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Social networks: we’ve all heard of them, and most of us are at least familiar with the basic principles of all the major ones—Facebook is the biggest, YouTube is the place to watch videos, Flickr is for pictures, and Twitter is, well, Twitter. But enough about the basics! We’ve compiled a list of fun social media trivia that’s sure to make you the most popular guy or gal at your next party. Or help you answer a Final Jeopardy question. Or at least make you say “hmm.”

2,330,000,000 – Number of results Google returns for the search term “blog.” The top result is Blogger.com, a Google-owned blogging service.
4,920,093 – Number of people that follow @aplusk (aka: Ashton Kutcher), Twitter’s most popular user.
750,000 – Number of people who joined the group “Students against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook)” when the news feed was introduced in 2005. Twitter, which was introduced in 2006, is a relatively close approximation and simplified version of the Facebook news feed. It currently boasts over 105,000,000 users.
50,237 – Number of times the most popular story on social news site Digg.com has been dugg. The story, entitled “Digg This: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0,” featured a string of code that could decrypt HD DVD format DRM. It was removed after Digg received a cease and desist notice.
11,091 – Number of results Flickr returns for the search term “platypus.”
2003 – Year Friendster, the site that defined social networking as we know it today, was launched. Friendster is still active today. Approximately 90% of its traffic comes from Asia and it continues to work on expanding its Asian presence.
1998 – Year LiveJournal, the granddaddy of all blogging platforms, was introduced.
130 – Average number of Friends a Facebook user has.
37 – Percentage of users who update Twitter using their mobile phones.
4:3 – Ratio of funny children videos to funny cat videos on YouTube. (Funny children may dominate YouTube, but the most dugg video of all time was, you guessed it, a cat video.)
0 – Number of followers many Twitter users had on May 10, 2010. After discovering a bug that allowed users to force other users to follow them without their consent, Twitter admins reset many account holders’ follower counts to zero while they resolved the issue.

Blogs are absolutely soaring in popularity these days. It seems like everyone from our airlines to our hairdressers are publishing something online. But why? What makes blogs such an important social media tool that Marriott and Coke have decided to adopt them? And more importantly, what separates a good blog from a not-so-good one?

The first thing every social media person should know before diving into the blogosphere is what a blog is and what a blog isn’t. Technically what a blog is is a website that people update semi-regularly with news, information, commentary, or just general day-to-day details. Blogs can either be professional or personal, and both types have their own unique set of guidelines. As far a business bloggers are concerned, a proper blog is—

A Whole Slew of Pages that Search Engines can Index
Any blog platform worth its salt will give each of your posts its own unique URL, which means that every entry you post will be a page that Google can index. If you’re a chef and restaurant proprietor, odds are that you didn’t devote a main page of your site to your love affair with Wusthof knives. However, if you write a post about why you love your Wusthof Le Cordon Bleu sandwich knife for slicing cucumbers, searchers could potentially find your restaurant by way of Googling  a combination of Wusthof + knife + cucumber + sandwich (trust me, stranger search combos have been Googled).

A Place Where You Answer Frequently Asked Questions
If you hear a question a lot, why not post a thorough answer on your blog? You should answer the customer queries immediately, of course, but you could also direct them to your blog if the answer is particularly long or complicated. And chances are, if many people are asking you, many more are asking Google, and wouldn’t it be nice if a few of those Googlers happened upon your company’s blog and used your services?

A Place Where You Demonstrate Your Expertise
When potential customers visit your website, they want to know that your company is the best one for the job. If your blog is full of well-written, informative posts, customers will know immediately that the people behind your business are capable and competent.  

Updated Regularly
I’m not saying you have to update your blog every day, but if there are month-long gaps between posts, old readers will lose interest and you won’t accumulate any news one. A loved blog is an effective blog, so try to keep your update schedule consistent.

Now for what a proper blog is not—

A Billboard
Entries about why your creamed corn/seared tuna/artichoke dip is the best and/or better than the creamed corn/seared tuna/artichoke dip down the street aren’t going to be all that useful. Sure, you can post an occasional announcement or promote a product, but by and large blogs aren’t really intended to be hubs for blatant advertising. If you want to post about the 22nd Annual Half-Price Oyster Week at your restaurant, consider doing so in an interesting way (perhaps you could post about how Oyster Week grew into the tradition that it is today or about which wines go best with fried and raw oysters).

A Will/Business Proposal/Other Official Document
A blog is a pretty informal thing, so have fun when you’re writing it! Use contractions and colloquialisms when they’re appropriate. Joke with the reader. Just remember that the voice behind your blog is the voice of your company, so keep it professional and keep it consistent with your company’s image.

