.
The extent of the damage is surprising, though; in comparing 10 of the top APIs to manual Facebook posting, Applum showed that Likes and comments decreased by an average of 80 percent.
Social RSS topped the list of engagement killers at a 94 percent decrease. Dlvr.it, twitterfeed, Publisher and Twitter rounded out the five worst offenders list at 91, 90, 86, and 83 percent, respectively. They also tested auto-posting software RSS Graffiti, Networked Blogs, Sendible, TweetDeck, and HootSuite. The study examined over a million updates on 50,000+ pages.
Third-Party API Posting Affects EdgeRank – For Some
EdgeRank Checker offers a few different theories on why this is so. The first is that Facebook collapses the posts of third-party APIs, grouping them together and only displaying the most recent one and thereby negatively affecting EdgeRank by reducing the opportunity for people to view, like or comment … at least, this is what happens with those outside of its Preferred Developer Consultants program.
By default, Facebook collapses multiple posts from the same API. However, InsideFacebook.com seems to have confirmed the existence of Facebook’s secret white list, which protects third-party publishers in their PDC program from collapsed posts, meaning their posts have a much higher chance of being read.
You can see more evidence of this in a post at AdAge’s DigitalNext blog, by Buddy Media Inc. CEO Michael Lazerow. Buddy Media is one of Facebook’s Preferred Developer Consultants and as such, is able to offer their clients the benefits of auto-posting software using multi-tenant enterprise products without running the risk of hurting their EdgeRank. In section 1.B) of his post, Lazerow shows that even single-tenant, branded applications used by large companies like Verizon, the subject of his screenshot example, are subjected to post collapsing by Facebook.
The moral of this part of the story is: auto-posting using consumer applications like HootSuite and branded single-tenant third-party APIs can hurt your EdgeRank and severely impact the level of engagement on your Facebook page. Using enterprise-level products by developers in Facebook’s PDC program may mitigate that risk, but that could change at any time.
Other Third-Party API Factors That May Affect EdgeRank
EdgeRank Checker hypothesized that three other factors may contribute to the drastic reduction of Likes and comments on third-party posts:
Facebook penalizes third-party APIs EdgeRank – they believe Facebook manually reduces the weight (one of the EdgeRank algorithm’s factors) of these types of posts. EdgeRank Checker purports that this could be to encourage more content creation within the platform and increase ad impressions. In his post, Buddy Media’s Lazerow disputes this, blaming it solely on the collapsing posts issue and adding, “In my four years of working with Facebook, not once have I seen Facebook prioritize an advertising product above user experience.”
Posts through third-party APIs are likely automated and/or scheduled. It’s difficult to create timely content days or weeks in advance. They suggest that “any negative impacts of scheduled posts are most likely correlations with poorly developed content.”
The content is not Facebook optimized. Simply put, if you’re posting the same content to LinkedIn, Blogger, Facebook, and Twitter simultaneously, you’re missing your audience on three out of four. Optimize content for the audience you have on each platform.
Should you stop using third-party apps for Facebook? Not necessarily.
Bit.ly showed us last week that Facebook links have a 3.2 hour half-life (the amount of time by which half the clicks the content will ever receive is reached). It makes sense to share the same content at different times of the day, maybe two or three times over a period of a week. Auto-posting or publishing software can be useful for this, especially if you have fans in different time zones.
Other times it may be wise are when a small business owner or sole proprietor is away on vacation, or it’s simply not possible to post for a few days. Also, these apps still work well on other platforms, like Twitter.
We don’t need to throw the baby out with the bath water, but common sense is needed if your social media strategy is to include a publishing app. Auto-posting cannot replace a real person behind the wheel.
Targeting Users with Specific Content May Help
Facebook lists really haven’t proven themselves very useful, but Facebook has been testing new ways to filter friends and automatically categorize contacts using newsfeed filters and Smart Lists. This could be incredibly useful for businesses and marketers and ties in one of the major benefits Google Plus had going for them over Facebook. Friend filters and Smart Lists are not yet available to all users.
Another question that remains is whether this filtering capability, allowing users to target certain groups of people with content, will become available to business pages as well as personal accounts. Even so, content posted through third party APIs will continue to suffer the same fate as long as Facebook collapses posts by the same API together. Marketers will have to use these tools wisely and not rely on them for the majority of posts.
Graphics courtesy of EdgeRankChecker.com, Story courtesy of Miranda Miller
5 Things Small Businesses Must Know About Google Plus
Google+ (also known as G+, Google Plus or Plus) is the biggest trending topic online these days. So, what is it and why should you care about it? Simple – it’s a new social media site that is directly tied into the most widely-used search engine on the planet, with looming search engine optimization (SEO) implications. If you care about your company’s online reputation – what consumers are saying and where they are saying it – you need to read this post.
