First things first: The Plus-1 Button

About a month ago, Google unveiled their +1 button in what seemed like an attempt to compete with Facebook’s ubiquitous Like button. I quickly added the +1 button to several blogs I manage so we could start taking advantage of people starting to use the +1 button. Google first launched +1 as a way to ‘bookmark’  search results that you’ve found helpful. For example, if I search for a Chinese restaurant in Indianapolis and one of my favorites comes up in the list, I can +1 it and it will come up at the top of the list next time I search for a Chinese restaurant in town. Pretty helpful stuff. Now, with the release of G+, the +1 becomes even more useful. Before G+ there wasn’t a way to catalog all the things you +1′ed (search results, blog posts, websites, etc.), but within G+, there’s a +1 tab on your profile page so you can go back through everything you’ve +1′ed in the past – making it a better place to store true bookmarks and pages you’d like to return to than simply liking a site/post/etc. through Facebook (since there’s no ultimate catalog of the things you’ve liked outside of Facebook.com).

Circles 

Circles are the foundation that G+ was built upon. While you can add friends to different lists within Facebook, it’s a feature that was added to Facebook after many people joined, so there isn’t a great adoption rate for the lists feature within Facebook.

G+: Add to Circle

Instead of friending people like you do on Facebook or just following them like on Twitter, you add people to your circles in G+. Unlike Facebook, you can add people to your circles without them having to add you back, but unlike Twitter, by clicking on the Incoming portion of your stream (which I’ll get to later) you can see the posts of people who have added you to their circles that aren’t yet a part of your own circles.

In addition to a simple drag and drop feature for adding people to different groups, Google also has a suggested users section to the right of your stream where you can hover over Add to Circles and easily add people to your circles.

You can also easily view content from and share content with specific circles very easily with G+. Say you want to share some photos with just people in your Family circle, it’s simple to do. If you want to share a link to an article with friends from work or share a photo with friends from college, you can do that as well.

Profile

If you had a Google Profile, it’s now your G+ Profile. You can fill in information like where you work, a bio, where you went to school, where you’ve lived as well as add photos and links to your social media profiles, websites and blogs. Just like on your Facebook profile page, you can add as little or as much information as you’d like. When people land on your profile page, they can view previous posts (but only ones that are either Public, Extended Circles or shared with a circle that they’re a part of), About, Photos, Videos +1′s and Buzz.

Stream

The G+ stream is just like the newsfeed on your Facebook wall. When you log in, you’ll see each of your Circles on the left side of the page. You can click on any circle to view updates from people in that specific circle if you don’t want updates from your circles mixing.

You can easily comment on, +1, and reshare posts within your stream. With every new post you create, whether it’s a photo, link, video or text update, you can select who you want to share the post with. You can specify any combination of circles, individuals and email addresses as well as with the Public, all your circles or (a really interesting option) Extended Circles. Extended Circles simply means that your post is viewable by everyone in your circles as well as everyone in their circles.

While G+ doesn’t have a direct messages feature like Twitter or a private messages feature like Facebook, you can post messages that can only be seen by one other person by making sure they’re the only person that you share the post with. If this feels a bit uncomfortable to use for private matters,  you can always default back to another medium to send that truly private message.

I’ve tried out sending a more personal message just to an individual and they truly are the only ones who can see the message.

Tip: If you’re sharing a private post with someone, make sure you disable sharing on the post so they can’t reshare your private message.

Photos

G+ allows you to connect directly with Picasa (which will soon be rebranded as Google Phot0s) and share photos on your profile. With the G+ Android App (and the soon to be released iOS app), you’ll be able to take pictures and share them immediately with your circles.

Hangouts

In my opinion, this is one of the best features on G+ and one of the greatest differentiation point over Facebook. In short, Hangouts are group video chats. While Facebook just announced Skype integration to allow video chats directly from Facebook, G+’s Hangout feature is several steps ahead of the Facebook/Skype integration.

With Hangouts, you can have multiple people in the same video chat and you can also chat via text while you’re in the Hangout. This is a great way to share links or other information while you’re hanging out. Another unique feature is the ability to share YouTube videos with the Hangout. That way the entire group can watch a video together.

Tip: While you can specify groups or individuals who you invite to the Hangout, you can’t kick people out of the Hangout and anyone who is in the Hangout can invite anyone else. For that reason, if you want to have a private video chat, I’d recommend sticking with Skype or Facebook.

Sparks

The G+ Sparks feature is a combination of Google News and Google Reader. You can specify things you’re interested in and set them up as Sparks. G+ then feeds interesting news stories  each Spark that you can read through or share with your circles.

Measuring Traffic

All these features are great and they could lead to G+ becoming a legitimate player in the social media space, but when push comes to shove, you really need to know whether G+ is driving any traffic (and, in turn, any conversions) to your site. If you have a web analytics package like Google Analytics installed on your site, you can easily track the referring links coming to your site from G+. Just like how Facebook redirects all links shared on their site through http://www.facebook.com/l.php? to enable accurate clickthrough tracking, G+ redirects all links through http://plus.google.com/url? and that’s easily trackable through your analytics pacakge’s referring links section.

Side note: I’m not sure why Twitter hasn’t implemented something like this. Maybe that’s where they’re headed with their t.co shortener. Since Twitter is accessed through countless apps both on computers and mobile devices as well as through Twitter.com, it seems that by redirecting all links posted via Twitter through one standard redirector (t.co), it would make accurately tracking all Twitter traffic MUCH easier for everyone. Twitter, you can take this idea, I don’t even need credit for it.

GPlus: Early Verdict?

It’s still way to early to say that G+ is a boom or a bust, but I see a lot of potential and quite a few pitfalls at the same time.

Pitfalls:

• Numbers: With 750+ million people on Facebook and 200+ million on Twitter, Google really got to this party late and it’ll take more than just luck to siphon people from networks they’re already familiar and comfortable with.
• No Business Options – Yet: Google has announced that they’re working on a solution for businesses who want to get involved on G+ – they just don’t want businesses creating profiles just yet.
• Growth Beyond Early Adpoters: Several people have started wondering lately whether G+ can grow beyond the early adopters who are on the platform now. Mashable estimates that there are nearly 10 million people using G+ already, but I can attest to the fact that the vast majority of the updates I’ve seen so far on G+ have been related to G+. Part of that could be the novelty of the platform and everyone trying to figure it out together, but there have been other networks (like Friendfeed) that have languished with only early adopters.

Potential:

• Circles: Google has come up with an extremely intuitive and easy way to place people into groups. Facebook’s similar feature is clunky at best and if you haven’t already moved your friends into different groups by now, chances are you never will. It seems that Google started with Circles as the fundamental element behind G+ and it shows. It’s so easy to share anything with as many or as few people as you want.
• Hangouts: I think this is the killer feature in G+. I’ve tested it out a couple time with some colleagues and we’ve had as many as 5 people in the hangout at the same time.
• In addition to being able to have a quick video chat with one or several people, you can make the Hangouts as public or as private as you want to.
• The fact that I had already used G+’s Hangout feature made me yawn when Facebook announced last week that you could now (finally) video chat via Facebook. However, since you can only chat with one person at a time, this feature was out of date before it was even released.
• Integration with Google: This is another one of G+’s biggest strengths. Google already has a huge user base of people on Gmail, Google Docs, Google Reader, Google Maps not to even mention Google Search, and the fact that your G+ menubar stays with you whenever your on a Google property just means that people can stay connected to their network and share with them even easier than they can through Twitter or Facebook.

Related posts:

1. Has Google Lost It’s Edge?
2. What’s the Buzz about Google Buzz?
3. Two Great New Features from Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a powerful tool for measuring traffic to and within your website, but it can also appear overwhelming at first glance. There’s such a wealth of information available through Google Analytics but unless you know what you’re looking for and how to access that data, you won’t get much out of implementing an analytics package like Google Analytics.

