As a software development project manager at Beacon, I’m also proud to say that I’m both an NPR and data geek, so I was elated to hear a story this week that united all of my passions:  Google Searches Are A Window Into Our Culture.  The tool “Google Correlate” is actually a fascinating window into how people are searching for not only one specific term, but an entire web of other related (or maybe not-so-related) terms.

The political example given in the story was somewhat predicable (Democrats– veggie-loving, fitness buffs; Republicans– meat-loving, weight-loss program participants), but my own searches turned up some interesting results on Google Correlate.  I am just starting work on a new website redesign for a well-known business school and was wondering what kind of associations I’d find if using terms related to that school (thinking I might be able to use this information with regard to site design and features).  Here’s the terms I tried:

• business school– while many of the U.S.’s top business schools are listed, I was surprised to see the appearance of “art schools” and “art colleges” as correlating terms.  Wonder if my client has considered cross-promotion with this demographic?  Could a more “artsy” site design have benefits in this area?
• management school– like the “art” association listed above, I was suprized to find “hospital association” as a correlation with “management school.”  Perhaps another marketing opportunity here?  Would a site feature that included possible hospital careers be helpful to these visitors?
• mba school– oddly, this was a much more common search term in Utah than any other state.  Not sure how we can leverage this, but I’m sure we’ll bat it around for a while!

Also, don’t miss the comic book on the Google Correlate site – fun!  The most important point that the comic book emphasizes and bears repeating here– “Remember:  Correlation is not causation.”  Google doesn’t attempt to explain the correlation between terms, just show it to us in a manner for us to interpret and leverage.  Happy correlating!

Last week, the world of social media was temporarily rocked by an accidental leak from a Google employee (the world of social media moved on quickly because that is what social media does).  Steve Yegge wanted to vent some opinions on Google+ in an internal memo, but accidentally made the post public.  To their credit, Google has not tried to suppress the post after the fact – you can read it here.  It is a bit lengthy, but I highly recommend taking the time to read it to get some pretty candid opinions from a Google developer towards one Google’s latest foray into social media.

In this post, Yegge expounds on some of the mistakes made with Google+ and makes some comparisons with an area where he finds Amazon.com & Facebook to be superior.  What really stood out to me was Yegge’s take on products and platforms:

“That one last thing that Google doesn’t do well is Platforms. We don’t understand platforms. We don’t “get” platforms. Some of you do, but you are the minority. This has become painfully clear to me over the past six years. I was kind of hoping that competitive pressure from Microsoft and Amazon and more recently Facebook would make us wake up collectively and start doing universal services. Not in some sort of ad-hoc, half-assed way, but in more or less the same way Amazon did it: all at once, for real, no cheating, and treating it as our top priority from now on.”

“A product is useless without a platform, or more precisely and accurately, a platform-less product will always be replaced by an equivalent platform-ized product.”

It occurred to me that since this was meant to be an internal post from a developer for other developers, those without a background in development may not understand the differences between platforms and products within the context of this post.  While the words can mean different things to different people across various industries (or even within this one), what purpose do they serve in this post to explain the [perceived] flaws in Google+ in relation to its competitors?

In this context, Yegge is criticizing Google+ for working on a closed system.  This makes it a “product.”  It is a versatile system with a variety of the features that people like in other social media systems – i.e. pictures, music, games, etc.  But, at the end of the day, the user is beholden to the features that Google has created for them.  Google+ is a pre-packaged product where the user’s ability to customize the experience is limited within the framework that Google allows.  Think of it as buying a car.  After purchase, you can add features like a CD player, power locks, keyless entry, et al.  You can even change car’s color.  But, you can’t drastically alter what the car is.  If you purchased an SUV, you cannot remake it as a sports coupe.

Yegge argues that Google+ (and maybe even Google itself to a certain degree) should be looking at itself more as a platform.  In this context, think of a platform more as a building foundation.  The foundation is a necessity and provides some direction for what it to be built upwards.  However, architects and foremen still have plenty of leeway on how to proceed.  For example, look at the openness of Facebook.  This was a system that originally served simply as a networking site.  However, over the past decade, it has evolved into a site where people listen to music (Spotify), play games (Farmville, Mafia Wars), determine their genealogy, take quizzes, etc.  These activities are done primarily through applications developed by third party developers.   These are people with no affiliation to Facebook, but can still use Facebook as a platform to develop apps designed to work specifically within it.  This means that every user experience is different depending on what apps they have installed on their page.  This also means that Mark Zuckerburg and Co. have given themselves significant flexibility for the future.  They do not have to dream of the next big thing, they will still benefit from it if occurs on their platform.