Remember that above all else, good blogs are the ones that people find interesting and valuable. If people like what you’re saying, they’ll come back for more, and there’s a pretty good chance that if something you write is especially useful or fresh, it will get passed around, which could translate into more exposure for your business and potentially more money in your pocket.

On April 3, Apple released the newest member of its uber-popular family into the world, and technophiles were so jazzed that they snapped up over 600,000 iPads in five short days. But Apple-hungry consumers weren’t the only ones who were excited about the iPad—most* of the web’s biggest social players were pretty darned enthused as well, and they weren’t afraid to show it:

Google: To take full advantage of the large iPad screen, Google reformatted Gmail. The two-column display is basically an enhanced version of the single column Gmail for Mobile app that was created for the iPhone and Android. (Some Gmail users even argue that Gmail for the iPad is an enhanced version of traditional Gmail and are going to great lengths to make it their desktop default.)
Flickr: The photo and video sharing site gleefully announced on its blog that it would be making its videos iPad-compatible by introducing HTML5 playback. (Until very recently, nearly all websites embedded videos using Flash, but since the iPad doesn’t support Flash, sites are switching their vids over to HTML5 to keep up.)  
WordPress: WordPress also trumpeted its foray into iPad territory on its blog (a move that was actually quite apropos and vaguely existential). The blogging website has released a new version of its iPhone app that’s compatible with the iPad and comes equipped with all sorts of fun features like the ability to geotag blog updates.
YouTube: I found nary a peep about the iPad on the YouTube blog, but Apple was very vocal on the video giant’s behalf. The iPad comes with a built-in YouTube app, which, like big brother Gmail, is formatted to suit the iPad screen.
Facebook: Facebook has been making apps for Apple products since the beginning of time, so everyone was waiting to see what it had in store for the iPad. As it turns out, what it had in store was nothing. More accurately, a Facebook app was in the works for the iPad, but its life was cut short when its programmer took issue with the App Store screening process and quit the project. Some Tom, Dick, or Steve did create a Facebook app called Facebook Ultimate, but it developed a horrible reputation among iPad users (and infringed on the Facebook copyright to boot) and Apple has since removed it from the App Store. There is a bit of hope for the disgruntled Facebook user, and it comes in the form of http://touch.facebook.com/, which is a stripped down version of regular old Facebook that fits better on the iPad screen.
    
*Twitter is conspicuously absent from this list, and with good reason—the micro-blogging phenom didn’t go to any lengths to adapt itself to the iPad. Happily for tweet-o-holics, however, the App Store has been flooded with third-party Twitter apps (the ones from TweetDeck and Twitterific are said to be particularly excellent) that pick up the slack. 

If you’re one of the lucky few techies who’s already gotten his hands on an iPad, go ahead and tweet, blog, email, or update your Facebook status about how you’re tweeting, blogging, emailing, or updating your Facebook status with your all-powerful fingertips. Those of us old-fashioned mice-and-keyboard folks will be mighty jealous indeed.

When I wake up on a Saturday morning and I’m in the mood for pancakes, I don’t go to the YellowPages to find diner listings—I go to Google to find and compare menus. When I back my car into a tree and need someone to pop the dent out, I don’t spend a year watching the newspaper for ads—I go to Google to find a deal. The point: it’s darned near impossible to own a business these days without also owning a website. Trouble is, a lot of business owners think that “owning a website” means jiggering two or three pages together and then never touching them again (or worse, paying good money for a professional-looking site and then failing to keep it updated). Successful websites are not static—they are tweaked, updated, and retooled so they don’t get stale. Successful websites are, in a word, managed, and if you follow these simple site-management musts, your website will continue looking as shiny as it did the day it rolled off the development server.
          
You must check for broken links and programming errors regularly.
Arguably nothing is more frustrating to a site visitor than clicking on an interesting link only to find that it’s broken, or trying to leave feedback and discovering indecipherable code where the form should be. Successful site management means making sure your site continues to work as it is was designed to do.

You must keep things consistent and up-to-date.
Consider this: It’s 1999 and a toy store is about to launch its very first website that’s full of bright colors, beveled buttons, animated graphics, and frames.  Around this time, the toy store staff gets tickets to an advanced screening of Star Wars Episode 1 and decides to post a picture on the homepage of the store owners standing outside the theater in full Jedi uniform. Website visitors think the toy store is trendy, and customers flock to it to get their hands on Darth Maul action figures.

