New Algorithms of Google Ranking

There are some new updates of Google Algorithms that I would like to summarize as following.

Recently Matt Cutts explained Google's introduction of new ranking factor Site Speed into the algorithm, which will take into consideration how fast a site or page loads. In the future, faster Web pages will rank better than slower ones. Page speed is a factor in the search ad AdWords quality score and there is a push to make it a factor in the organic ranking algorithm, which has more than 200 factors in the algorithm, Schwartz writes. A video explains the rollout of Google Caffeine in January 2010, and introduces Site Speed. In early this month, Google introduce Closure Tools for optimizing the script in order to get high performance of Javascript code, you can get more information from this official page : http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/11/introducing-closure-tools.html

Also, Google start showing the site navigation, adding Site Hierarchy into search result. That you need to create a site with clear hierarchy and text links, Create a site map with links to important pages.

This is the official caption from Google Blog that will see their continuously improvement of ranking algorithms.

For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.

Best Ways to Measure a Social Media Campaign

To know how successful of social media campaign , you need to get the right measurement metrics that can judge whether is it successful or not. I always use these 5 key metrics in order to measure the social media campaign .

Metric 1 : Traffic

You need to monitor the traffic before and after you launch social media campaign, also you can analyze the source of traffic by using your analytics tool such as Google Analytics. It can know as referral source and also direct traffic and also keyword search as well.

Metric 2 : Interaction
You can measure the interaction of social media campaign by using different key measurement , for example : in Twitter, you can use Retweet figure to measure how successful in each message or campaign message that you send out each time. For the blog and also youtube.com , you can see how much people Response / Comment on your post. It will be count both negative , neutral and also positive sentiment.

Metric 3 : Sales

For the sales, if you using the Google analytics tool or other well known tool, you can determine the source of traffic which generated the sales and you can measure the return on investment, conversion rate from each visits compare to other traditional media, search marketing and also display advertising as well.

Metric 4 : Leads

Some website, there is no e-commerce transaction but it is lead generating site. You can use Lead as your major KPI to measure how successful of converting visitor from social media to be prospect buyer (lead). You can use Google Analytics and set up goal for lead in this case.

Metric 5 : Engagement

For the engagement measurement, the ideal you can measurement by using average time spent on the site that it is easier to track on the visitors who came from social media campaign (using Google analytics tool).

1 Billion Views a day at Youtube

On October 9, Youtube reached the 1 Billion Views of Video a day, there are some interesting information from CEO & Co-Founder , Chad Hurley as following.

Looking back at those early days, we were committed to some basic principles that have since become fundamental tenets in the world of online video:

• Speed matters: Videos should load and play back quickly.
• Clip culture is here to stay: Short clips are voraciously consumed and perfect for watching a wide variety of content.
• Open platforms open up possibility: Content creation isn't our business; it's yours. We wanted to create a place where anyone with a video camera, a computer, and an Internet connection could share their life, art, and voice with the world, and in many cases make a living from doing so.

Three years after the acquisition, our platform and our business continue to grow and evolve. We are still committed to the same principles that informed the site early on, but we know things have changed. As bandwidth has increased, so has our video quality. As we've started to see demand for longer, full-length content, we've brought more shows and movies to the site. There are now more ways than ever to make and consume content, and more of you are looking to turn your hobby into a real business. We're working hard to keep up with the fast pace of technology to bring you everything you would expect from the world's largest video site: better quality; a full spectrum of choices and tools for users, partners and advertisers; and ways to make the YouTube experience your own anywhere, anytime.

iPhone's Google Maps app now shows Adwords now

You may noticed the new "Sponsored Link" search results showing up when you search in Google Maps on your iPhone? These new search results are Google adwords ads. They're easy to pick out, because they use a customized icon instead of the typical push pin icon. While it's not surprising that Google is going to want to find every way possible to monetize its mapping service, it's still a little disconcerting to see these results popping up.

Given this obvious new revenue stream, it makes us wonder whether Apple wants to get in on the lucrative mapping action. Their recent purchase of the mapping service company Placebasecertainly suggests the possibility. That makes the share of Google increase significantly during the last week.