Last week Google debuted an upgraded version of Google Analytics (v5), and anyone with a Google Analytics account can now view the old version or the new version. In order to access the new Google Analytics, simply click on new version next to your email address on the top right corner of the page. While Google is still in the process of pulling all the old features over to the new version of GA, the new version seems to be working just fine and there are even a few new features to go along with the redesign and reorganization.

You could spend months learning all the ins and outs of Google Analytics, but here are some of the most important things to look for when you’re tracking visitors on your website using Google Analytics.

The Basics

Google Analytics - Visitors Overview

When you first log into Google Analytics you’ll see the Visitors Overview that includes stats like Visitors, Pageviews, Time on Site and Bounce Rate. The Visitors and Unique Visitors numbers are important because it lets you know how many people have come to your site during the time frame you’re looking at and you then know approximately how many of those visitors have been to your site before. Pages per Visit lets you know the average number of pages each visitor goes to while on your site. Don’t think that just because you have a high Pages per Visit number it means your visitors are happy with your site and they’re getting what they wanted from your site. I’ve seen instances where a campaign caused Pages per Visit and Time on Site to drop, but have dramatically increased conversion rates. As much information as Google Analytics provides you, it still requires old fashioned individual user research or surveys to find out users sentiments.

The term Bounce Rate can be confusing. A bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to your website that only view one page (the page they landed on first) and then exit your blog. In general, you want as low a bounce rate as possible, but much like the Pages per Visit and Time on Site metrics, a bounced visitor isn’t necessarily an unsatisfied visitor. If your website is more informational in general (many Local, State and Federal Agencies have more informational than sales or conversion goals), a higher bounce rate might not be a bad thing. But for most organizations the goal of your website is likely to sell a product, ticket, room night, service or something along those lines. If you notice high bounce rates for pages where you’re specifically selling an item or asking the user to take an action (sign up for an email newsletter or download a whitepaper), you should make some modifications to the page that could help lower the bounce rate.

Traffic Sources

Tracking where your visitors are coming from is important for any organization. Under the Traffic Sources section of Google Analytics, you’ll find detailed information about how visitors came to your site and you can determine which keywords, search engines, referring sites and even ad campaigns are driving the most traffic (and even which ones have the highest ROI, through more advanced Goals).

Keywords (Organic Search)

Most websites will see the plurality (if not the majority) of traffic come through search engines. Whether it’s paid traffic via search engine marketing or organic traffic from users typing search terms into Google or Bing, you’re likely to see a lot of visitors come to your site through search. Click on Traffic Sources –> Incoming Sources –> Search –> Organic to see all the search terms that people used get to your website. Looking at the organic search terms can help you to know what kind of content you need to beef up on your website to increase traffic and conversion.

Referrals

Referrals are visitors that get to your website by way of someone else’s website, but not a search engine. For instance, if I have a link on my website to yours and someone clicks through to your site from mine, then SocialMediarology.com will appear as a referral on your website. Click on Traffic Sources –> Incoming Sources –> Referrals to view all referral sources for your website. It’s great to see sites that are referring traffic to you, but the real benefit of referrals is when you dig down just a bit deeper to see exactly where those referrals are pushing the most traffic on your site.

To dig down to the Landing Page you can click on the image at the right for a more detailed view. Next to Secondary dimension: just below the graph, click on Select –> Traffic Sources –> Landing Page. This will then give you the great detail in the screen shot below. You can now see not only which referring sites sent you traffic, but which actual pages on your site those visitors were sent to and what their Pages Per Visit, Avg. Time on Site, % New Visits and Bounce Rate were for each specific landing page from each specific referral. See how much information you’re getting now?

Google Analytics - Referral & Landing Page Stats

Campaigns

The campaigns section is one of the most powerful features of Google Analytics. I won’t go into too much depth about campaign tracking, but check out this post if you want more detail about campaign tracking – specifically as it relates to tracking referrals from social media properties like Facebook and Twitter. You can view campaign tracking by clicking on Traffic Sources –> Incoming Sources –> Campaigns. Campaigns are a great way to accurately track exactly how visitors are coming to your site.

