Occasionally, Google will introduce an enhancement to its search engine allowing users to “opt-in” for use prior to releasing the addition live. These enhancements are found in Google Labs (www.googlelabs.com). One current feature in the labs is Google’s Social Search.
Supposedly, Google offers subscribers the ability to search their own networks for relevant results to their query. Those results, in turn, may be given higher precedence than those results returned from outside the user’s network. Notice the word “may.” I’ve yet to see any such results. Perhaps, my network isn’t big enough. However, I would have thought with a few thousand friends, someone’s got to be talking about the same thing(s) for which I am looking. Maybe, we’re just not compatible and I should find new friends.
Or, maybe Google has yet to penetrate the social community for the same issue with which it has always struggled. Furthermore, Google now introduces its own hurdle.
Website Magazine’s November issue lists 50 leading web sites for marketing and business development professionals. As one could imagine, the list paints a different picture than that which would have been constructed only a few years ago.
As Website Magazine points out, the use of social sites has increased among top enterprises. Among the listed social sites are Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, Ning and Yelp.
Blogging sites have also become increasingly popular with enterprise trend setters. Of course, the two most well-known, free blogging platforms, WordPress and Blogger, were ranked high in the list – #’s 9 and 11, respectively. And, blogs could not receive nearly as much customer attraction if it wasn’t for the aggregators that push their content to subscribers and increase the blogs’ visibility. A few aggregators, namely, Digg and Technorati, were included in Website Magazine’s list.
Finally, any company seeking to solidify their online presence, must now syndicate video content. YouTube is now the second-largest search engine, following only its parent, Google, and provides easy and rapid traffic generation through professional and grass-roots video creation and delivery. It’s no wonder that YouTube was #4 on the list. Other video platforms like Blinkx, MetaCafe and Ustream.tv were included in the top 50, as well.
In conclusion, I must agree with Website’s disclaimer, “Keep in mind that the sites on this Top 50 are not an acknowledgement of their effectiveness but rather their popularity.” Website Magazine asserts that the effectiveness of the given sites still highly depends on the manner in which they are used. Again, I completely agree.
On a previous post, I discussed the importance of diversifying your social media marketing channels due to the attacks on the social network Twitter.
As these attacks were taking place, marketers rushed to other channels such as Facebook and FriendFeed. This, in turn, brought heavy stressed upon the infrastructure of these two servers making their responses to traffic requests quite sluggish, as well.
Over the past few days, we’ve witnessed some of Facebook’s own growing pains.
If you've ever sat in my seminars, you found very quickly that I love statistics. As rapid as the Social Media horizon changes, so is the rate at which these statistics change.
Socialnomics, this past week, released some staggering statistics on the current impact of Social Media. Erik Qualman has done a fine job of compiling the data and its presentation. I think you'd agree with me how amazing some of these statistics are. A few of these include:
- 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
- Years to Reach 50 millions Users: Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
- If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia
Also, a few interesting facts concerning education:
- 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
- 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
- Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
Erik has posted the list of statistics along with their sources on his blog, just below the video.