Now it’s 2009: the site’s colors are still bright, the buttons are still beveled (except for the new one that was tacked on when the Wii was released in 2005), the graphics are still spinning, the frames are still frames, and that Episode 1 picture is still on the homepage. Website visitors think Jar Jar Binks was annoying; they want the U.S.S. Enterprise collectible ship. They wonder if you are even still in business. They go somewhere with more modern offerings. Successful site management means making sure your pictures, content, and design are contemporary and consistent so that your customers stick around.

You must freshen up the content.
Soon after a site is launched, a search engine’s web crawlers will visit and scan the content for keywords. The crawlers will come back again in about a week, but if they don’t read anything new, they won’t come back again for two weeks. Then four, then eight, then sixteen. If you announce a promotion during week nine, the search engines (and, by extension, potential customers) won’t know about it until nearly two months later. However, if a site manager regularly adds or tweaks content, s/he gives the crawlers a reason to come back more often, so that when a promotion announcement is launched, web searchers have a chance to find it before it ends. Successful site management means making sure the web crawlers are always coming back for more.

You must find out how pages are performing.
You may sell dog biscuits, table linens, and souvenir shot glasses in your shop around the corner, but if website visitors are devouring the pages you’ve devoted to treats and ignoring everything else, you know some parts of your website are not pulling their weight. Successful site management means monitoring the site’s performance and taking steps to improve it.  

You must not overpay for site management.
Theoretically, anyone can be a site manager. However, website management is not easy task, and your current staff is already busy enough, which means you’d probably have a hire a new person with the right technical and creative credentials just to keep up with the website. That person will expect a salary, insurance, a 401k, paid vacation, and maybe even your first born son. That person will also expect to be paid for the time s/he spends learning about your website management system. A professional, on the other hand, will expect nothing more than a comparatively low monthly or yearly maintenance fee. And (added bonus!) since s/he will likely already have web management experience, all you’ll pay for is service.

Your website is a marketing tool. You wouldn’t let the same television ads and radio spots run indefinitely, so why would you let time wear away an idle website? Don’t allow your website to fail your business: get someone to manage it, stat!

In late 2006, rumors swirled that Google was thinking about purchasing Facebook for a cool $2.6 bil (or maybe less, depending on how willing you were to believe the hype). In the end, Facebook decided to remain independent (a move that seems to have worked to their advantage so far) leaving Google social network-less. Of course, Google is never, ever willing to be outdone, so a few weeks ago the search giant rolled out its very own social network—Buzz.

Buzz is part of Gmail, which Google (rightly) claims has always been a social network waiting to happen. Buzz allows users to create profiles and update their statuses just like its social network competitors, but it’s also sort of like an RSS feed on crack: Users can link any number of social media accounts that they already have (including Flickr, Blogger, Twitter, Google Reader, and YouTube accounts) to their Buzz account so that when they update these networks, the updates automatically appear to their friends on Buzz as well.

Google believes that by promoting Buzz on the Gmail platform, they are giving it distinct advantages over social network numero uno, Facebook. For one thing, users don’t have to search for new friends—Buzz recognizes who's friends with whom via users' Gmail contacts and connects them automatically. Google also boasts that by integrating Buzz into Gmail, users will be able to track Buzz alerts and respond to them without having to follow links and log in to an outside site.
 
Still, with 400 million users, Facebook is without a doubt the top social media dog, and it doesn't seem poised to budge. But social network and media sites are certainly not immortal—before Facebook came along, MySpace was king, and now it’s virtually dead (well, at least as far as people over the age of 16 are concerned). The trouble with MySpace was that it felt incredibly juvenile—users decorated their profiles with sporty and sparkly princess themes, added music that assaulted profile visitors, and “totally wunted u 2 luk @ there pics from SpRiNg BrEaK”! Facebook toppled MySpace because it was cleaner, offered only a single, standardized layout, and promised users increased privacy (it was open only to college students once upon a time, you know).

For all the bells and whistles and apps and Pages that it has added since its inception, Facebook continues to feel like a social network that’s adult and “with it.”  And Facebook users, in spite of their moaning about the endless (and senseless) redesigns, constantly changing privacy settings, and annoying calls to “Join my mafia!” and “Help me raise my barn!” are largely pretty content with Facebook—their friends, their pictures, their videos, and their wall posts are all there, after all. Buzz might catch on among a few Gmail users (in an “I’m here so I’ll give it a try” sort of way) but unless Buzz offers a feature that Facebook absolutely cannot duplicate (and we know from the Twitter-like “live feed” that Facebook will try) it’s hard to believe that the Facebook Empire would actually lose a significant number of its users to the new kid in the Google-verse.

