But what is it?

Google Instant predicts what you are searching for based on the partial search phrase you have typed in and instantly provides the search results. As you continue to type the search phrase, the search results continue to update.

The idea is that Google can predict and deliver what you are looking for before you’ve finished typing the search phrase, saving you from having to type the whole phrase or hit that pesky search button.

For instance, if I search for “atlanta hotels”, the moment I type “a”, the results come back with “amazon”. I add the next “t” and the results update to “at&t”. When I add the “l”  the results are for “Atlanta” and if I complete the word and add a space to signify I’m adding another word, the results come back with “atlanta braves”.

I only have to type “atlanta ho” (no sniggering) for Google to predict that I’m searching for “Atlanta Hotels”. It’s that time saving (in my case, of not having to type 4 letters) that Google says will give us the most time savings since the invention of the washing machine.

Potential problems?

Although Google has promised faster searches (the stated 2-5 seconds per search seems high) it could be that repeatedly loading  search results that contain images might actually slow the search process down. Searches that bring back Google Images and YouTube results, such as searching for a celebrity like Lady Gaga,  will have to render the thumbnail images for those Google image photos and YouTube videos. I also don’t know if it was just me but, despite testing on two computers in two different locations,  I found a lag when typing into the search box (maybe Google’s trying to emulate my iPhone).

Furthermore, I wonder whether Google Instant could result in a change in search habits in the way that TV adverts reduce our ability to maintain concentration on the programme we’re watching. Might users become sidetracked by unrelated results that come up mid-search query? Say I’m searching for “jenny craig”, would the pictures of Jennifer Aniston when I’m only 3 letters into “jennifer” distract me and send me looking at different sites, therefore slowing down the speed of my original search?

Although Google Instant has started rolling out today, it may only be users logged into their Google Account who get to see Google Instant at the moment. Google promises to roll it out for everyone over the next little while.

http://www.google.com/instant

Let me know what you think of it.

I'm on a boat!

I’ve written lots about Foursquare for retailers, this post is focused on how you as a consumer or end user can use it. But first…

What is it?

Foursquare is a location-based social networking application for “smartphone” mobile devices (currently Blackberry, iPhone, and Android) and is also a game. Users “check-in” at venues using their mobile phone or text messaging. Users are then awarded points and can also achieve “badges” for certain types of check-ins e.g. “I’m on a boat” badge for checking in on the ferry.

Foursquare was created by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai who founded the similar project called Dodgeball, that Google bought in 2005 and then shut down in 2009.

How does it work?

1. The first thing you need to do is open an account on the Foursquare website.
2. Download the Foursquare app onto your mobile phone and install it.
3. Now login with the account credentials you created.
4. Using the Foursquare app, you can now “check-in” and post “shouts” (updates or tweets) based on where you are and what you’re doing as well as “tips” ( You can choose to have your shouts go to Twitter and Facebook as well. Linkedin can’t be far behind). You can also find your friends, add new friends, search venues, earn badges and ultimately become the “mayor” of a venue.
5. Now go somewhere and “check-in”. If the location isn’t already listed on Foursquare (unlikely but possible), you can add it by following the directions.

Play Foursquare

Foursquare has a practical element to it (more on that later) as well as a game component. You earn points for every check-in and get more points for doing different things like:

• checking in at multiple spots in one day
• being adventurous and exploring different parts of the city
• adding tips for other people to try

You can even become the “mayor” and get a mayor badge for checking in more than anyone else in a 60 day period (note: you need to have a profile photo to receive this badge). You may also make it to the “leaderboard” for most check-ins in a particular period.

Gimme free coffee...

Badges

There are hundreds of badges to be “unlocked” and displayed on your profile. Many of them are fun. There’s the

• Adventurer Check in to 10 different venues. You’ve checked into 10 different venues!
  
• And the Bender That’s four nights in a row for you!
• I’m on a boat! Most Victorian’s will get this badge at some point…
• And my fav, the Barista which has scored my enough free tall darks to keep me awake for weeks…

I'm on a bender!

