Social Mediarology

I’m as big a Google advocate as anyone. I’ll swear by Gmail,and Google Voice has revolutionized my voicemail and the way I leave myself notes. I use Google Contacts as a central repository for all of my professional and personal contacts. I’m always finding some new way to parse web data in Google Analytics. While I only use Blogger now for my personal family blog, it was where I got my start in blogging. I keep up with dozens of blogs through Google Reader. Even though YouTube‘s new auto-caption feature still has some bugs to be worked out, it has tremendous potential for, among other things, disablity compliance. At home, all of my photos are stored in and organized by Picasa, and every time I need directions, I pull up Google Maps.

Even though that’s all true, I can’t help but feel that Google has lost it’s edge lately. Last September, they launched Google Wave, which was touted as the future of email. Google Wave incorporated Gmail-like email functionality, collaborative capabilities like Google Docs and the ability to see responses in real time. First revealed in the summer of 2009, Google Wave was rolled out to a handful of early adopters in September. Almost as soon as it was released the blogosphere was buzzing with disappointment. Part of that was due to the fact that, with the rolling release of Wave, some of the earliest users didn’t have any one to interact with. In addition, Wave was confusing for even the most savvy web users. Though Google has made some small tweaks to Wave since its release, the general consensus is that Wave has been a let-down.

In February, Google released Google Buzz to all Gmail users. Buzz was to be Google’s answer to Facebook and Twitter. With a built-in user-base of more than 150 million, Google wanted to create their own proprietary social network to let users interact with one another through their email client. In addition to some big privacy concerns, Google only let you pull in updates from Twitter, Flickr, Friendfeed and several Google-owned sites like Picasa, YouTube and Google Reader. Notice that Facebook is missing from that list? On top of that, Buzz doesn’t allow you to push out updates to Twitter, Facebook or other social networks, which makes it even more of a walled garden than Facebook, Twitter or others. Social media is at least in part about openness and ease of sharing and Google Buzz simply doesn’t cut it on those two counts.

Finally, Microsoft recently announced that they would incorporate an optional Foursquare layer to Bing Maps. I blogged about this in a previous post, and the Foursquare layer is now a reality on Bing Maps (Visit maps.bing.com and click on Map Apps, then click on Foursquare Everywhere – you might have to install Microsoft’s Silverlight plugin for it to work). This kind of integration is something I would have expected from Google, not Microsoft. If Google hopes to remain the technology giant that they are, they have to be on the forefront of social technology. Microsoft and Yahoo already beat Google in integrating real-time information (Facebook & Twitter updates) to their search engines and this is just one more area where Google is forced to play catch-up.

Every company is bound to release some products that are duds, but it feels like Google has been experiencing more than its fair share of duds lately. On top of that, they’ve been happening on relatively big products. I’ll still keep using the Google products that I know and love and I’ll continue to try out any new products they launch, but if they keep taking missteps like this, it might not be long until Google is reminiscent of some of the past tech and search giants like Apple before the iPod and Altavista.

On February 9, Google released Buzz to the masses. If you have a Gmail account, you’ve probably seen a splash page about Buzz in the past couple of days. I turned on Buzz for my account a few days ago and here’s a rundown of what Buzz can do for you.

• Buzz can be used as an aggregator for your Google-owned social media accounts (Google Reader — check out this post and this one for more on RSS and Google Reader –, YouTube, Blogger, Picasa) as well as a few others (Twitter, Flickr & FriendFeed).
• Buzz automatically suggests people you should follow. This list is culled from the people you email most often.
• Underneath your Inbox button in Gmail, a Buzz button appears. This allows you to view all recently Buzzed items.
• Buzz intelligently selects the most interesting buzzes for you to view. You can always click on the Buzz button to see all recent buzzes, but you’ll be notified when an interesting piece appears.

There are a few things that Google needs to do to improve Buzz, but since it just launched last week, Google is bound to do what they need to do to make Buzz more usable. Here are a few things Buzz is missing.