But, by being a product over a platform, Google+ has determined that it already knows what its users wants and will be able to provide that experience for them.  With over 40 million users at the time of this post, they are obviously doing something right.  But for sustainability purposes, without being in a platform setup, Google will have to constantly be on the edge of taste in order to prevent from going the way of MySpace…

- EJW, follow me on twitter: @ejwestksu

Beacon’s own Brad Henry is doing a Google Analytics user survey with one of the GA staff at The Google Analytics Partner Summit in Mountain View CA!

Found a super article on “How to Google Like Google Googles” at PCWorld today.  Here are a couple of my favorites tips:

1. It is a constant battle with my middle and high school students to get them to use “authoritative sources” for school work (“but Mooooom, EVERYONE uses Wikipedia and my teachers don’t care!”).  Having seen for myself the misinformation purposely posted on Wikipedia, I still insist on .edu, .gov, etc. sites for research and this tip makes that a bit easier (though the battle rages on…)

   Search certain types of sites or just certain sites. You can search a wide variety of sites by inserting a close angle bracket (>) symbol before the type of site you want to search. For example, [penguins site:>.edu] searches for penguins across all .edu sites; and [crater image site:>nasa.gov] searches for crater images across NASA.gov.

2. Would have been soooo helpful on my three day, agonizing move across the country last year with the dog, two distraught teenagers and a dying minivan:

   Find hotel prices directly on Google Maps. No more copying and pasting the address from one site into a map to see its location–for several major cities in the United States, you can easily see nightly rates when you search for hotels in Google Maps. Try it now: Search for a “hotel in Los Angeles” on Google Maps

3. Not a particularly helpful tip, but makes you really want to be a “Google Master” doesn’t it?  Or is that just me???

   Gmail is a very deep program, with too many tips and tricks to list in this article. In fact, Google categorizes its Gmail user tips into four stages–white belt, green belt, black belt, and master. The tips for each belt can be found at Google’s “Become a Gmail ninja” site. There’s even a printible guide; after all, even ninjas forget their moves once in a while.

The internet is an ever-growing jungle of information.  I found this graphic depicting some of the common activities on the web and the number of occurrences they appear every minute. Facebook, the social networking giant, has 695,000 status updates, almost 80,000 wall posts, and over half a million comments posted every minute.  By the time you’ve read this post, Google will also have received just under 700,000 searches.

(Click image for full size)
Source: Go-Gulf

Google+ is the latest social networking tool launched by Google end of last month. It’s extremely popular, already having over 10 million users despite being in ‘field-trial’ mode. If you are one of the lucky few who managed to score an invite for Google+ but don’t have a lot of friends yet, read below to see how to invite your Facebook friends. Even though Facebook has been trying very hard to stop users from making the switch over to Google+, there are a couple of ways left to export your friends list. Below is one of the ways you can export your friends  from Facebook and import them into Google+. This method works for now, but it may not work for long if Facebook decides to block this too.

1. First create a Yahoo Mail account, if you don’t already have one.
2. Log into your Yahoo account and click on “Contacts” tab.
3. Click “Import contacts” and select Facebook from the list.
4. Log into Facebook if it prompts you and authorize Yahoo to import your contacts.
5. Once you start the import, it could take a few minutes depending on how many contacts you have.
6. Next, log into Google+, and click “View and edit” link right below your circles.
7. Click “Find and invite” link on the top and click on Yahoo.
8. Login to Yahoo and authorize Google+ to import your contacts.
9. Wait a few minutes for Google+ to import all your contacts than you can add them to your circle. However, it seems like Google+ has some issues with importing contacts from Yahoo. This step did not work for me, but I know it works for most people. If it didn’t work for you, read the steps below to try an alternate method.