If you place several different banner ads on a website (let’s say you have IntAdA, IntAdB and IntAdC as your different ads), you can append special Google Analytics campaign tracking codes to each link on those banner ads so you know exactly who came from which ads and which ads performed best. The first thing to understand is what Google’s campaign parameters are and how to add them to your links. Below are the basic campaign tracking parameters that we’ll use.

• utm_campaign: Your campaign name (IntAdA, IntAdB, IntAdC in this example, but it could also be another campaign name or a date if you’re tracking an email send)
• utm_source: The source for the link (The site your ad is placed on for this example – we’ll call it AdSite.com – but it could also be Twitter, Facebook, HootSuite, TweetDeck)
• utm_medium: Identify your medium (For this example, we’ll call it BannerAd, but it could also be email, search, social media, SEM, display ads, twitter, facebook, etc.)

If I were running an ad campaign to push people to the Interviews section of Social Mediarology, the page I’d push visitors to would be: http://socialmediarology.com/category/interviews/. But, to more accurately track the entire campaign – including the different creative versions of my ad, I’d append the following to the end of the URL: ?utm_source=AdSite.com&utm_medium=BannerAd&utm_campaign=IntAdA So the full link would look like this: http://socialmediarology.com/category/interviews/?utm_source=AdSite.com&utm_medium=BannerAd&utm_campaign=IntAdA

The easiest way to create trackable links like this is by using the Google Analytics URL Builder. Simply put in the link you want to append tracking code to and enter the campaign, source and medium names into their respective spaces and the site will generate your trackable link for you. Throw that long URL into a URL Shortener and you’ve got a short URL you can easily share via Facebook, Twitter and other social mediums. Within Google Analytics, you can now visit the Campaign section and you can filter sort and search for your campaign, source and medium names to see how much traffic you received from all your different campaigns.

Content

Google Analytic’s Content section features detailed information on individual pages, events (like outbound clicks) and in-site search metrics. Depending on how you’ve set up Google Analytics, your outbound clicks and in-site search may or may not work right off the bat, but the Site Content section will be a section you use quite a bit.

Site Content

Within the Site Content menu, you can look at Pages which sorts all the pages on your site by the number of pageviews. It’s a great quick way to check out what your most viewed pages are so you can know what your top content was for the time frame you’re looking at.

You can also look at the Content Drilldown section that allows you to drill down deep into your site architecture to see how many views a particular page or blog post got during the time period you’re looking at. This is where I spend most of my time, as you can add a secondary dimension like City, Region or Browser which can give you a much more granular look at who’s visiting which pages.

Google Analytics also lets you dig down into your Exit Pages. An exit page is the last page a visitor was on before leaving your domain altogether. In the end, the exit percentage for every website is 100, but by looking in depth at the Exit Pages section you can see which pages are particularly notorious for sending people away from your website.

If your top exit pages are confirmation pages that visitors receive after placing an order with you, that’s not necessarily a bad thing – but couldn’t you offer them something on that page to convince them to stay at your site a little longer? If some of your top exit pages happen to be during the checkout process BEFORE visitors have purchased from you – then you’ve got a problem and need to figure out how to close the deal with those visitors before the exit your site completely.

Landing Pages is another section in the Site Content area of Google Analytics. Here you’re able to see your pages sorted by number of entrances. It’s a great way to look at your top few landing pages on your site and dig down into how people are finding those pages. In the screenshot below, I took a top landing page and segmented it by source – now I can see how many people are coming to into our site from that post through Google, Bing, Yahoo, Facebook and more.

Site Search

Google Analytics’ Site Search section allows you to dig down into how visitors are using your internal search to find what they’re looking for on your site. Setting up site search is something you’ll have to do (or have your IT department do) in addition to the basic Google Analytics setup, but it setting up your GA account to track your internal site search isn’t too difficult. In Google Analytics, you can modify the account settings and there’s a place under the Profile Settings tab where you can request that GA tracks Site Search. All you have to do is enter the parameter your site uses for search and GA will start tracking it.