1. Yes, It’s a social media site.
Google+ is Google’s answer to Facebook. If you’ve ever used Facebook, you already know how this works. You can share content (such as text, photos, video, etc.) to a network of contacts. Your contacts can respond and rate your shared content in turn. You can add contacts, block them, connect to other services like Twitter, and much more
2. It’s sort of like Facebook – but different.
Privacy issues have been a burr under the saddle of Facebook since its inception in 2004. Users have complained that the privacy settings were too obtuse and instructions on how to protect their accounts were confusing. G+ removes the confusion by introducing a better privacy management system. You’re able to create groups for contacts (they call these Circles) and then select them on the fly as you create content.
Any post you make can be edited to remove or add contacts individually, or entire Circles. This sort of direct control is lacking in Facebook and is a boon for those who want to manage their information online in an organized manner. The other change is perhaps more important for businesses. The +1 button is a way to signal your approval of a contact’s post (whether it be text, a photo, a video, etc) and effectively validate it as a good source of information. On the surface, this may appear as simply the equivalent of Facebook’s “Like” button, but this is where it gets interesting – and a little bit confusing.
3. The +1 button will probably directly impact SEO – but we’re not yet exactly sure how.
If you used Google’s search engine in the last year, you may have noticed a strange development – a little “+1” button that would show up in search results. Clicking on it would indicate to Google that you have endorsed that result as a solid source of information for the search term you used. Naturally, everyone speculated that the more +1 clicks that a site received, the higher that Google would esteem it for that particular search term. Google denied this at +1’s implementation but did not dismiss the possibility of +1 affecting search rankings in the future – which means it will be a reality soon enough.
With G+ using the +1 button as a way to endorse a post by a contact, the overall vision for +1 is revealed to be a bit grander. Google envisions +1 as the tool that ties together all user-endorsed content across the web. Whether you +1 something in search results or a photo that your friend took of his dog and uploaded to Google+, you’re contributing to your personal version of Google’s search algorithm, meaning that content may eventually be served to you differently based on your +1 behaviors.
This concept is very bold and presents an interesting problem for SEO management, if it does indeed create a personalized set of results which varies wildly for every user. When the SEO community reaches some sort of consensus (or if Google releases more information) then I’ll do a follow-up to this post on how +1 effects Google+ SEO performance.
4. Google says that businesses should not create profiles for themselves on Google+ yet – but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try it out.
While it may seem logical to create a G+ profile for your firm and get ahead of the competition, there won’t be special business profiles until later this year. These new business-only profiles will reportedly contain features that are highly useful to companies – my guess is that they will be analytics-focused, providing deeper details on user demographics and the like.
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t experiment with G+ as it currently exists, but be aware that you may end up having to recreate the profile again this fall. Of course, it would be to your benefit to try out the new platform that consumers may use to talk about your company.
5. Google is putting its full weight behind G+.
Pretty soon Picasa and Blogger will cease to exist and you’ll be using G+ for blogging and uploading photos. What’s next? Will we see more Google services die a slow death, only to be reborn as a part of G+? Absolutely. We’ll also likely see new services pop up, such as games, plugins, and more customization. What does this mean for you? SEO is going to be influenced by this in a big way. Instead of being an aggregator or a channel to find blog posts about your firm, G+ will instead be both the platform and means of distribution for content.
Once we know more about how this whole thing effects SEO performance, I’ll give you some best practices for using Google+.
Google certainly has big plans for G+, that much is clear. It’s taken aim at Facebook (and, to a lesser degree, Twitter) in a big way. The bottom line is that any company that cares about what consumers are saying – and where they are saying it – should get familiar with Google+ now
By Naveen Hariprasad the senior product marketing manager for Kaulkin Media and insideARM. He is currently trying to figure out how to juggle all of his social media networks while providing marketing support for clients. He can be reached by email
How to move from facebook to google+
G
oogle plus is on a roll, challenging the mighty Facebook. Nevertheless only time has the answer to the question will Google plus overtake Facebook. As on now, we help you to migrate your Facebook album to Google plus. No its not a cluttered procedure. Thank to Aman Kumar Jain who crafted this app.
Move2Picasa allows you to migrate all your Facebook photos to Google plus. The app doesn’t have all features yet. It either moves all photos or moves none. Users cannot choose photos to move, nor can it pull in photo tags and comments. It took over three hours to migrate all photos. The photos get added to the Picasa albums in Google accounts, and can then be shared on Google+ profiles.
Singh stated that he received $150 in response to a donation appeal for hosting expenses of the website. “I have also got around 25 requests for a paid app that can move photos on a priority basis. They want to move large volumes of photo. We are in the process of developing it and also scaling up resources to clear the current queue of requests,” he stated.
Though the app moves out or rather copies out photos from Facebook into the rival Google+, Singh does not expect Facebook to block it soon. “The app uses Facebook’s APIs and does not violate any of Facebook’s rules. So, I do not think Move2Picasa will face any block from the Facebook author
To see the origanal article on Google + Click the link