Alternate method

1. Go back to the Contacts tab in Yahoo Mail, click on “Tools” dropdown and select “Export”
2. Click on “Export” next to “Yahoo! CSV”, follow the steps and click export.
3. After a few seconds, you will be prompted to save a file. Save it somewhere on the Desktop, you will need it in the steps below.
4. Open your Gmail account, and click on the “Contacts” link on the left.
5. Click on “More actions” to open the dropdown and click on “Import”
6. Browse and select the csv file you just saved in step 3 above. And Click Import
7. Wait for the list to be imported into Gmail than go back to Google+.
8. Refresh the “Find and Invite” tab and all your friends should show up and you can now add them to your circle.

Let me know in the comments if this didn’t work for you.

Eight weeks down, two more to go.  The past two months have really gone by quickly.  I spent some time today reflecting back and what all I have done and learned so far here at Beacon.  I’ve learned a lot, but I realize that there is still a lot I don’t know.  Since this week was the start of a new month, I spent a lot of time this week working on transitioning the accounts I was working on to other members of the WMS team.  This involved some meeting time and talking about what I had been doing, what I planned to do, and what steps could come next.  The other major thing I did this week was to compile monthly reports for the clients I had been covering.  Like I mentioned a few weeks back, that’s not the most glamorous task but it’s really not so bad.  I found it very rewarding to see growth in the clients I covered and to see things I had done start to show results.

The other big thing I did this week was to sit down and map out a final two week plan to help market Beacon itself.  I’m excited to be getting into this since my background from undergrad is marketing.  Some of the things I am going to be doing involve PPC campaigns, setting up various tracking measures, creating possible promotions, and a few other ideas.  This will be fun.

On a side note, I have been doing a lot of work with social media for several clients as well as for Beacon, and the more involved I get, the more I learn.  I’ve always been comfortable with Facebook, but I never really have had much exposure to outlets such as blogs, Twitter, and Foursquare.  That has changed during my time at Beacon.  I’ve learned how to utilize various outlets to accomplish different tasks.  For instance, I’ve learned that using Twitter can be very valuable for interacting with customers and is a great tool for promotional contests.  Another thing I learned is that Foursquare, which is a location based check-in service, is great for driving foot traffic into a business.  The way that is done is by first setting a location for the business within Foursquare.  Then you can set up options where special offers will pop up on someone’s cell phone if they are running the Foursquare app and they are within a specified geographical area of your business’s location.

The final thing I want to talk about relates to social media as well.  The “new kid on the block” is Google+.  I was able to get an invite to join Google+ today.  For those who are unfamiliar with Google+, it basically is a social media outlet similar to Facebook.  There are subtle differences between the two that I have observed, but overall it seems to be more or less the same.  The concept is almost the same as Facebook, and the only real differences at the moment are that Google+ calls features by different names than they are called within Facebook.  I’m not entirely sure if it’s something I’ll stay with but I’m willing to give it the “old college try.”

Yesterday Google made a post about their new +1 project available here http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/06/1-reporting-in-google-webmaster-tools.html and how sometimes these new features don’t really have much impact until you are able to view the data associated with those features.   Well that is what Google wants to make available to website marketers, managers, and owners by providing report data in two separate locations.  The first is in the Google Webmaster Tools account and the second is available in your Google Analytics account.

The first new report in Webmaster Tools is the Search Impact report.    Google provided an example report which you can see below.  The most interesting thing that catches my eye is their primary focus on CTR and how this new feature affects that.    I’ve been saying for some time that Google is placing a lot more weight on the CTR as a factor in determining your search engine position for an organic search.   You can find a relevant post here.   http://blog.beacontechnologies.com/google-seo-factors-2011/

This new report will allow you to measure the change in CTR associated with this feature.   The higher the number of +1s the higher the position, the higher the CTR, the higher quality.  It looks like this new feature is going to play a significant role in Google’s Organic ranking algorithm over the next several years.    For the longest time Google had to rely on other websites “casting their vote” for another website’s authority in the form of links.  This is what the Google algorithm was based on and what made it so successful.   It was also what spawned a new industry of link building and manipulation of the results.

Google appears to be shifting from a website’s vote of importance to more of a personal vote of authority by allowing users themselves to cast their vote in the form of their “+1″.   Their is no doubt that spammers will begin strategies to manipulate this but for the time being it appears that the web is evolving and understands that what people say is important is better than what a set of codes or website says is important.