Events

Events is  pretty flexible part of Google Analytics. you can set up the Events section to track all of your outbound links and any downloads you offer on your site. Events were added to Google Analytics relatively recently and they’re a great addition. Before Events, most outbound clicks were tracked as pageviews – which can seriously affect your webstats with inaccurate numbers.

Overview

There are many different analytics packages (including free packages like Yahoo Web Analytics and GoingUp or paid packages like Mint, Woopra and WebTrends) and Google Analytics may not be the best package for your business. However, as one of the most popular web analytics packages in use today, understanding Google Analytics and how you can use it for your business is extremely important.

Do you use Google Analytics or some other package for your blog or website?

Related posts:

1. Two Great New Features from Google Analytics
2. How To: Track All Your Traffic From Twitter
3. Has Google Lost It’s Edge?

For the most part, by looking at your analytics software (I’ll use Google Analytics for example, since it’s what I use and it’s free), you can click on the Referring Sites section and see how many visitors came to your website from Facebook, Flickr, Foursquare and other social sites, but the real fly in the ointment is Twitter. You’ll see Twitter.com in your Referring Sites section, but it’s likely that you’re getting more visits from Twitter than just the ones you see.

The visits you see from Twitter.com are just that – they’re only visits made by people clicking on your link while looking at their Twitter accounts on Twitter.com. In fact, Mashable just reported that Twitter just announced that 40% of all tweets come from mobile devices – an astounding number. This only underscores the importance of making sure you can track all Twitter traffic accurately. Currently, you won’t see mobile or desktop applications like TweetDeck, HootSuite or Seesmic show up in your analytics data. So, there’s a large group of visitors that you may not be properly attributing to Twitter.

If you’re using Google Analytics to track your web stats, it’s actually pretty easy to begin capturing all of your referrals from Twitter. We’ll be using Google Analytics Campaign tracking codes to do this. The first thing to understand is what Google’s campaign parameters are and how to add them to your links. Below are the basic Campaign tracking parameters that we’ll use.

• utm_campaign: Your campaign name
• utm_source: The source for the link (HootSuite, TweetDeck, TwitterFeed, Email Newsletter)
• utm_medium: Identify your medium (email, search, social media, twitter, facebook, etc.)

For example, if I wanted to point people to the Interviews section of Social Mediarology, I would post this link on Twitter from TweetDeck: http://socialmediarology.com/category/interviews/. But to more accurately track those visitors from Twitter I’ll append the following data to the URL above:

?utm_source=TweetDeck&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Interview

So the full link would look like this: http://socialmediarology.com/category/interviews/?utm_source=TweetDeck&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Interviews. Nice long URL, huh? Not to worry, your standard URL shortener will compress all that to a nice small URL to post to Twitter (http://bit.ly/fwzSam).

Now, next time you log into Google Analytics, look under Traffic Sources then Campaigns and you can search for all the campaigns you ran through Twitter and find out how many people clicked through. You can even have one Campaign with different links you post to Twitter, Facebook, Email and other mediums and all you have to change is the utm_medium or utm_source parameters.

The best part is you don’t have to remember how to add all the parameters to your links, just check out Google’s free URL Builder and it will create the URLs for you. In fact, if you use TwitterFeed to push your blog posts through to Twitter or HootSuite to manage your social media presence, you can set up their baked-in URL shorteners to automatically append analytics tracking data.

TwitterFeed:

Log in, and either create a new feed or edit an existing feed. On Step 2, you can add services to push your feeds to, add or edit one of your Twitter services to see the ability to add UTM Tags.

I really like the ease of using TwitterFeed because there are several options they allow and you can push your feed to multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts. The ability to add in custom tracking parameters is a real plus.

HootSuite:

HootSuite is just as easy. When you’re logged in, click in the box where you add a URL to shorten, Then click on the down arrow to the left of the Shrink button. Select Custom URL Parameters and you can fill out either one-time parameters or you can add parameters in as a default. Now these parameters will be added to the end of any link you shorten through HootSuite.