What I Like

From a consumer’s perspective the practical components or benefits are:

• You can see where your friends are and what they’re up to
• You can find special offers or deals nearby. For example, today I checked in at the Mayfair Mall and up popped an offer from A&E for 25% off any purchase when I check-in there.
• And if you’re competitive in nature you can relish in ousting your friends as mayor by checking in more often than they do.

Whether you are a consumer or a business we would love to hear other’s experience with Foursquare. Please leave a comment below.

Since the last post we have successfully moved our Klout Classification from an Explorer to Activist, which is one step closer to our classification goal of Specialist. In the end all that really comes from this Classification is the fact that it gives you an idea as to how you are using Twitter, and if what you are doing matches your end goals.

In order to have our classification change we had to make some adjustments to the way we used Twitter. As in the last post I decided that we would like to be a specialist so that we can show our knowledge of using Wordpress (and then use this specialist status to hopefully pick up a lead.) We achieved this by doing the following:

1. Participate more in conversations about Wordpress as a Content Management System.
2. Create and Retweet more content about Wordpress as a CMS
3. Follow and engage Twitter users that are actively sharing content mentioned in point 2
4. Follow and engage Twitter users that are following Twitter users mentioned in point 3

Now the next step is to review the other data that Klout shares with us so we can streamline our usage to meet our goal. On your profile page there are 3 tabs at the top, we have focused on the Klout Summary so far but now we will look at the Score Analysis, more specifically the first section called Klout Score.

Klout Score

As stated by Klout this section is a “Measurement of your overall online influence” and off the bat Klout gives you a bold statement of how your Twitter account is perceived. For Sage it states:

@SageInternet needs to engage more with others or be more active to gain influence.

Perfect, so now we know exactly what we need to do. We need to engage with others in order to gain influence. In changing our classification over the past few weeks one of the steps we set out was ‘follow and engage…” What Klout is telling us that we didn’t quite hit the engage part good enough. For now we will continue to along the Twitter path using the steps outlined above and we will focus a bit more on engaging.

Take a look at the statement for you Klout score, and try to follow any advice that it may be dispensing. If it is telling you that you are awesome, then just keep up the good work.

Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo!, is one of the most popular photo storage and sharing sites on the web. It’s free, easy to use & offers a variety of methods for sorting, categorizing and tagging images. People can comment on and rate pictures, and photos can be made private or only viewable by friends and family.

Flickr offers an easy-to-use interface featuring photo thumbnails and the ability to navigate images with the same tags, sets or groups. Various upload methods include the web, email and mobile phone.

Features

• It’s free
• It’s easy to use
• Options for securing your Flickr photos
• Great tagging and organizing system
• Incorporate into blogs and websites
• Use Creative Commons copyright licenses with photos
• Create groups to encourage & facilitate conversations

Users get up to 100 MB of image upload monthly for free. A pro account allows for unlimited photo storage for $24.95 a year.

A potential downside to Flickr is that public photos, unless you specifically add a watermark on your own, can be downloaded and used by anyone. To avoid that you can incorporate Creative Commons copyright license details to inform people of usage rights.

Flickr on your webite or blog

A big benefit of Flickr is the blogging options. You can have Flickr photos automatically rotate on your blog in a sidebar. You can even send photos directly to your blog from your cell phone.

An additional benefit is the ability to organize photos into sets or groups, tag them, or show them on a map displaying the location where the photo was shot.