So how do you make sure you take advantage of this and get a leg up on the competition?    Google provides the information you need in your Google Webmaster tools account.   Once you are logged in, you will need to click on the new Social link in the left navigation and then click on the “add +1 button” at the top of the reports pages.    It’s a simple set of codes that references the primary JS file and the other to actually display the button.

Once you have the +1 button installed and are using it to it’s full potential,  you will want to see how the users who have given you their vote of confidence interact on your website differently.   Do they bounce less, access more pages, convert higher, spend more money, or any of a number of questions you might have?   Well Google Analytics will help you answer these questions by automatically including these statistics in your UI with three new reports.  Their is a social engangement report that segments your social users similar to a custom segment, then there is a social sources and actions report which allows you to see who does what actions from which social network.   And then their is the Page report that allows you to see social metrics associated with pages so you can get specific with your data and tie it to specific content.

And as usual, you can create all kinds of drill down reports by adjusting the dimensions and other report features to create a custom view into your website user’s social behavior.    We don’t currently have a ton of data in these reports yet because they are so new so we are still playing around and seeing what we can discover.  There is surely more to come about this and I will post some updates to new posts as am sure this is going to be a hot topic for some time now.



This week has gone well.  Along with the weekly meeting, I was able to participate in a couple other meetings.  One was with a client I am working on.  It was a standard “checking in” type of meeting.  I was able to hear some ideas the client would like to see worked on in the near future.  As part of that discussion, I was able to view some work for other clients that I was unaware of, and that gave me some good ideas for some things that I may try to bring up with some of my other clients that could potentially use the same type of feature on their website.  I also sat in on a brief training session on a tool for unifying social media efforts.  Hootsuite allows you manage social media updates and accounts from a centralized location.  You can connect Facebook and Twitter and monitor activity on each as well as schedule updates to release when you want rather than right at the moment you type them up.

As far as the type of work I did this week, I mostly worked on finishing up monthly reports and then getting them sent out.  Once that was finished, I switched over to working on keyword discovery.  I spent some time learning how to find new keywords as well as learning how to see how websites rank for keywords that they are targeting versus not targeting.  I did this for a couple clients and that gave me a chance to approach it from different perspectives.  The other thing I did in relation to keywords was to try to determine how difficult it would be to rank for keywords based on the current content of the website and the amount of competition for the keyword.  This was interesting because I was not aware of what all goes into determining how a website ranks for a keyword.  Some of the areas that are important, they are kind of common sense ideas, are having the keyword appear in the text of the URL, the title of the page, and/or the content of the page.

In closing, my productivity this week fought a long battle with my ability to be distracted and my ability to be amused by simple things.  I blame Google for this.  As most people are likely aware by now, Google created a special logo to honor Les Paul’s 96^th birthday.  The logo was a playable guitar that even let people record short songs if they were in the US.  Google kept the logo up today, Friday, even though Les Paul’s birthday was Thursday.  This is by far the best Google logo I have seen.  The second best was the playable version of Pac-man.  I did manage to get several tasks completed this week, but I also managed to rock out from time to time.  While I am not an overly talented Google guitarist, I did manage to find several YouTube videos of people who are good.  Just head over to Google and search “Google guitar” and you should be able to find them.

There’s in interesting war of words going on between Microsoft and Google regarding search. An article at Search Engine Land alleging that Microsoft was copying search results from Google was the first salvo in the war. Microsoft followed up by accusing Google of click fraud.

The gist of Google’s claim, seems to be that Microsoft’s uses the data collected from the suggested sites/Bing toolbar feature to populate Bing’s search engine results even if the search results come from Google’s website.

Microsoft’s defense appears to be that they do incorporate the results into Bing, but it is one of many parameters when ranking a link. That the scenario Google executed was not legitimate since Google created false links to nonsensical search terms and then had there employees click on those links.

Who’s right and who’s wrong? Well both are right and both are wrong. Google’s honeypot essentially peeled away Microsoft’s aggregating of the parameters used to rank sites. By using uncommon search terms, Google was able to populate a false relationship between the search term and the site. If a popular term had been entered, the other parameters would have minimized the ranking. Microsoft however is using the search results from a competitor as part of it’s ranking algorithm. They are just letting their end user’s be the means of populating the data. Google’s honeypot just showed that when the other parameters are not relevant, then Google’s results will appear.