If you selected the Always apply when creating Ow.ly links box, the parameters will be appended to every link you create, so if you’re linking to external websites, they’ll see your tracking code on their site as well, but as long as it’s included on links to your site, that’s what really matters.

Hopefully this brief walk-through helps you to start tracking more of your visits from Twitter. Have you noticed that your referrals from Twitter didn’t look as strong as you expected them to?

Related posts:

1. How To: Monitor Twitter Using Twilert
2. Sharing, Retweeting and Mentions on Facebook and Twitter
3. What is Twitter?

Bit.ly:

Bit.ly is the most popular URL shortener online today, and for good reason. After bursting onto the scene just a few short years ago, Bit.ly has not been content to sit still for long. They took over as the default URL shortener on Twitter (until Twitter’s proprietary t.co shortener took over a few months ago) and they keep coming up with reasons for people to keep using them. From their easy to access and robust stats to their simple to use API to the inclusion of QR codes, Bit.ly makes using their service very easy.

Features:

• One of the shortest URL shorteners. Since . The minimum length of a Bit.ly link is just 19 characters! That only takes up about 13% of your tweet (140).
• Easy to view click stats: Simply add a + to the end of any Bit.ly URL (http://bit.ly/SocMedrlgy+). You can easily see how many clicks your link received and where those clicks are coming from.
  • The stats even show you how many times your link was retweeted and shared on Facebook.
• Allows for easy customization of shortened URLs: (bit.ly/b4yn9p turns into http://bit.ly/SocMedrlgy) easily.
• Allows for link bundling: Let’s say you’re sending 10 links to some coworkers to look at some research you’ve been doing. You can bundle those links into 1 bit.ly bundle link so you don’t have to copy and paste 10 different links to each person.
• Bit.ly has a Pro option that is free and offers you the ability for your bit.ly links to be branded with your own custom shortened URL. For example, the New York Times uses nyti.ms, the Huffington Post uses huff.to. Just another way you can extend your brand and use a great URL shortener at the same time.
• Robust API that allows you to integrate your Bit.ly account to shorten URLs in many social media management applications like TweetDeck and TwitterFeed.
• Automatically creates a QR code: Bit.ly automatically creates a QR code for each and every shortened URL you create. This is hugely important as smartphones and QR codes are being used more each day.
  • Don’t know what QR codes are? Check out this good intro post for now. I’ll write up a post about QR codes soon too.

Shortfalls:

• Honestly, one of the only reasons I could think to not use Bit.ly is if you’re already using HootSuite or another social media management application that doesn’t allow you to use a third-party URL shortener.

Goo.gl:

Goo.gl is one of the newer URL shorteners. They originally launched exclusively for shortening links to Google-owned properties like YouTube, Google Maps and others, but recently opened up to shorten any link.

Features:

• One of the shortest URL shorteners. The minimum length of a Goo.gl link is just 19 characters! That only takes up about 13% of your tweet (140).
• Easy to view click stats: Follows the Bit.ly model of showing stats for each link by adding a + to the end of the URL (http://goo.gl/VdKMa+). You can easily see how many clicks your link received and where those clicks are coming from.
• Automatically creates a QR code: Just like Bit.ly (in fact, Bit.ly did it first), Goo.gl automatically creates a QR code for each and every shortened URL you create.

Shortfalls:

• Does not allow for customized URLs: http://goo.gl/VdKMa.
• Not used as widely as Bit.ly: This may not really be a negative, but it’s not used nearly as often as Bit.ly (check out this article on ReadWriteWeb all about the top shorteners)

Ow.ly:

One of the first URL shorteners, TinyURL hasn’t done much in terms of upgrading their capabilities in the past 8 years. TinyURL is a simple and plain URL shortener. The provide you with the ability to shorten any URL for display elsewhere on the web.

