By popular request, some of the notifications that used to appear in your feed but had been moved to a sidebar are now back in the Live Feed.

You can edit options at the bottom of each feed to choose who shows up more or less in the two feeds.

(UPDATE: This post was created as a Google Sidewiki on the Facebook homepage, but the new homepage format seems to have broken Sidewiki for the site. Can’t see my original post.)
in reference to: Facebook | Home (view on Google Sidewiki) ]]> http://www.virante.com/blog/2009/10/23/new-facebook-home-page-news-feed-vs-live-feed/feed/ 2 http://www.virante.com/blog/2009/10/22/marketers-get-ready-for-google-social-search/ http://www.virante.com/blog/2009/10/22/marketers-get-ready-for-google-social-search/#comments Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:22:00 +0000 Mark Traphagen http://www.virante.com/blog/?p=42

On October 21 Google announced at Web 2.0 Expo the coming-soon implementation of real-time Social Search incorporated into the regular search results page.

Results will appear at the bottom of the results page and will be culled from the searcher’s own social networks, the ones listed on his/her Google Profile.

Marketers who have been ignoring social web sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and Friendfeed would do well to get on board now and start learning how to use them properly and building followings. Why? Imagine this scenario:

You run a website selling vacation packages for Tampa Beach, FL. One of your Twitter followers is looking for a good resort package deal for the coming weekend. It so happens that you’ve been tweeting about some great deals you’re offering for this very weekend. Your follower goes to Google to search for potential packages. Even if she missed your tweets, they will likely appear on her search page because she is linked to you via Twitter.

in reference to: BREAKING: Google Announces Social Search (view on Google Sidewiki) ]]> http://www.virante.com/blog/2009/10/22/marketers-get-ready-for-google-social-search/feed/ 0 http://www.virante.com/blog/2009/10/01/tip-use-news-feed-groups-to-filter-your-feed/ http://www.virante.com/blog/2009/10/01/tip-use-news-feed-groups-to-filter-your-feed/#comments Thu, 01 Oct 2009 20:37:00 +0000 Mark Traphagen http://www.virante.com/blog/?p=41

Overwhelmed by your News Feed? Too much to read? Facebook allows you to create groups of your friends so you can temporarily just see who you want to see in your News Feed. For example, you might create a group of “Relatives” or “College Buddies.” To make a new group:

1. In the News Feed column, click “More”
2. Click “Create New List”
3. Name the list and select the friends you want to include.

Now when you visit Facebook, just click the group in your News Feed list, and you will see updates only from friends in that group!

in reference to: Facebook | Home (view on Google Sidewiki) ]]> http://www.virante.com/blog/2009/10/01/tip-use-news-feed-groups-to-filter-your-feed/feed/ 0 http://www.virante.com/blog/2009/09/30/truetwit-pre-validates-your-twitter-followers/ http://www.virante.com/blog/2009/09/30/truetwit-pre-validates-your-twitter-followers/#comments Wed, 30 Sep 2009 13:36:00 +0000 Mark Traphagen http://www.virante.com/blog/?p=39

If you’re trying to do marketing on Twitter the “hard but right” way (i.e., actively engaging with and listening to followers instead of just link spamming), one of the most pain-in-the-but burdens you take on is deciding who is worth following back. There was a time early in Twitter’s history when I used to auto-follow back, but as Twitter has gained in popularity and thus become a prime spambot target, I now make all follow decisions “by hand” as it were.

If you’re getting dozens (or hundreds!) of follow requests a day, that becomes a burdensome–or perhaps near impossible–task. Enter TrueTwit (http://truetwit.com/truetwit/signUp/index). TrueTwit has created what amounts to a Captcha for Twitter. Once you’ve registered your Twitter account with TrueTwit (using Twitter’s secure OAuth authorization), TrueTwit sends anyone who follows you an email asking them to reply to validate that they are a real person. You then receive email notifications from TrueTwit only for those followers who have completed the validation process. (After registering with TrueTwit, you should turn off the “email me when someone follows me” option in Twitter’s notification settings.)

You’ll still have to evaluate new followers on a case-by-case basis to see if they are worth following, but like a good front-office receptionist, TrueTwit gets rid of the riff-raff to make that task much more manageable.