Social Media Club

Flickr Groups

Another benefit is the ability to create “groups”. A group admin can:

1. Modify information about the group
   • Create or change the group name
   • Create or change the group description
   • Associate the group with an external URL
   • Create a personalized URL for the group
2. Determine whether or not your group topics or pool can be viewed by non-members.
   • Create a group icon
   • Determine group moderation rules
   • Determine what kind of content can be added to the group pool (photos, video or both)
   • Set the frequency of group pool submissions
3. Create group participation rules

There’s no limit on the number of admins a group can have, although once someone becomes an admin, they can never be demoted. A group moderator can:

• Approve or remove photos from the pool
• Moderate group discussions
• Remove or ban members

Search out and join appropriate groups and share your photos in those groups. There are Flickr groups for just about anything. If you own a Scooter Shop there are plenty of scooter related groups. Or maybe you produce Bridal Shows. Get the picture? You can also search out and join groups related to your location — search on your city name, nearby city names, and your province. Posting photos and joining discussions in those groups will enable you to reach a local audience.

Are you using Flickr as a marketing tool? We’d love to hear about it.

If you are still skeptical about how this social media “fad that the kids are doing” can have any business application whatsoever, a recent Gartner report should convince you otherwise.

Gartner’s survey found that most people’s purchases are influenced by social networks, the inference being that companies not marketing using social media are missing the majority of their potential market.

“Our survey results showed that one-fifth of the consumer population is composed of salesman, connectors and mavens. These are three roles that are key influencers in the purchasing activities of 74% of the population.”

Nick Ingelbrecht, Gartner Research Director

Gartner broke the response group into 5 distinct categories and recommends that companies target these intelligently. Of the 5 categories, 3 of them (”Connectors”, “Salesmen”, and “Mavens”) are the major influencers and effected the purchases of just under three quarters of the consumer population.

• Connector — Act as a link that connects different groups of people.
• Salesman — Highly persuasive by nature, these people influence what the people around them buy.
• Seeker — Use social networks to receive advice and recommendations before purchasing.
• Maven — Experts in a field, who love to share that information with all those around them.
• Self-Sufficient — Research in their own time and don’t pay much attention to what those around them think.

What does this mean for marketing your business?

In at nutshell, if you’re not using social media to market your business, you should be, and if you are using social media, you can refine your campaign for better effect.

Identify and develop relationships with your key customers. Target the different category types selectively based on the member characteristics and what your goals are.
For example, be wary that Mavens are going to be vocal about the evaluation of your product but won’t necessarily be positive just because you provided a freebie. The avenues you select for releasing certain information will therefore differ depending on the type (e.g, Promotions, Product Information, Product reviews) and end goal (e.g. Drive brand awareness, increase traffic, increase conversions).

Gartner reports that “social networks have become a critical but underutilised, aspect of the marketing process”, so with less of your competitors already leveraging social media, cultivating these key customers is a way to establish market share with a lower investment than traditional marketing avenues.

YouTube is the most popular video storage and sharing website (there are others like Vimeo and Viddler) with more than 2B (yes that’s billion) views per day and 24 hours of new video being uploaded every minute. It’s free and easy to use, and offers various methods for sorting, categorizing and tagging videos. People can comment and rate videos.

YouTube offers an easy to use interface featuring video thumbnails and the ability to categorize videos by creating tags, playlists or groups. Various upload methods include the web, email and mobile phone.

Pros

• Free and easy to use
• Video editing and annotating tools
• Create your own branded “channel”
• Users can subscribe to your channel or add you as a “friend”
• Provides in-depth analytics (views, demographics, rating, popularity, referrers)
• Great tagging, rating, commenting and organizing system
• Video can be easily incorporated into your blog and/or website (saves disc space)
• You can message friends
• Upload videos from your mobile phone or apps (e.g. FLIP Share)
• Leave responses to other’s video clips.
• Join and/or create groups

Cons

• Easy for visitors to “steal” or leverage/use public videos – potential for copyright infringement.
• Potential for negative comments / videos. You need to pay attention and manage this closely. Surprisingly there’s no RSS feed option for comments.

Pricing

Free.

Groups on YouTube

Another benefit is the ability to create “groups”. A group owner can:

1. Modify information about the group
   • Create or change the group name
   • Create or change the group description
   • Create a personalized group URL e.g YouTube.com/group/YourCompanyName
2. Start conversations / topics
3. Add comments to a topic
4. Rate comments

An excellent example of using YoutTube to effectively build a company brand is BlendTec. If you haven’t see this yet you’re in for a treat.