Features:

• One of the shortest URL shorteners.  The minimum length of a Ow.ly link is just 18 characters! That only takes up about 13% of your tweet (140).
• More secure stats: Since you can only view the stats on your shortened URLs if you created them and you’re logged into your HootSuite account, you don’t have to worry about others seeing the stats from your links.
• Through the HootSuite interface, you can download your clicks data to a csv file for manipulating offline.
• Allows you to upload pictures, files (and soon videos) to a shortened URL as well. This is great, because you don’t have to host the files on your own server – just let Ow.ly host them for you.

Shortfalls:

• Does not allow for customized URLs: http://ow.ly/3nmhr.
• No easy way to view tracking information outside of HootSuite. You can’t simply add a + to the end of your URL to view stats like you can with bit.ly. Instead, you have to log into HootSuite and use their stats interface to view info about each individual link.
• Does not (currently) automatically create QR codes for you with each shortened URL.

Budurl:

I used Budurl for about a year in late ’08 through late ’09. One reason I started using it is that I started getting more active on Twitter and I needed a URL shortener that would give me some statistics about how many clicks I was getting on my links. Budurl was one of the first URL shorteners to offer basic stats like that. Budurl now offers several levels of paid plans in addition to a free plan.

Features:

• Allows for customized shortened URL: budurl.com/socmedrlgy
• Preview function: By placing ? at the end of the URL (budurl.com/socmedrlgy?), users will see a preview to see where your shortened link will bring them. By using the preview feature, you can ensure you won’t be led to any risky sites without your knowledge.
• Basic click numbers in the free account: You can see the number of clicks each URL received.

Shortfalls:

• Fairly long”short” URLs: While a Budurl link isn’t quite as long as TinyURL links, it’s still relatively long. The minimum length of a Budurl link is at least 24 characters! That’s just over 1/6^th of the total characters allowed in a tweet (140)
• Very basic tracking metrics on free account: This is probably the biggest reason I’d recommend using one of the other URL shorteners I already mentioned. While the basic click-through numbers are nice for the free account, you don’t get into the really good stats until you start paying $8, $12 or $49 a month. Still, not a bad price for good analytics, but you can get a lot of the same features for free from Bit.ly.
• Free version does not (currently) automatically create QR codes for you with each shortened URL.

TinyURL:

One of the first URL shorteners, TinyURL hasn’t done much in terms of upgrading their capabilities in the past 8 years. TinyURL is a simple and plain URL shortener. The provide you with the ability to shorten any URL for display elsewhere on the web.

Features:

• Allows for customized shortened URL.
  • Instead of this url: tinyurl.com/2fr2atm I could create this one: tinyurl.com/socmedrlgy- slightly more customized and memorable.
• Preview function. By placing preview. before tinyurl in the URL (preview.tinyurl.com/socmedrlgy), users will see a preview to see where your shortened link will bring them. By using the preview feature, you can ensure you won’t be led to any risky sites without your knowledge.

Shortfalls:

• Long “short” URLs: Even though the link that TinyURL generates is significantly smaller than the original link you submitted, it’s still relatively long as far as modern URL shorteners are concerned. The minimum length of a TinyURL link is at least 26 characters! That’s nearly 1/5^th of the total characters allowed in a tweet (140)
• Very little innovation: While TinyURL has been around for almost 9 years, they have changed very little about the site and have not kept up with the new players in terms of innovation and features they offer.
• No tracking metrics: This is probably the biggest reason I’d recommend staying away from TinyURL. With all of the other big players in the URL shortener field providing some level of tracking and anlaytics, there’s just no real benefit to go with TinyURL over one of the others.
• Does not (currently) automatically create QR codes for you with each shortened URL.

You can decide which URL shortener works best for you, but it’s best to use one that will work in concert with your other efforts. If you manage a Twitter account, Facebook page, MySpace profile and a Foursquare account, it might make more sense to use Bit.ly or Ow.ly, since they can be hooked up with Social Media management tools. If you’re just looking for something simple and no-frills, Goo.gl or Bit.ly might be for you. Have you used shortened URLs before? Which service to you typically use?

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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.

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1. What’s the Buzz about Google Buzz?
2. Two Great New Features from Google Analytics

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

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1. Two Great New Features from Google Analytics

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.

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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?

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