A few months back we sung the praises of Google’s Local Business Center and encouraged all the business owners in the blogosphere to snap up their listings. Creating/claiming a business listing is really one of the simplest things in the world to do, and since Google features its listings front and center on search engine results page one, having a listing is also one of the best ways to reach customers. But if, for some reason, you have not already claimed your listing, you really ought to do so before your competitors can monopolize the top spots. Why? Because most customers figure they can get what they need from one of the first few listings they see, so they won’t look beyond the main pack. Your business listing must occupy one of the top spots if it’s going to be effective. Thankfully, the tricks to boosting your listing’s rank are just as straightforward as getting a listing in the first place:

• Put keywords in the title of your listing: From Google’s perspective, the title of your listing (the name searchers see on the search engine results page) is the most important place for keywords. Your title should indicate what type of business yours is and where it’s located because those terms will be the ones used most often in a search. For example, if you own an art supply store in Chicago called “Glitter ‘n Glue,” the title of your listing should be “Glitter ‘n Glue Chicago Art Supplies.”
• Make sure the business address you enter in your listing exactly matches the address on your website and in internet Yellow Pages: The more often Google sees one business address, the more likely it’ll be to recognize the legitimacy and popularity of that business.
• Submit a phone number with a local area code: Local phone numbers prove to Google that you are actually doing business in the area you claim you are. If you have an 800 number you can add it as an additional number, but it will do you no favors in the primary position.
• Include keywords in the description of your business: Think about some of the words people might use to search for your business and arrange them in a readable 200-word description. Glitter ‘n Glue might choose “canvas,” “crafts,” “paint brushes,” “ceramic,” and “scrapbooking,” but they would never arrange them thusly: “We sell canvas paint brushes for your ceramic and scrapbooking crafts.” Customers want to understand who you are, so make sure your description makes sense to them.
• Fill out as much information about your business as you possibly can: Google wants to have the most complete collection of Local Search business listings on the Web. If you scratch Google’s back by submitting an informative listing, Google will scratch yours by ranking you higher.
• Consider who will be searching for your business: Will your customers be local or out-of-towners? If your customer base is local, you should use colloquial keywords in your listing. For example, if you own an ice cream shop in Rhode Island, it’d be better to mention your 200 varieties of colorful “jimmies” rather than your 200 varieties of colorful “sprinkles.” If your customer base is from out of town (perhaps you own a hotel or a restaurant) identifying your location is especially important because potential customers who are planning a visit will use it as their search term 100% of the time.
• Get reviewed: Potential customers love reading what other people have to say about a business they’re considering using; Google loves listings that can boast a lot of customer reviews. Let your current customers know about your listing and encourage them to leave feedback there.

As always, too much of a good thing can be, well, bad. So don’t stuff keywords (it looks spam-y), don’t write 100 five-star reviews for your own business (it looks fake), and for heaven’s sake don’t create multiple listings (Google really hates that). If you play well and you play fairly, your listing will make you proud.

One of the biggest arguments for encouraging businesses to invest in social media marketing is that they’ll be able to monitor what customers are saying about their brand, guide the conversations, address issues that arise, and generally be more in-tune with how their brand is perceived. Regardless of whether or not you currently use social media to market your business, there’s a pretty good chance that you’ve been touched by a company’s social media monitoring efforts. Well, provided you were one of the over 100 million people who tuned in to the Super Bowl on Sunday to watch the ads as well as the game, that is.

The ad in question wafted onto the TV screen during the third quarter, it lasted a warm and fuzzy minute, and then it faded to black. The ad was from Google, but it wasn’t hawking Google Chrome or Google Android or Google ISP or any of the other new products and services that keep cropping up in the Google-verse. Nope, the ad featured the most basic Google service of all—its search engine:



The ad (called “Parisian Love”) was certainly a hit—a number of outlets have reported that it was one of the most talked-about ads of Super Bowl XLIV —but it also left many people scratching their heads. Google never advertises on TV, why would they spend $6 million to start now? Does Google feel threatened by Bing? Who hasn’t heard of Google search? (To be fair, though, everyone’s heard of Budweiser too, yet we still see their Clydesdales prance through every single Super Bowl.) 

"Parisian Love" wasn’t actually intended to attract the Super Bowl audience to the search engine that made Google famous and still brings in nearly all of its revenue. In fact, the ad wasn’t originally intended to air during the Super Bowl at all. It was created by Google’s creative team and posted to Google’s YouTube channel almost three months ago as one in a series of promotional “Search Stories” videos. The purpose of these videos is not to promote a Google service, but rather to contribute to Google’s “don’t be evil” image. 

