Online This Week: Feb. 24, 2012
This is my review of noteworthy things that happened this week involving Online Presence Management, search engine internet marketing, search engine news and website SEO. I’ll also be mixing in some technology business news, tech gadgetry news, and tech-culture news.
Here’s my list for the week of Feb.20-Feb. 24, 2012:
Online Privacy Battles Heat up
Google recently announced a consolidation of privacy policies for its many different products into one comprehensive privacy policy for all Google products, that is scheduled to go into effect March 1st. Google’s stated intention for the move was to simplify all of those privacy policies into one privacy policy. The more cynical observers of the move saw it as a means for Google to be able to seamlessly share all data collected by all of their properties amongst themselves. This allows Google to build a more detailed user profile and thus more effectively target you for advertising. This has unleashed firestorm of activity and blogging on Privacy. This week, this article in ZDNet reported that the Center for Digital Democracy said that Google has misled and sugarcoated the new privacy policy, asked for FTC action. On Thursday of this week, the Obama administration announced the creation of a “Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights”, which is said to be “voluntarily” supported by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL. Read more about the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights at SearchEngineWatch.com or Marketingland.com. Will this “Bill of Rights” give any real privacy protection, or has the Obama administration been taken for a ride by these companies who have offered “voluntary cooperation” to a list of objectives that they will be in no way legally bound to actually comply with? The plan is to move forward with the Bill of Rights to establish codes of conduct that the FTC will be able to enforce, but by then the stakeholders working with government should sufficiently water down the code so that it no longer has any real teeth. The truth is that Google and Facebook provide amazing services to millions of users for free. The price paid by the users for using that service is paid in units of privacy. If you’re not comfortable with that, don’t use them. As this ZDNet article points out, you never had any privacy, so get over it already.
Foxconn and Apple
On Monday Dateline aired a special report on working conditions at the Foxconn manufacturing facility in China, where some of the biggest names in high tech devices, including Apple, assemble their devices. You can watch the video of their report here.
Apple and Foxconn responded to the CBS News story and the working conditions at the plant with statements attacking 2 details in the report. You can read about their response in this BusinessInsider.com story as well as this Mashable.com article.
This ZDNet article gives an interesting take on working conditions in China. What do you do when a country has such a low level of humans rights that what we would consider barbaric is welcomed openly by millions of workers? 3000 workers apply for jobs at Foxconn every week. As this BusinessInsider.com article points out, what we may view has horrible working conditions have been welcomed by some Chinese as their only alternative to rice farming or prostitution.
Google Heads up Display Glasses by the end of 2012?
Augmented Reality could be a step closer to amazing reality if reports of Google working on heads up display glasses are true.
Google heads up display glasses are said to be similar to these Oakley Thump MP3 player glasses shown below.
This article in Mashable.com says that Google is working on glasses with a built in camera that could make augmented reality an actual reality by the end of 2012. The heads up display would allow you to navigate on screen commands projected onto the inside on the sunglass looking devices. Small head motions control the user interface. They would be Android based and have augmented Reality functionality overlaid over the real world. The price point would be in the $150-$600 range, about the same as a smart phone. Read more at PCWorld.com or Extremetech.com.
Online This Week: Feb. 17, 2012
This is my review of noteworthy things that happened this week involving Online Presence Management, search engine internet marketing, search engine news and website SEO. I’ll also be mixing in some technology business news, tech gadgetry news, and tech-culture news.
Here’s my list for the week of Feb. 13-Feb. 17, 2012:
Twitter: We Keep Your iPhone contacts Too
Last week the social media website Path got into some trouble when it was discovered that their iPhone app captured your iPhone contacts and copied them to their server. It was revealed this week and reported in this Mashable.com article that Twitter’s iPhone apps ‘find a friend’ feature was also storing contact information on their servers. Following the Path incident last week, two members of congress sent a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook. The letter asked Apple to clarify its privacy policy. Late Wednesday Apple released a statement saying iOS apps accessing users contact lists will require explicit permission. That was reported in this AllThingsD article.