Another one I like, although it’s completely innocent an not marketing related but a perfect example of what goes viral and what happens when it goes viral is JK’s Wedding Entrance Dance. Again, if you haven’t see this yet you’re in for a treat.

Got any favourite videos or examples of companies using YouTube well. Share them in the comments.

I have to admit I was stumped when it came time to figure out exactly how to do that. Not surprising really as removing, deleting, quitting or canceling accounts etc on most of the social media networks is far less intuitive than joining, liking, friending, following or connecting. They go out of their way to help you join, connect and spread the message, the opposite – not so much.

I checked various pages, the person’s Linkedin profile, my connections list, I highlighted the account – couldn’t find it. Turns out there is a text link to the top right of the Connections page titled “Remove Connections”. Now that I’ve done it and I look back at the page it doesn’t seem as hard to find but then that’s always the case once you done something once.

So aside from the practicalities you may be wondering why I decided to disconnect from this particular person. Without being too scientific about it I figure there are a few levels or types of connections:

• Strong (deep connections)
  • Co-workers (a no brainer)
  • Colleagues, partners, suppliers (also a no brainer)
• Medium
  • People we’ve met at a business function and stay in touch with but may not see in person that often
• Light
  • People we’ve met once at an event and don’t communicate with often (if at all)
  • People that we’ve communicated with but may not have met in person
  • People that have invited us to connect and we reluctantly approved

The connection I removed fell into the very last category. This person also used Linkedin a bit too frequently to post unrelated information from various social networks. I could have used the “hide” button on the Network Activity page to simply not have to see their posts any longer, and I considered that. But to be honest I had never removed a connection and was curious about how to do that.

So there you have it. Not quite as easy as the “unfollow”, “unlike” or ”unsubscribe” but just as effective.  What have you learned today?

PS – I also exported my 580 connections to my Mac Address Book – very easy and useful.

If you click on the “recommendations” link when you are logged into your Amazon profile, you will now be greeted with an option to link the accounts with Facebook Connect

Why would you want to do that?

Amazon will use the “like” data to tailor recommendations more closely to you.  If your friends have also shared their profiles with Amazon, their data will be used too.

Shove over Google

For now you’ll receive recommendations  based on what your friends like so if they all like Ironman II, you can bet Amazon will recommend the Ironman boxset to you.  How long until Facebook is extracting this information not just from what your friends like but also from their associations though? That sort of massive granular demographic information makes Facebook advertising way more targeted than any other ad environment out there.

It’s this sort of consumer knowledge that makes Mark Zuckerberg so cocky about Facebook, and makes Google quake in its boots. Google only knows what you typed into search engine. Facebook knows who and what you like, and who influences you… pure gold to retailers.

What you do need is a “tribe”.

An authentic tribe of friends, colleagues and customers that you have something in common with, can converse with and share relevant, useful information and stories with.

Don’t waste your time trying to build up your followers list with spam generating “VIP Follower” tools. It makes you look cheap, and really, what’s the point? What are these VIP followers going to do for you?

Outside of your immediate and obvious tribe, there are people you might want to connect with to tap into their social influence (more on that later). Follow them, if you really do have something in common they will likely follow you back, and look for opportunities to engage them with questions, @ replies or retweets, when it makes sense. You’ll be surprised to find that even uber popular SM gurus will respond. I was shocked to get a response from @chrisbrogan to a question I asked him on Twitter.

More on strategically building your “social capital” in a follow-up post.

Have you helped anyone achieve their goals today?

What’s your take on building a tribe? Do you auto follow or are you more strategic about it? We’d luv to hear from you. Use the comments box below.

If you don’t have Google Analytics (GA) set-up on your website yet you need to do that right away. I provided instructions about how to add Google Analytics to your site in a previous post.

GA is a very powerful tool and the majority of websites aren’t leveraging the full value of what they have at their disposal.

This post is for those business that are using GA and are interested in tracking some form of goal or “transaction” on the site. You don’t have to be running an e-commerce business or website to benefit from GA goals. What this function does is calculate a conversion metric. The “conversion” can be:

• a completed email subscription form
• a completed PDF White Paper download form
• a product trial request
• a reservation (restaurant, hotel, oil change)
• or an online purchase

Google offers the following requirements:

Requirements

The name of the goal: Specify a name that you will recognize when viewing the goals within each set of your reports. Examples of names you might use include “email sign-up”or “article ABC download.”

The defined funnel: You may specify up to ten pages in a defined funnel. Although funnels are optional, defining one can help you map where visitors drop off during the path to completing a goal.

The value of the goal: Google Analytics uses an assigned goal value to calculate ROI, Average Score, and other metrics. A good way to value a goal is to evaluate how often the visitors who reach the goal become customers. If, for example, your sales team can close 10% of people who request to be contacted, and your average transaction is $500, you might assign $50 (i.e. 10% of $500) to your “Contact Me” goal. In contrast, if only 1% of mailing list sign-ups result in a sale, you might only assign $5 to your “email sign-up” goal.

Enter Goal Information

Defining a value for your goals is useful especially if you have more than one goal with subtle differences that don’t directly impact the bottom line (sales), like an email subscription or white paper download. Having a goal value will also help to determine the ROI if you have a number of tactics for driving traffic to the site e.g. natural search, referring sites, and social media.

Here’s how Google suggests you set-up your goals:

Setting up goals

After you’ve thought of what your goals will be, start setting up them up by following these instructions:

Sign in to your Google Analytics account at https://www.google.com/analytics/.

Select the account that contains the profile you’ll be creating goals in from the Overview page.

Find the profile for which you will be creating goals, and click ‘Edit’ under the ‘Actions’ column.

Under the ‘Goals’ section, select one of the four sets to create your goal in (each set contains up to five goals) and click ‘Add goal.’ You can create up to 20 goals if you use all four sets.

Enter the goal’s name so that you can quickly recognize it when viewing reports.

Turn the goal ‘On’ or ‘Off.’ If you choose ‘On,’ that means you want Google Analytics to track this conversion goal at this time. Turning it ‘Off’ will only make the goal inactive without deleting it.

Select the goal’s position. The pull-down menu lets you select a goal’s position from within a set so that you can control the order in which it appears from the ‘Goals’ tab in your reports, or lets you move a goal from one set to another.

Decide one of the three types of goals you want. This can be URL Destination, Time on Site, or Pages/Visit.

I almost always choose URL Destination as the goal and will focus on that type of goal today in the interest of brevity.

URL Destination

This goal lets you specify a page with its own URL as a goal. Simply copy and paste the goal page URL from the browser address bar or  Top Content report in GA. In the case of a registration, the goal page might be the Thank You page (e.g. For the goal page “http://www.mysite.com/thankyou.html” enter “/thankyou.html”).

To begin setting up a URL Destination goal, follow these instructions:

1. Select from one of the three match types that Google Analytics uses to identify the goal.
2. Enter everything after the domain name (this is commonly called the Request URI) in the Goal URL box. For example, if your goal page is www.domain.com/whitepaperdownload, enter “/whitepaperdownload” into the Goal URL box. Reaching this page marks a successful conversion.
3. If your goal URL is case sensitive, select the checkbox. This means your goal URLs are capitalized exactly like the visited goal URLs.
4. Now click “save changes” to create this goal and you’re done.

Google Goals - Graph

It generally takes about 24 hours for goal data to start being collected and reported on so don’t be surprised if you don’t see any data in the reports right away. Of course there also needs to be conversions for the goal to be reported on as well.

You are now ready to start assessing how well a your site is fulfilling your business objectives. Use the graphs to identify conversion trends for any of your goals or for your overall conversions and conversion value.

And feel free to use my online marketing mantra; “test, track and tweak…”