Originally posted via Google Sidewiki in reference to: TrueTwit Sign Up (view on Google Sidewiki) ]]> http://www.virante.com/blog/2009/09/30/truetwit-pre-validates-your-twitter-followers/feed/ 0 http://www.virante.com/blog/2009/09/29/new-facebook-feature-a-help-to-spreading-your-message-sort-of/ http://www.virante.com/blog/2009/09/29/new-facebook-feature-a-help-to-spreading-your-message-sort-of/#comments Tue, 29 Sep 2009 21:03:00 +0000 Mark Traphagen http://www.virante.com/blog/?p=38 I wrote a couple of months ago about some elements of fail in Facebook’s Pages feature from a marketing standpoint. A recent new feature at Facebook solves the main gripe in that post…sort of.

Facebook now allows users to “tag” other users or Pages by name in a wall post or status message. Similar to Twitter, the feature uses an @username nomenclature. A very nice addition is that once you enter @ and start typing a name, a dropdown appears suggesting all possible matches among your friends. Any post or status you tag will appear in the notifications of the friend or Page thus tagged. This is similar to the tagging already allowed in Facebook for pictures, videos, and Notes.

This goes some way toward addressing one of my major gripes with Facebook as a means of spreading your message and brand: if someone clicks “share” on something you posted, it shows up in their Wall and their friends’ newsfeeds, but with no link or attribution back to the original. At least now you can encourage visitors to your page to provide a direct link, but they will still have to do this manually by typing in your @Pagename. You might want to include a line in your posts something like “If you share this, please add credit and link back to our Page by adding “@AcmeWidgets. Thanks!” (Of course, subbing your Page name for “AcmeWidgets.”

I’ll really sit up and pay attention the day that Facebook makes such linking automatic.

I’m speaking, of course, of so-called “negative keywords,” keywords that you don’t want your pay-per-click ad to show for. Negative keywords are perhaps one of the most overlooked–and yet most useful–ways of improving the performance of your ad campaigns. Why would you not want your ad to show? Isn’t any exposure good exposure?

In the “old days,” maximizing exposure was certainly the highest goal. When you’re advertising in print or broadcast media (TV, radio), you’re throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping some will stick. You can’t micro-target your audience in those media, so your best hope is to expose your message as many times as possible, counting on the likelihood that some of those times potential customers will see it.

But one of the great advantages search-based advertising gives us (arguably its greatest advantage) is the micro-targeting that older forms could not offer. With finely-tuned keywords and ad text, an advertiser can have real hope to get his message in front of actual potential customers nearly each and every time it shows. Conversely, a PPC advertiser will want to have his/her ad not show to potential clickers she/he doesn’t want or need.

This is where negative keywords come into play. Say that you are marketing iPhone apps, but all the apps you’re marketing are pay apps. You should include the negative keyword “-free” in your ad campaigns because it is highly unlikely that anyone actively searching for “free iPhone apps” will convert on your pay-only app site.

Now here’s my suggestion to the folks at Google AdWords: Create a report in the new AdWords interface that displays the potential top negative keywords for any ad group. This shouldn’t be hard to do. The new interface already has an awesome report that displays the top actual search phrases that triggered a group’s keywords (very useful for discovering valuable phrase and exact matches you should be targeting). The only bad thing about that report is that it only displays phrases that actually resulted in clicks. Now that can still be a good source of potential negatives. But what would also be useful to know are the phrases that are generating lots of impressions for a keyword but no clicks. Those are CTR and Quality Score killers. So basically, the report I’m proposing would display the phrases that generated the most impressions with zero clicks, in descending order of impressions. That seems to me like a gold mine for some very positive negatives.