DuckDuckGo hits Milestone of 1 million Searches
DuckDuckGo, the small startup search engine that bills itself as the Google alternative that respects your privacy, reached an impressive milestone this week. On Monday they cracked the 1 million searches per day milestone. This article in searchengineland.com reported on the milestone. Although the milestone is impressive, they are far from cracking into the search engine big 5: Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask and AOL. Google handles over a billion searches per day.
Volunia Rolls out Beta Testing
The search engine startup Volunia began sending out logins to Beta testers this week. I wrote of my experiences with Volunia in a blog post earlier this week. The search engine has a unique approach to the concept of socializing search. Volunia’s approach is especially interesting in light of Google’s attempts to socialize search with a much different approach.
Continuing Dialog on Google Search Plus Your World and SEO
There is still much being written in the tech/SEO blogosphere about Google Search Plus Your World (SPYW) change. SEOs are struggling to understand what Google’s increased focus on Google+ in search engine results means for SEOs and search marketing in general. As the initial blowback by users fades and the realization that this change is probably here to stay settles in, some prominent SEO thought leaders have presented some pragmatic guides for developing Online Presence Management strategies. I reported on the reports in a blog post this week. The first guide was title ‘Google Plus Box Ranking Factors’ and appeared in SearchEngineLand. The second more in-depth guide by AJ Kohn on the BlindFiveYearOld site was titled ‘Ultimate Google+ SEO Guide’.
Online This Week: Feb. 10, 2012
This is my review of noteworthy things that happened this week involving Online Presence Management, search engine internet marketing, search engine news and website SEO. I’ll also be mixing in some technology business news, tech gadgetry news, and tech-culture news.
Here’s my list for the week of Feb. 6-Feb. 10, 2012:
Path makes a Privacy Blunder
The ‘personal’ social media, Path.com, made a huge privacy blunder this week. I wrote a blog post on January 9th that outlines Paths plan to be a smaller, more intimate social media site, limiting its members to 150 friends. It was discovered this week, and reported in this businessinsider.com post, that Path, which is primarily designed for mobile use on smart phones, was scanning the address book of all of its users, and saving all of their contact information on their servers. Path responded to the charges by saying the reason for storing contact info was so they could alert users when friends from their contact list had joined Path. This explanation was fairly weak, since other apps including Facebook, foursquare and Instagram scan your contacts to alert you when a friend has joined, but they do not upload the contact info and store it on their server. Path says a new version for Android will soon let you opt out of the ‘feature’, and they are working on one for iOS. It may be too little too late for the fledgling social media. This post on ZDNet by one disgruntled user may be the typical reaction of people who had placed their faith in Path.
Protest against Apple for Chinese Working Conditions
The past few weeks have seen many expose stories in mainstream as well as tech media about the working conditions at Foxconn, the Chinese factory that produces Apple products, as well as products for many other electronics manufacturers. This week the leaders of an online protest delivered 250,000 signatures they had gathered to Apple stores in San Francisco, New York, Washington D.C., Bangalore, London and Sydney. Change.org founder Ben Rattray delivered the signatures to the store in San Francisco. The petitions ask Apple to make the iPhone5 the first ethically produced iPhone, and for Apple to take a leadership role in the Chinese production market. Read more about the protest here. This businessinsider.com chart shows what would happen if Apple took a leadership role by transferring just $1 billion of its offshore profits to wages for the employees of the Foxconn factory.
UPDATE: On Monday February 13, 2012 Apple announced that they had asked the Fair Labor Association to audit the company’s Foxconn Shenzhen and Chengdu, China. Read more about it in this ZDNet article.