• Integration with Facebook – As the most popular social networking site in the world, Google really needs to add Facebook soon. Ironically enough, Facebook owns Friendfeed, which is currently supported by Google Buzz.
• Buzz posts should also feed out to accounts that are hooked up to it (Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, etc) rather than just pulling the posts into Buzz.
  • A great example of this would be for Buzz to function more like Hootsuite (discussed in my last post), but still live within Gmail.
• Allow users to filter and view only the Buzzes they want to see.
  • Just like Facebook allows you to view updates in specific groups, Buzz should allow this. There are sometimes you just don’t want to see every one of someone’s Foursquare updates.

In short, with some work and slight tweaks, Google Buzz has the potential to radically change the way social media is consumed. By building Buzz right into Gmail, Google was able to ensure its immediate adoption by millions of people, unlike Google’s much hyped but less loved Wave, which launched in the Fall of  ’09. Wave turned out to be much more complicated and much less thought-out than Buzz seems to be, on top of the fact that you needed a separate login to Google Wave, which reduces the number of users drastically.

Here’s a quick video from Google all about Buzz.

Have you used Buzz yet? Check me out on buzz: Jeremy A Williams

One of the most important things you can do online today is tracking your web traffic with some type of robust web analytics package. At the Indiana Office of Tourism Development, we primarily use Google Analytics. It’s free, relatively easy to set up and enables us to track just about everything we need for our website and blogs. By analyzing the data culled from Google Analytics, we’re able to see whether some of our new marketing in initiatives are driving people to our website, whether a redesigned homepage had an effect on website visitors and whether our social media efforts are enticing users to visit our website.

The bottom line is if you have a website, you NEED to be tracking it.

Luckily, Google Analytics is in the process of launching two new features that will help make their service even more usable and robust.

A few weeks ago, Google unveiled their “Intelligence” feature and it’s a great addition to Google Analytics. As you can see in the video below, Intelligence looks at all of your web data and automatically flags data it considers important.

For example, during our recent Leaf Cam campaign we sent out our Big Idea Email (sign up to receive it here!) and experienced a 52% increase in website traffic from the day before. Google Intelligence noticed that along with 36 other alerts. Some of those alerts were a 75% increase in visitors from Kentucky, a 62% increase in entries to one of our Leaf Cam Contests and a 90% increase in visits to our Leaf Cam page (click on the image below for a larger version).

Google automatically creates alerts for many things, but if you specifically want an alert every time something specific happens, you can set up custom alerts as well. The custom alerts can even be emailed to you as they occur. These alerts are great for pinpointing changes in visitor’s actions on your website, but what if you want to know what factors contributed to those changes in your webstats? That’s where Google Analytics’ second great feature comes into play.

Google is still rolling this feature out to all GA accounts, but it will allow for you to make annotations on any data. For example. We launched our redesigned homepage on May 4th, 2009. There are 80 Intelligence Alerts for May 4, 2009 ranging from a 15% drop in new visitors to the site to a 30% increase in the average Time On Site per visitor. All I have to do is create a notation on May 4th so we can always know that we’re seeing those changes due to the redesign of our homepage. I can also set up notations for days that we send out our consumer or industry emails, note days when we’ve begun a new PR push or ad campaign or days when a news story came out that pushed traffic to our site.

Check out the video on Google Analytics Annotations below:

All in all, these two new features on Google Analytics give users a tremendous amount of flexibility with their web data.

Yesterday, Google unveiled a new feature on Google Image Search. Until then, Google Images had been a great utility when looking for specific images on the web. Whether you wanted to find pictures of different Indiana License Plates or the Indiana State House, you’d probably be able to find just what you were looking for. But what if you specifically wanted to find a picture of Indiana License Plates that were red, or blue, or even green? Your only hope was to type in “red indiana license plates” and hope that someone had tagged the photo as such.

Purple Flowers on Google Images

That all changed yesterday. Google unveiled the ability to filter images by color. Let’s say you want to find a picture of flowers for a blog post you were writing. the image on the left shows what you’d find if you just typed “flowers” into Google Image Search. If you only want pictures of purple flowers, simply click on “All Colors” just below the search box then click on the purple box and…voila, you have purple flowers!

Red Flowers on Google Images

If you want to find red flowers, simply click on the red box and you’ll be given a great selection of red flowers. Not only does this new functionality give you the ability to better refine your search, but the fact that Google can scan the images for specific colors opens up the door to some amazing technological advances in the future.

How will you use Google Images’ new color selection feature?