According to Google CEO Eric Schmidt , “Our goal was simply to create a series of short online videos about our products and our users, and how they interact. But we liked this video so much, and it's had such a positive reaction on YouTube, that we decided to share it with a wider audience,” said Schmidt. In other words, Google’s monitoring efforts directly influenced their Super Bowl presence. Google could have chosen to remain off-air, they could have put that $6 million toward something else, but when you already know your ad’s a winner (a luxury most other Super Bowl advertisers don’t have. Ahem, Taco Bell.) heck, what’s $6 mil?

And judging by "Parisian Love"’s reported popularity, I think I can safely speak for much of the Super Bowl audience when I say that when that familiar search bar popped up on our TV screens, we put down our buffalo wings and our tasty beverages, we watched, we smiled, and when the “Search On” tag line popped up we sighed, “Well gee wiz, Google! That was an unexpected treat! I wonder if I have any new e-mail.” If you’re already sure that your ad is going to illicit nearly 100 million responses like that, well, what’s $6 mil indeed!     

Google recently rolled out some highly-anticipated real-time features for its search engine that include Twitter and news and blog feeds that can (and often do) occupy the top spots on search results pages. Google says that the changes will give its search engine users access to the most up-to-the-minute news possible.  We say the changes will give social media-savvy business owners an even greater chance of being found online.

Google’s real-time search is meant to give Google users access to news as it breaks, even if the user wasn’t necessarily searching for news. Google gives the following example on its blog: “The big story [in the top position when we searched for GM] was about GM's stabilizing car sales, which shows under 'News results.' Nonetheless, thanks to our powerful real-time algorithms, the 'Latest results' feature surfaces another important story breaking just seconds before: GM's CEO stepped down.…” If the real-time search had been live when Michael Jackson died, Google users searching for his biography might have seen tweets about his death before the mainstream media had a chance to report it (I, for example, found out very early by reading statuses on Facebook).

Could some of this “real-time” news actually be just plain old gossip? It certainly could, yes, but that doesn’t stop it from occasionally receiving top billing, and there are some strategies that businesses can use to make themselves visible in that spot:
•    Tweet about trending topics. They are the ones that make it to the top of the search results page.
•    Update your business page’s Facebook status with subjects people want to know about. Facebook statuses are not yet part of Google real-time search, but they will be in the near future. When they are, their feed will probably behave much like Twitter’s.
•    Blog about interesting or useful information that people will want to share. The more popular a blog post is, the better chance it will have of showing up at the top of the results page.
•    Include keywords in blog titles, status updates, and social media descriptors whenever possible. That way, when people search for one of your keywords, the live feed will show them your blog (and, by extension, your business).

It’s important to note that Twitter feeds and blog posts are not always displayed in the prime top position (they usually only appear there when the searched term is a hot Twitter or current event topic). They are, however, always available in the “Show Options” menu, and there’s no telling where they’ll end up once Google has refined the real-time search algorithm. Google admits that there are quite a few wrinkles it needs to iron out of its upgraded system; however, the mere fact that Google is taking the steps to include social media so prominently in its search results points to the breadth of social media’s influence and to its mighty staying power.

*Google has released this video to demonstrate how its new real-time search functions.

I devoted the majority of my last post to proclaiming "keyword meta tags are not the answer to being found on Google! Invest your web promotion dollars and hours elsewhere!" I mentioned some other avenues for search engine promotion of course, but I'm betting you wouldn't mind a specific example of a worthwhile "elsewhere." Ladies and gentlemen, feast your browsers on Google's Local Business Center. This local business listing service is one of the easiest ways to promote your website to your web browsing customers.

Google a business, any business, followed by the city in which you'd like that business to be, and Google will return a list of relevant business listings, their phone numbers, URLs, and a map marked with where each one is located within the city. Click on the name of one of the businesses and you'll go directly to its website; click on the gray "more" link next to the phone number and you'll be whisked over to the company's own local business listing page. These pages are hosted by Google and are loaded with basic details about the company (business hours, contact info, acceptable payment methods, etc.) and with more advanced material too, like pictures, websites related to the company, and user-added content. The best features of the page are the user reviews--as long as they're mostly positive, customer endorsements could do more for your business than paid ads ever would.      

Getting one of these listings for your company is about as simple as flicking on the lights in your office or store each morning. The service is free through Google--all you have to do is sign up and supply some content to put you business on Google's radar. But as with everything on the web, there are tricks to keeping your business near the top of the listings, like adding fresh content, using the right keywords, promoting your listing page, and garnering customer reviews. I5 web works knows all these tricks and more. We can help you establish your local business listing and increase your chances of being found in relevant searches.