50 Best Websites in 2009 (by Time Magazine)

I just read from Time Magazine that they post the list of 50 Best Websites. You can see the full list from this URL : Full List 2009 , the first one is Flickr. Most websites are hottest websites and web 2.0 concept, such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Hulu, Kayak ,etc. You will see significant different from the List from 2008. Full List 2008 , in 2008, they are few list of Web 2.0 and Communication tool like this year. 2009 is golden year of Social Media.

Social Media Figure Interesting!

During this early of September, I am quite busy with several digital marketing projects. That I have less time to work on this blog. I am trying to update as much as I can. Keep update from me via RSS. Today I have found some interesting about Social media about CTR when it is the best time that most people clicking. It interesting that people most click on mid of week. Tuesday is the day of the week when click-through rates are highest on content posted on the walls of brand pages on Facebook, at 9.89%."

The Digital Disconnect’ Emerges'" study found that even though 52% percent of the 1,000 women surveyed have befriended or become a fan of at least one brand on a social network, 83% nonetheless feel 'neutral' or 'negative' when they see a brand on a social networking site. Only 17% said they feel positive."

Who's on Twitter

I just review the research paper about Twitter, it quite interest to learn about Demographic data of Twitter users. More than one-half of all Twitter users (53%) are women, and the majority are young. Among users who disclose their age, 66% are under 25, and another 15% are ages 25 to 29. That's huge market for consumer products which target to teenagers.

Most Twitter users are quiet: 85.37% tweet less than once per day. Only about 1.1% of users update their timeline an average of more than 10 times daily. This means a small group of users dominate the Twitter timeline—75% of all Twitter activity comes from just 5% of users.

Marketers are also more likely to update than the average Twitter user. More than 65% post less than once daily—significantly better than the 85.4% overall figure. Another 6.3% of social media marketers post twice per day (compared with 2.8% overall), and 4.3% post at least nine updates per day (versus 1.31% overall). There are significant growth of using social media for marketing campaign. The new digital marketing plan, it always included Twitter and Facebook as tools for communicating to target audience.

Win 25,000 GBP for your DMO idea! UBUNTU Awards for South Africa

I have found one interesting contest. The Ubuntu awards have been announced and its all about ideas for a campaign (online / ofline etc) to run in January / Febuary 2010.

The proposal must be for £25,000 and we are looking for:

• The quality of execution
• The breadth of elements used in the campaign
• The success in the way the elements are linked to provide a 360 degree campaign.
• The innovation that will make South Africa stand out as a destination
• The expected return on investment.

Full Information for this competition at http://www4.southafrica.net/ubuntuawards/Default.aspx

Social Technographics Customers Profile

If you are looking for doing customer profile on Social Media campaign, you may use this data tool from Forrester. It quite interesting. Forrester's Social Technographics® classifies consumers into six overlapping levels of participation.

Features of this profile:

- For an explanation of these groups (Creators, Critics, etc.), see a presentation
- Bars indicate the percentage of the selected demographic that are in each Social Technographics group.
- The white marks indicate the same percentages for the whole population of the country selected.
- The index indicates how the demographic compares to the population — a score of 100 means the demographic is the same as the population average.
The message "No data available" appears when you request a profile for which our survey samples are not large enough to provide a reliable answer. This occurs for age groups in Japan, Metro China, and South Korea. To see profiles in these countries, set the Age to "Not specified".

Social Media Revolution

There are some Social Media revolution which significant to our digital life. You can see summarize as following.

• By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network
• Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
• 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
• Years to Reach 50 millions Users: Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months. Who will be next?
• If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia
• Yet, some sources say China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million using their services (Facebook’s ban in China plays into this)
• comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network
• 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
• 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
• % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
• The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
• Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway and Panama
• 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
• Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
• What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
• The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
• Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
• There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
• 54% = Number of bloggers who post content or tweet daily
• Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
• If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
• Facebook USERS translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than 4 weeks and cost Facebook $0
• 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
• 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
• People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google ranks them
• 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations , Only 14% trust advertisements
• Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI, 90% of people that can TiVo ads do. Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009 , 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone
• According to Jeff Bezos 35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
• In the near future we will no longer search for products and services they will find us via social media
• More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.
• Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy Listening first, selling second
• Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertiser