Looking for a huge numbers of fans? Can’t wait a second longer? Then read on, this blog post is for you…

1. 1. Buy your fans
   This is definitely the easiest way to guarantee a following fast; decide how many ‘fans’ you want then simply go to any dodgy-looking site (probably via a Facebook ad) take your wallet out (remember to stick your head in the sand) et voila, success! But wait a second; by definition once you directly pay for a relationship what does that relationship become? What does it really mean? There’s a very obvious analogy here, one that doesn’t involve any love at all… Read More »

What is influence? It’s a massive question in the world of social media. Thousands of man hours are being pumped into companies who are trying to solve the problem in the hope that one day, you’ll be able to search a category and an application will spit out exactly the 5 top influencers you need to be communicating with to push your product.
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On Wednesday night, Google announced they have changed how average positions are calculated in the Top Search Queries report. These changes are effective immediately.

Average position is an SEO truth that seems to struggle to take hold even though it is far more appropriate to today’s personalised search landscape than the old concept of absolute rankings.

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Just before this weekend Google pushed out yet another feature to support Google+.

The “Ask on Google+” prompt appears for users who are signed into Google.com, .co.uk and other properties in an “11th position” on page one of the search results. Searchers do need to be logged in order to see the suggestion but they do not need to be experiencing Search plus Your World results.

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That’s the question that Business Insider is asking. Google tells us that Google+ is growing very fast and that sign-ups are rocketing. We heard that in December Google+ hit 66.7m users worldwide with 2.6m in the UK. Further we heard that Google+ recorded its second-highest traffic record from users in India for that period, with 4.3 million unique visits, followed by Brazil with 3.6 million.

Last night Google told us that number has jumped to 90 million Google+ users suggesting it will break the 100 million barrier very shortly. That’s a very healthy figure and supports what Google has been saying, which is that signs-ups alone make it one of the web’s fastest growing websites, but are people regularly using it? What are the levels of engagement? Read More »

Last night Google announced a new update to their search algorithm. It will be one of about 500 this year and comes into effect immediately.

The blog post announcing the update does not mention the series of Panda improvements Google has been making in order to combat content farms but the algorithm update is very much of that family. The tweak punishes those webpages who have content that is too difficult to find.

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Last week the digital marketing world was rightly focused on CES and Google’s latest evolution: Search plus Your World. I call it Search+ and it was in the headlines for all the right reasons.

However, caught between the importance of Search+ and Google’s embarrassing Kenyan adventures and easy to miss, there was also a humble little post about making better use of page titles.

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News Corporation CEO Rupert Murdoch is proving that he won’t be reined in when it comes to Twitter. Over the weekend he has been using his shiny new 140 character account to rail against the injustices of the world calling Google a “piracy leader” and opining that Barack Obama had thrown in “his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters”. He is starting to sound like one very hacked off media chairman whose vast PR machine can not keep him quiet.

Google has responded to the elder Murdoch’s tweets and called them nonsense. Oh dear. Maybe not the response the billionaire media mogul was looking for. Read More »

Facebook insights. Dear oh dear. I’ve got to come out and say it – I’ve found their new and “improved” suite of analytics entirely perplexing, lacking in usefulness and extremely complex to explain, aggregate and apply to the real world.

I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one in the industry who has been using the old Insights page to report back successes to clients. I’ve been living in hope that they’ll never switch it off , but the time has come – the old insights page is still an option, but it’s not recording new data. I haven’t felt this down since I said goodbye to my Bebo account…

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Google has started the year by encouraging us to take more notice of our friends while simultaneously upsetting some of its other <cough> ‘friends’.

The launch of Search Plus Your World on Tuesday makes sense of some of the moves we’ve seen over the past few months, notably the creation of the Google+ network and encrypted search via SSL connections. Read More »