Pinterest Becomes Fastest Startup to 10 million Unique Visitors
Pinterest, the social media site that allows users to share links of interest with pictures, became the fastest growing startup to reach 10 million unique visitors ever. I discussed the start up, their business strategy, and their incredible growth in a blog post earlier this week. Pinterest’s core group of early adopters has been 18-34 year old women in the American heartland, which is a very different demographic than most start-ups target. Will Pinterest’s model scale to reach other demographics with different interests, or will it remain mostly about women’s clothes, recipes, home furnishing ideas, and ‘cute’ pictures? If the format scales to be interesting for other demographics, Pinterest could end up bigger than Facebook or Twitter. Its model also makes it very appealing as a marketing tool. Keep an eye on this growing phenomenon.
Consumers Concerned about Personalized Search
In light of all of the negative publicity surrounding Google Search Plus Your World, I was wondering if this reaction was just within the search engine internet marketing community, or if there has been reaction in the mainstream search user world. An interesting study by AYTM Market Research shed some light on this question. The following graphic appeared in this article in eMarketer.com:
As the chart shows, only 15.5% of users liked personalized search results. 39.1%, said yes but qualified the yes with but I do have some concerns about privacy. 45.4% said they thought everyone should see the same results when searching the same keyword.
Another complaint about Google’s Search Plus Your World was the use of Google+ as the only social media signal used in customizing the results. Another survey on Google+ Usage by internet users in general also shed some interesting light on the coverage of Google+.
19.5% of Internet users do not know what Google+ is. 19.3% have an account. 20.3% have an account but don’t use it, and 40.9% do not have a Google+ account. No matter how hard Google tries to push Google+, it does not seem to be getting any real traction as a social media platform.
These two surveys point out two facts that Google may have underestimated when they went forward with their Search Plus Your World Change. First, a lot of people don’t think search should be customized for each person. If you add in people that could possibly see the benefit, but they have privacy concerns about customized personal search, you are looking at 85% of people either don’t want it or have privacy concerns with it. Second, Google+ is not being accepted by mainstream users. More people in this survey had never even heard of Google+ (19.5%) than those that said they had a Google+ account and used it (19.3%).
If you have an online presence, and you have concerns about the future of search, what should you do? One of two things will happen. Google will continue to push Search Plus Your World, leveraging their search dominance to increase usage of Google+. If this happens, adding a Google+ Presence to your Online Presence Management Strategy will become vital. The other possibility, given the numbers in this study, would be a rollback of the Search Plus Your World feature. If you are managing an online presence, you might want to wait to commit resources to a strong Google+ presence in the short term.
Online This Week: Feb. 3, 2012
This is my review of noteworthy things that happened this week involving Online Presence Management, search engine internet marketing, search engine news and website SEO. I’ll also be mixing in some technology business news, tech gadgetry news, and tech-culture news.
Here’s my list for the week of Jan. 30-Feb. 3, 2012:
Google’s New Privacy- Reaction Continues
This story continues to dominate discussions in the Search Engine Marketing blogosphere. As announcements of the change were sent out to all Gmail users, and a page was set up announcing the changes to all users as they logged in, reaction to the change has been overwhelming and mostly negative. This businessinsider article reported that according to Google ‘most users love it’. This ZDNet article looks at Washington’s misguided interest in Google’s new privacy policy. This fastcompany article has a list of suggestions for maintaining your privacy with competing services.
Microsoft vs. Google in a Privacy Smackdown
It started with a post to the official Microsoft blog in the early morning hours Wednesday. The post suggested that Google users fed up with privacy concerns should consider Microsoft’s suite of competing products. It suggested Microsoft had more of a commitment to privacy. It also announced plans for Microsoft to place ads in major newspapers that would make the same claims to Google users in an appeal to win them over. It escalated when Google responded on its public policy with a post titled ‘Busting myths about our approach to privacy’. In it Google listed seven myths about Google privacy, followed by the facts the supposedly ‘busted’ the myths. Five of the seven myths cited sources from Microsoft as the origin of the myth. In a humorous turn to the story, Microsoft leaked a funny video called ‘Gmail Man’. It shows Gmail Man reading everyone’s mail as he is delivering it. The video was shown originally to a limited audience at Microsoft’s Global Exchange Server Conference, but somehow found its way onto Youtube thisweek.
Facebook IPO
Facebook filed paperwork this week in advance of its impending IPO. The tech blogosphere analyzed and read all kinds of meaning into every detail of the paperwork. This ZDNet article looks at post-IPO challenges to Facebook and its ‘hacker way’. This article in WebProNews looked at things in the IPO filing that could end up killing Facebook. I looked at what some of the filings said about Facebook and their business model, and I examined the balancing act between user privacy and keeping advertisers happy in this blog post.
Facebook IPO and What it Reveals
Facebook’s S-1 filing to IPO gives a little insight into their business model, plans for growth, and the quandary that both Facebook and Google face.
The business model has, on the surface, seemed fairly simple. As discussed in this FastCompany article ‘What is Facebooks Business?’, the main strategy is to create a place where people want to hangout, upload content, update their status, and exchange messages. Targeted ads placed next to that content accounted for $3.2 billion of the $3.7 billion that Google generated last year. Third party apps (mostly Zynga) brought in the other $500 million.
The plans for growth are really limited to three options. To approach the $100 Billion valuation of the IPO they will have to bring in more people, serve more ads, or raise the price of those ads. In all likelihood they will attempt to do all three of those things. With 845 million users and China off limits, increasing the number of users is not a sustainable long term strategy, since there are only 7 billion people on the planet. So they will need to focus on improving the service to increase the time users spend on Facebook, so that they are able to push more ads, while at the same time collecting as much information from you to better target the ads, thus creating a better conversion rate, and the ability to charge more for those ads. Luring users in with features they enjoy, while at the same time enticing them to give up more personal information is really the strategy they must employ. The recent Timeline feature is a perfect example of this strategy. A tool that essentially attempts to extract as much information from you about your life history is packaged as a ‘feature’ that allows you to tell your life story. Will users buy this? And for how long?
The quandary that both Facebook and Google face is a delicate balancing act between keeping users and advertisers happy. They both seem to be in a race to extract as much information from their users, so that the profiles they can build for their advertisers assure better targeting, and ultimately better conversion rates for the advertising. The real trick is to keep both groups happy simultaneously.
What does this mean for the small business owner who has an online presence to worry about? The advice for any of my Indianapolis SEO and Online Presence Management clients would be that there are amazing opportunities for search engine internet marketing. Google Adwords allows you to purchase ad placement in front of people who are already looking for you. Although not as effective as organic SEO for conversion, it is the quickest route in the short term to Google front page placement for your business. For long term success, organic SEO can achieve first page rankings that will have higher conversion rates than Pay-Per-Click. In the even longer term, it is important to keep abreast of trends such as the current privacy issues that users seem to be having more frequently. As Google and Facebook both continue the delicate balancing act between keeping users and advertisers happy, you need to know whose stock is rising and falling with users, and manage your online presence accordingly.
Google, Facebook, and Twitter: What Happened Last Summer?
I was reading an article about the recruiting strategies of Twitter, and one of the comments slammed working at twitter as a place to work. He had a small graph to back up his claim that Twitter was fading. This graph couldn’t possibly be correct, I thought. With all of the hype surrounding social media, Twitters reach could not possibly be on the decline already, could it? So I found a tool that he had used to graph ‘Reach’, according to Alexa. They define reach as the percent of all users who visit a given site. It is expressed in the number of users per million who visit that site. Here is the graph of reach for the last two years for twitter:
Wow, it appears that Twitter’s reach peaked in July or August of last year, and does in fact appear to be on a downward trajectory. This made me a little curious about the reach of some other sites, so I tried Facebook. Surely Facebook has an ever-expanding reach. Here’s the same Alexa Reach graph for Facebook:
Facebook was also on the expected upward growth in reach, until July-August of last year. They aren’t dropping, but their reach obviously flattened out at around the same time frame. Interesting, but just a coincidence? Let’s look at Google, same time frame:
Google appear to have peaked at just over 500,000 out of a million, or half of all users in early July of last year. Although not as dramatic as Twitter or Facebook, they did have a sharp drop in August and an apparent flattening out of growth in their reach since that point in time.
What does this mean? Google, Twitter, Facebook, what happened last summer? Did the public reach some tipping point of oversaturation from these three major players on the internet? These figures are gathered from users of the Alexa tool bar, was there a change in Alexa users that caused these figures to change? If you have any theories, Please comment below.
If you have an online presence, trends can impact how you should be allocating your resources to best strengthen your online presence. It is important to follow trends in search and social media. If you have a social media strategy, it is important to know the potential reach of social media. It is much hyped right now, but is the general public growing tired of Twitter and Facebook? It is important to have better search engine rankings, but is Google losing its reach? If so it bears watching, and you might want to cover your bases. There are many ways to be found on the internet, and a good online presence management strategy involves making sure you are found in all of those places. Good website SEO is important, but things are constantly changing, so being found everywhere is better.
Online This Week: Jan. 27, 2012
This is my review of noteworthy things that happened this week involving Online Presence Management, search engine internet marketing, search engine news and website SEO. I’ll also be mixing in some technology business news, tech gadgetry news, and tech-culture news.
Here’s my list for the week of Jan. 23-Jan. 27, 2012:
Apple releases 4th Quarter Revenue
On Tuesday of this week Apple announced its revenue for the 4th quarter of 2011, and as MG Siegler observed in this TechCrunch story, it was “The Day Apple Left the Tech World’s Collective Mouth Agape”. The numbers were staggering: $46.33 billion in revenue with $13.06 billion in profit.
Google and Facebook Announce Changes
Possibly trying to go under the radar because of Apple’s stunning revenue reports, Facebook and Google both made announcements that could ultimately prove very unpopular. Some have suggested they hoped these announcements would attract less attention in the technical blogosphere by timing them to coincide with the Apple Revenue numbers. Regardless, both stories blew up the tech blogosphere, as well as crossing over into mainstream media. Google announced it would be sharing all tracking data across all of its properties, including Gmail, Google+, search, YouTube, and more. This will allow them to ostensibly generate more detailed user profiles to better target ads. Their justification, of course, was to provide a better user experience. Read more about Google’s change in my earlier blog post. Facebook announced that the Timeline feature will be rolled out as the only user profile in the near future. The Timeline profile should allow Facebook to capture more detailed user profiles, again to better target ads. Facebook also claimed the purpose was to enhance user experience. Read more about Facebook’s changes and the growing backlash against both companies in my recent blog post.
“Don’t Be Evil” Bookmarklet Shows Google’s Bias
A tool developed by Facebook and Twitter engineers took a slap at Google’s hypocrisy and their corporate logo. The tool attempts to show what Google search results should look like if they indexed all social media, and not just Google+. For a great explanation of how it works and more about the Focus on the User website, read this informative article written by Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land.
Google vs. Facebook: Loser? Privacy
An article in USAToday this morning stated “Google and Facebook might have finally gotten the average consumer riled up about privacy”. Google and Facebook both made big announcements yesterday concerning user data and how it will be collected, used, and displayed. I wrote a blog post yesterday about Google’s announced changes. Basically, Google will begin sharing all of the data that it collects across search, Google+, Gmail, Youtube, and it’s other properties. They changed their privacy policies by rolling some 60+ privacy policies into just one.
Facebook announced yesterday that within the next few weeks their new timeline feature will become the profile for all users, and no longer an option. The timeline feature makes it easier for Facebook to profile users. As people adjust to the change, they may feel like data that was private before has been pushed to the timeline. They will have to adjust to new privacy settings under the new feature, and I expect the outcry against it from the general public will be louder than the last feature change that changed the newsfeed.
Both Google and Facebook have seemingly thumbed their noses at any question of privacy violations. They both seem to have the attitude they can do whatever they want with data that they collect from the users of their services. There are huge stakes here, as they battle to provide more detailed user profiles, which allow them to offer better targeted marketing. The global online advertising market is expected to grow from $80 billion this year to $132 billion in 2015, according to eMarketer.
So who or what can stop them? Both companies have had their problems with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and there have been calls for further inquiries into both. Both companies have increased their lobbying budgets, Google from $5.2 million in 2010 to $9.7 million in 2011, and Facebook from $351,000 in 2010 to $1.4 million in 2011. Don’t expect more than a slap on the wrist from the FTC. The only thing that could stand in their way would be users turning away from their services because they just get too fed up with privacy violations.
The USA Today article went on to say that the changes announced on Tuesday seems to have struck a chord with users. Have Google and Facebook finally hit a tipping point in their race to profile users at the cost of privacy? Will users begin to walk away from either of the two services out of frustration with privacy violations?
If you are an online presence manager who uses search engine internet marketing, changes allowing improved targeting and retargeting of customers across all platforms could be in the very near future. As long as Google and Facebook manage the reaction to privacy changes so that there is no significant pushback from users, some of the best targeted pay-per-click advertising opportunities ever could soon become a reality.
Google to Merge User Data across More Services
Google announced on Tuesday that it would begin tracking more user data across all of its services, including search, Gmail, YouTube, and others. This story did not just break in the technical search blogosphere, but was a major story in USA Today. Previously, a user habits were only used to target ads within the particular product. When this announced change goes into effect March 1st, activities will be tracked across all of Google’s products to target ads across all of Google’s products. USA today points out that this change reflects Google’s desire to get as large of a share as it can of the US online advertising market, which was $32 billion in 2011.
Google has been faced with a growing challenge from Facebook for online advertising. It is beginning to seem as though there is no limit to the depths to which Google or Facebook are willing to sink in terms of privacy violation to provide better targeted marketing. Better targeted marketing translates to bigger online advertising market share. Facebook is pushing forward with their timeline “feature”. This businessinsider.com article reported that users will be forced to use the timeline feature, whether they like it or not.
This ZDnet.com article goes into a little more detail on the good, the bad, and the scary issues with Googles changes in data collection. Google has pointed out that it is not collecting more data, it is just making all of the data it has about you available to all of its products. The upside to that is that where Google now has 70 different privacy policies for its different products, it will be replaced with one privacy policy. The downside is that basically the privacy policy is that you have none.
This article in Gizmodo.com called Google out and flat out declared that Google has violated its “Don’t be evil” policy. Google’s original policy stated “Focus on the user and all else will follow”. No matter how Google may try to spin some of their recent changes as being all about the user experience, the truth is they are not. Recent changes to incorporate Google+ into search were clearly a move to strengthen their social media offering. They can spin it all they want and say they were improving the relevance of the search results. Anyone looking at that change objectively would see that if they were serious about improving search relevance with social media they would be attempting to include all social media. Now this change to a model that allows sharing of private data across all platforms is very obviously a play to monetize the users data and strengthen their market share in online advertising.
The timing of the announcement? That was a little suspect as well. As this businessinsider.com article points out, they announced the change on the heels of Apple’s earnings announcement. The old method to bury a bad news story was to drop a press release late on Friday of a long weekend. With today’s 24/7 news cycle, apparently the new version of that old trick is to try and bury a story under what you hope is an even bigger news story of your competition.
What does this mean to the users of Google products? Will they grow tired of privacy invasions to the point that it will impact Google’s popularity? There are no signs of that happening yet. There is however a growing undercurrent of mistrust of Google that seems to be growing. Media coverage of some of Google’s latest moves that paint an unflattering picture of Google seem to be spreading from some of the techno-SEO blogs and media to the more mainstream, as in today’s USA Today article.
What does this mean to you if you are have an online presence and you are considering search engine internet marketing? You should eventually be able to do even more targeted marketing than was ever available. Things like retargeted marketing, where ads target users based on keyword searches, gmail content, and their YouTube viewing habits. This could create unprecedented ability to target Pay-Per-Click advertising to an amazing extent.