1. Newsfeed is now front-and-center and much more straightforward. It’s the flowing lifestream of your friends, as it is on the web version. (Request for future update: It would be nice to be able to filter the news feed by groups and to hide things as you can on the web version. The mobile version should recognize hides made on the web version.) UPDATE: Oops, my requested feature is already there in Facebook 3.0, just a bit hidden. Tap the “Newsfeed” button at the upper right while viewing your Newsfeed, and up pops a familiar iPhone roller wheel with all your groups!
2. Notifications are easy to find/view, and they now actually connect to the post they are notifying you about. That I was inspired to type that last phrase in italics points to just how inane the Facebook 2.0 for iPhone was.
3. You can now actually comment on and/or “like” posts in your Newsfeed or on friends’ Walls. This means that after two years at the top of the iPhone apps downloads rankings, Facebook for iPhone has finally actually become social.
4. Video, video, video. For some users, this might become the single most exciting upgrade in the new version. You can now upload video captured on your iPhone 3GS straight to your Facebook page. (Viewing videos in the iPhone app is not yet enabled, but Facebook says this is coming soon–which will be yet another revolutionary step of its own.) I was thrilled when iPhone 3GS not only added video but the ability to upload it straight to YouTube. But now I’m already ready to say “Buh-bye, YouTube.” Facebook’s new video upload from the iPhone is faster and easier than the YouTube version. Plus my videos go straight to where people I care about will actually see them. I predict that this addition will significantly increase Facebook’s share of the video social media market.
5. The most significant aspect of the Facebook iPhone makeover: (and why I titled this post “…Is Better Than We Think”) Facebook’s new iPhone app may be the best-yet, easiest-to-use social media interface for a mobile device we’ve seen. Since it is becoming increasingly apparent that mobile is the future of social media, the new iPhone app may go a long way in establishing Facebook as the leader in social media in the next few years. Look out, Twitter.

So reports Rebecca Lieb at clikz.com from Google AdWords’ team head Nick Fox’s keynote at the recent Search Engines Strategies meeting in San Jose. Fox imagines a world in which “seach ads just…happened. You tell us what you’re selling, we do the rest.” In this world (apparently already under development by Google engineers), Google will not only match your selling proposition with prospects using its search service, it will even create the ads for you. Fine (maybe), but what about my competitors asking to sell the same product or service? Fox promises only that their new technology “will somehow be fair and objective enough to make everyone happy if and when all this comes to pass.”

If you’re an AdWords advertiser, this announcement should be making at least the following hairs stand up on the back of your neck:

• “Fair and objective treatment” of competition sounds a bit too much like a bit too much like the old visions for a socialist utopia. Online advertisers are inveterate capitalists. They don’t want fairness with competitors; they want to do better than them. I don’t see advertisers willingly releasing their freedom to try to be smarter than their competitors to the Google politburo.
• Fox seems to put forth a fairly flat vision of why entities advertise on Google. For example, in the same address, while advocating a cost-per-action over cost-per-click payment model, Fox said, “Leads, schmeads. We want to more closely align advertising with performance.” Sounds good, but will Google really be able to precisely define and measure every possible “action” for which advertisers place ads? To some of my clients, generating “leads” is far from “schmeads.”

I do see one positive in this announcement: a recognition that the present keyword system quickly becomes hopelessly complex for anyone but the smallest advertisers. The number of variables that have to be evaluated and managed in a large account quickly approaches impossible levels, at least for hands-on human management. To me, a better thing for Google’s geniuses to be spending their time on would be developing more and better keyword management, reporting, and feedback tools.

The good news is that Google has opened up a feedback forum for advertisers to discuss this idea. I’m betting they’ll get an earful as this becomes more widely known.

* * * * * *

For intelligent Google advertising management that has you’re goals and interests in mind, check out Virante.

If you squeeze your browser down to less than a few inches in width, the organic results actually get pushed down below all of the ads.

It will be interesting to see how much of an effect this has on click-through rates. Anyone out there doing Google CPC noticing anything yet?

But they “got better.”

Just one day later they resumed service, explaining that an overwhelming response from users made them reconsider. No other conditions have changed: still no revenue model (that they can live with) and still discriminated against by Twitter.

Such a drastic move by a fairly popular service (especially occurring on the same day that FriendFeed was absorbed by Facebook) should give those whose business model is heavily dependent upon social media pause. If that’s you, you should…

1. seek to diversify your social media “portfolio.” Don’t build all your business or promotional channels through one (or even a few) SM outlets. Very few have yet found viable revenue models; nearly any of them could disappear at any time.
2. keep backups of any data (such as analytics) or post archives generated on any SM sites over which you have no direct control.

In the meantime, it will continue to be interesting to watch how (or if) the plethora of free services that grew up around the social media boom of the past few years are able to create acceptable and profitable revenue models.