3 Most Important Social Media Strategies

To be successful in social media is it important

• To increase your network in social space - have more and more followers in Twitter?
• To have presence in all the forms – blogs, forums, Twitter, Facebook…?
• To keep talking about your own business?

If you feel so, then you are wrong. Social media is about others talking about your business. It is about sharing knowledge. It is not a place to do sales. Your network should talk about it and spread the word.

The most important steps for a social media campaign to be successful are

1. Identifying the evangelists who will talk about your business and get them into your social network.
2. Make the evangelists to talk about you and your business.
3. Allow the evangelists to spread the word among their network

Who can be these evangelists? They can be your customers, prospects, analysts and/or your partners. Try to convert them into evangelists. Discuss a topic among them so that it can ignite a healthy discussion. Share knowledge so that these evangelists can get more dope to discuss. Let them review your product or service. Let them discuss about your customer support. If at all there are few negative conversations or feedback in the social media space, inspire these evangelists to have more positive conversations apart from you immediately responding to the same.

Also read below articles to know more about social media and networking:

The Four Important Steps to Start Social Networking for Business
6 Tips To Be Successful In Social Media Marketing
5 Important Approaches for Social Networking for Companies

6 Basic Tips for a Perfect PPC Campaign

I did come across a couple of online marketers who define their PPC campaign success to no. of clicks on the ad, click-through-rate (CTR) and cost-per-click (CPC). I definitely agree these are required to measure the performance of the PPC campaign but, do not judge the success of a PPC campaign by taking only these two factors. Many advertisers generate a large amount of clicks for their ads, but at the end you also need to note how many of these clicks have been converted to leads or sales.


So, ensure you have the following when you run the PPC campaigns -

1. Look at cost-per-acquisition (CPA). This will let you know average cost of each lead or download or sales that has happen. Accordingly you can compare or plan to invest in other online / offline campaigns.
2. Doing an analysis on the CPA number you get, try to predict the CPA at various spend levels. This helps you to reach optimal CPA.
3. Make the campaigns as keyword rich as possible using long-tail keywords pertaining to your business or products segregated as different groups. You can use the keyword tools provided by Adwords or WordTracker or KeywordSpy.
4. Each group or the set of keywords has the respective and related landing page. This will help to get a better quality score and will reduce the CPC. Not only CPC, but will also help in better conversions.
5. Use the geo-targeting, day-parting methods to reduce the unwanted clicks.
6. Try to use a back-end database or system which can track the CPC of each click and measures the ROI of each keyword.

There are many more tips and strategies that need to understand. PPC campaigns are easy to setup, but much more difficult to manage and optimize. Doing this takes time and effort. But, if you have the dedication to make the campaign a success then cheers.

Related posts:
5 Easy Tips to Improve the CTR for Google Adwords
13 Easy Tips to Make Landing Pages More Effective

Kindle Wireless Reading Device

This is an introductory video that provides a demonstration of the new Amazon Kindle eBook reader. A good one.

It is priced at US$ 259.00 as of now.

You can get more details an Amazon Kindle here. Do not miss the long review by the users.

Good news. Kindle can now be shipped to customers outside the U.S. Check out for the costs and shipping details in the above link.

SEO: Search Engine Optimization Bible

SEO: Search Engine Optimization Bible written by Jerri L. Ledford, is a very good book to know and learn the basics of SEO. This book offers readers about what they need to write a SEO plan and implement a successful SEO program. It also provides useful and easy tips on getting the website to the top on SERPs, The sidebars provide more information and additional resources on the topic which are very helpful to a rookie.

The main topics covered include –

• Creating an SEO plan
• Identifying and managing keywords
• Maximizing pay-per-click strategies
• Understanding the best practices for link building
• Regarding search engine robots, spiders and / or crawlers
• On-going process in SEO
• Tracking and generating useful reports

 If you want to make SEO work for you, this is the book you need to succeed.

About the author, Jerri L. Ledford: She has been a freelance business technology writer for more than 10 years. During that time, over 700 of her articles, profiles, news stories and reports have appeared online and in print. Her publishing credits include: Intelligent Enterprise, Network World, Information Security Magazine, DCM Magazine, CRM Magazine, IT Manager's Journal. Jerri also authors corporate collateral -white papers, case studies, web content, and presentations. Her corporate clients include Switch & Data, The World Health Organization, FujiFilm, Coco-Cola, and NaviSite.

Optimzation of Google Products Data Feeds

I have been looking at ways at optimizing the data feeds for Google products listings. I am doing research and all trials and this is what I assume the right way to get the listings on to the top of the product search results. If we follow the best practice and guidelines then it may surely be in top in the search results. Here are few guidelines which I feel will help.

(If you want to know how to create a data feed, then visit Google Merchant Center, which provides step-by-step process to create one.)

1. Specify Geographic Country: When you register for or sign in the Google Merchant Center you will be asked to enter the country for your target audience. Make sure you enter the right country. This will help you target the right audience as it increases the relevancy of your product's listing. Thus, it improves the quality of traffic and reduces the bounce rates.
   
2. Identify Right Keywords: Just as you identify keywords for organic search engine optimization, in the same way identify the keywords for the product data feed. Once you identify the keywords check if you can use them in the title and description of the products in the data feed. Try repeating them - but it should not look silly for the readers. Make sure title is about 65 characters and description is less than 160 characters. Also, ensure you are not repeating the same title for different products.


3. Product Type: Google Merchant Center uses the product taxonomy to categorize the products. Do make sure you specify the right category and are as specific as possible. Search for the right category here for your product and specify the same in the data feed.



4. Enter Relevant Attributes: Google provides the merchant to enter three types of attributes viz. mandatory, recommended and optional. Include all the mandatory and recommend attributes and as many of the optional attributes as possible. You can find the list of attributes here.


5. Images: Do submit high quality images. The best and minimum size of the product image that can be submitted is 300 x 300 pixels. If you have larger images, do not re-size them. Just give the path in the feed.


6. Data Feed Quality: Do check the data feed is formatted correctly. You can review this page for formatting guidelines.


7. Check Performance: Use the performance tab in Merchant Center to check average item performance. See how many of your items are currently searchable in Google Product Search, and track clicks by item. Learn more about the 'Performance' tab.


8. Track Your Listings: You can track your listings through Google Analytics. You can measure the traffic that is being referred from Product Search by adding tracking parameters to the URLs you submit. Keep track of products listings which are working well and try to tweak the ones which are not working well. The feedback received from Google Analytics will help to adjust the product feed. Check here for more details.


9. Data Feed Update: Ensure that you regularly update the data feed accordingly when there are any changes in product details like price and specifications. Do update the attributes accordingly and upload the feed on regular basis. You can also automate your data feeds so that they are submitted to Merchant Center regularly. Learn more about the available options to upload your data feed.

Last but not least, do provide as specific and quality information of the products as possible the product data feed. This may help a better ranking in the product search. As in Adwords or organic search the long tail keywords will lead to conversions. So, do not worry if your products are not being on top for generic keywords. We need to really bother about long tail keywords and specific product name rankings as those are the words used by prospects and will lead to sales.

Voice Based Microblogging: Bubbly

By the way Bubbly is going, it seems to be the next big thing after the current internet fad - Twitter. Bubble Motion has recently launched this Bubbly - a voice-blogging social network built for mobile phones.

Bubbly is already moving upwards with the number of subscribers, which have reached 500,000. They claim to they have more than 150,000 users from India only.

With Bubbly, you can record and broadcast messages from any mobile device. When a users records audio messages (lasting up to one minute) and updates, followers can listen in whenever they want. To start voice-blogging, you enter a short code onto your phone, and start recording your messages. To follow another voice-blogger, users dial the phone number for whomever they want to follow. Whenever there’s a new audio update, followers are notified via SMS with instructions on how to listen. Bubblers can also control who can listen to their messages, and have the option of masking their actual phone number to prevent followers from calling them directly.

Bubbly is currently partnering with mobile operators in India and has launched with regional and national Indian celebrities using voice-blogging using Bubbly. India seems like a perfect market for Bubbly. Among the first few is Sonu Niggaam. He said, "This platform offers no space for pretensions and is a genuine way of engaging with fans". Hey, can't one mimic the celebs voice?

Looking at all this, Bubbly can have success in markets where mobile usage is more than the internet usage.

Google PageRank Updated - April 2010

Google have taken the time over the Easter holidays and the weekend to update the PageRank system. The last time it was updated was during the Christmas holiday period of 2009. I see few of the new websites (lanced in Februay 20101) getting a PR of 1 which seems to be good for webmasters. I am yet to hear if it has caused any harm to any of the websites.

I do not think the PageRank is the only way Google judges the value of a website. A site without PageRank can still rank well in the Google search results. A website with a PageRank 2 or 3 can outrank a PageRank 6. I think PageRank is one of the metrics Google uses to rank the websites. But, still it is important to most of the webmasters. What are your thoughts?

The Four Important Steps to Start Social Networking for Business

We have seen over the past few years the “buzz” was and is all about social networking say it on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn or…. the list goes on. Many other brands, retailers and corporate have also boarded the bandwagon to listen and respond to their consumers with the intent to increase the interaction and communication with them.

But, what are the main things the social networking depends on?

I have just tried to summarize the vast thing in under these four steps. This is just to provide the reader a hang of the buzz word.

1. Listening: The first and the foremost thing is to know where your prospects or customers come together to share knowledge and interact. It hardly makes sense if you try to build your social networking setup at a place where you do not have your prospects. So, one needs to do extensive research and study to identify such platform as to where they are getting together. If this is not possible, then identify where is the communication relevant to your business is going on. In fact you want to be among with your peer group. You need to know the answers to these basic questions
   - Where do they live?
   - What do they do?
   - How are they currently using social media?
2. Interaction: This is the ability of users to engage with each other and the business owner. The most important thing is a social network mainly depends most upon the quality of the interaction features and interaction between the peer groups. Without them, a social network’s growth becomes difficult, its membership becomes disengaged and its purpose is missed. Moreover, the quality of content that is being shared should be of interest and related to your business. Try to identify thought leaders in your business or organization that can submit good content regularly and can interact with the community. Do not try to talk more of sales here or more of me. You can build successful network if you share knowledge and this platform is not to advertise your business. Create distinctive content that fits with the organization’s identity and mission. The owner should make this as a part of the routine – create content, respond to members and engaging them.
3. Relationship: The third important step is to build relationships with your prospects and customers. With proper interaction (step #2) one reaches to build on this step. This relationship should be such that it should trigger offline relationship and get-togethers. Here the member is more matured in the networking space and would like to increase his/her network may or may not be in the peer.
4. Measurement: So your question now is “What is the ROI?” Lot of sharing content, exchange of opinions, reviews…etc is going on. So, would you like to see the no. of page views, referrals or sales conversions? I would suggest you to develop a set of objective-oriented measurement standards, tied to existing business objectives, to assess the effectiveness of the social networking initiatives. For any social media community, there is an unlimited scope of activity to measure: interactions, contributions and connections across time location and topic. You need to focus on relationships and not selling.

Building a good social networking for business is not that easy as mentioned here in four steps. It needs lots of thinking, detailed plan, strategies, identifying the peer group, getting hold of the contributors that can ignite interaction and engagements and the list goes on. But, these four steps will really help you in understanding what ground word is required. So, good luck.

Also read:
6 Tips To Be Successful In Social Media Marketing
5 Important Approaches for Social Networking for Companies

The Future Could See Searches for 3D Content

It is talked that the “most used” button in search engines is the “back” button. That means, the searcher often cannot find what he/she is looking for in the top listings and are compelled to go back to find other links or to modify the search string. It is here that Bing is trying to look at this as its big opportunity as per Qi Lu, President – Online Services Division, Microsoft.

The search started with finding documents and then moved to images, videos, real-time information, events… The future could see searches for 3D images, 3D videos… And it seems Bing is trying to build the capability of capturing all the information and use it.

The bottom line is Google has such a better headstart over Bing that the former has more wealth of information and understands the user intent better that any other search engine.

The search giants’ alliances with the social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter will get information about people and real-time events. This will be not just limited to celebrities. Bing thinks their alliance with Yahoo will bring together lot more information for the searcher. But, will it beat Google?

Source: Times Of India

Famous Personalities / Celebraties on Twitter

Twitter has become very famous among the personalities, especially among the film celebraties. You find Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Gandhi and not to forget Priyanka Chopra, Mallika Sherawat, Rakhi Sawant et al... Here are few Twitter accounts which I was able to find out. Not sure how many are verified. You can directly follow my list on Twitter - Films and Sports.

Abhishek Bachchan
Aishwarya Rai Bachchan
Ajay Devgan
Akshay Kumar (verified)
Amrita Arora
Amrita Rao
Amitabh Bachchan
Anand Mahindra
Anupam Kher
Anushka Sharma
Arbaaz Khan
Arjun Rampal
A R Rehman
Arshad Warsi
Asin Thottumukal
Ayesha Takia
Barack Obama (verified)
Barkha Dutt (news channel, verified)
Bill Gates (verified)
Boman Irani
Celina Jaitly
Chetan Bhagat (author)
Chris Gayle (cricket)
Dalai Lama (verified)
Deepika Padukone
Dino Morea
Farhan Akhtar
Geoffrey Boycott (cricket)
Genelia D’souza
Gul Panag (verified)
Hritik Roshan
Imran Khan
Jiah Khan
Jugal Hansraj
Karan Johar (verified)
Konkona Sensharma
Kris Gopalakrishnan
Lara Dutta
Lalit Modi (cricket, verified)
Madhavan
Madhur Bhandarkar
Mahesh Bhatt
Mahesh Bhupathi (Tennis)
Mahendra Singh Dhoni (cricket)
Mallika Sherawat (verified)
Mandira Bedi
Meera Sanyal (politics)
Meghna Gulzar
Mohammed Kaif (cricket)
Narendra Modi (politics - protected account)
Neha Dhupia
Neil Nitin Mukesh
Oprah Winfrey (verified)
Pragyan Ojha (cricket)
Prannoy Roy (NDTV)
Priety Zinta
Pritish Nandy
Priyanka Chopra (verified)
Radhika Roy (news channel)
Rajat Kapoor
Rahul Gandhi (politics - protected account)
Rahul Khanna
Rajnikanth
Rajdeep Sardesai (news channel)
Rakhi Sawant
Ram Gopal Verma
Ranbir Kapoor
R P Singh (cricket)
Riteish Deshmukh
Sachin Tendulkar (cricket - verified)
Sajid Khan
Salman Khan
Sameera Reddy
Sania Mirza (tennis)
Shahrukh Khan
Shammi Kapoor
Shane Warne (cricket)
Shashi Tharoor (politics)
Shatrughan Sinha
Shekar Kapoor
Shilpa Shetty
Shreya Ghoshal
Shruti Hassan
Siddharth
Sona Sinha
Sonam Kapoor
Sonu Nigam
Sussanne Roshan Khan
Sushmita Sen
Trisha
Uday Chopra
Vijay Mallya
Vivek Oberoi (verified)
Yuvraj Singh (cricket)
Zaheer Khan (cricket)

Let me know if you have more. You can add them as comments here.

For Twitter ids of Telugu film stars click here.

The A to Z of Sachin Tendulkar

Seven Social Media Trends for 2010

We have seen what difference Social Media has done to the online world in 2009. The users have increased enormously on Facebook, Twitter… More and more people are using it. Organizations have also moved over to this channel to provide customer service or just to create brand awareness here as well. So, what 2010 has for us in Social Media –

1. Social Media will be more filtered: People do not like unnecessary updates to be seen in Facebook or Twitter. They want to read updates which they are interested in. People would now like to connect with only like-minded people. They just do want to increase their social network – they will now choose in which niche network they want to be a part of. This will give rise to increase in “exclusive” social networks concentrating on niche areas where like-minded people can ignite more in discussions.
2. More Organizations will join this wagon: More corporate and organizations will try to use this medium to provide customer service. This is the most economical way to solve the customers’ issues and it is also quick. Even the customers will feel it is comfortable to reach through this channel. Wells Fargo, Best Buy’s are already using Twitter help out their customers to answer their queries.
3. Organizations will look out for numbers: Organizations will try to leverage this medium and at the same time they would like to know as to whom all are talking about their brand and products on other social channels. They would be keen to analyze the plus and minus feedbacks. They may also want to know about the presence of their competitors here and how they are leveraging this platform. More tools and filters will come into play to help the organizations in getting these stats and analysis.
4. Social Media on Mobile: Organizations will have polices on using networking sites by employees and may even block most of the sites within the office network. Employees will be forced to use mobile phones to help them with the social media. This will increase the usage of mobiles with good apps to help them in satisfying them with the social media addiction.
5. Social Business: More games and apps will be focused on generating revenues. The apps will try to create competition with friends. FourSquare, Rummble will try to concentrate more into this business.
6. Usage of Emails will come down: Social media helps in distributing and sharing of content with large audience much easily than emails. People will try to use less and less of emails and more of social sites. Read more about this - Email Vs Social Networking Sites
7. Leveraging Offline meets with Online Connections: People will tend to meet offline with the like-minded people whom they met online. Networking groups will lead to such meet-ups. More and more websites and people will come-up to have such meet-ups.

Let me know if you anticipate more or do you defer with my thoughts. I would like to hear from you.

Related read: Top 10 Probable Trends in 2010 for Online World

10 Tools for Website & Page Load Speed Tests

Google is trying to help webmasters to build efficient websites which can load faster. Also, Google's new algorithm addition can also check at the time taken by the web page to load. So, it is always a best practice to test the loding of the website. There are lot many tools available and here are the best ones which I like -

1. Google's extension for Firefox - Page Speed
2. Google Webmaster Tools
3. Pingdom Tools
4. WebpageTest.org
5. Website Optimization Speed Test Tool
6. WGET
7. Uptrends Page Load Test Tool
8. Submit Plus
9. Link Vendor Speed Tester
10. Self SEO website speed checker - check and compare speed for different domains at a time

More details are available here.

Facebook crosses 350 Million Users, Eliminates Regional Networks

Facebook is rolling out changes that it proposed in July 2009. As per the communication sent by the founder Mark Zuckerberg to Facebook users, some of the regional networks have become so big as they have millions of members. And member’s privacy makes no sense here. So, Facebook is planning to update the current privacy model by eliminating the regional networks. The members will be prompted again to update the settings.

Facebook is also including more granular control for the privacy settings. Now, your information, contact details, photos… can be shared with your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.

Mark says, “The plan we've come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone. We're adding something that many of you have asked for — the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload”.

I also want to add that Facebook has added 50 million users in 2 1/2 months. That’s actually a bit slower than the amount of time it took for them to get from 250 to 300 million users, though still a fast pace.

Google Caffeine Now Live On One Google Data Center

Search Engine Roundtable in the blog post has mentioned that Matt Cutts confirmed that Caffeine is live 50% of the time on 209.85.225.103.

There were many threads across many blogs and forums about the major changes happening yesterday to Google search results. DigitalPoint Forums, Google Webmaster Help and WebmasterWorld discussed about this changes in the search results.

Matt Cutts was kind enough to update all stating that the change or update the webmasters are looking is only from one data center 209.85.225.103 which is hitting Caffeine update 50% of the time. So, Caffeine is live only at one data center and not all and that too you will get the results with Caffeine results only for half of the time. But, Matt did not disclose if we can get the results with the new update 100% of the time from a single IP.

Update from Matt Cutts: “So 209.85.225.103 does hit the Caffeine data center more often than other IP addresses, but it's always been the plan that Caffeine would roll out at one data center (no more data centers will get Caffeine until at least January”.

So, folks to see the search results with Caffeine update, I guess we need to wait till the vacations are over.

Happy Vacation!!

Top 10 Probable Trends in 2010 for Online World

Here is my early guess work of the trends that can be expected in the online and internet world during the year 2010. All may not be true and damn sure to happen… but, we can just expect it. So, here are the predictions:

1. Social Media may replace email to a certain extent: Social media may reduce the usage of communication through emails. Facebook, Twitter… are providing access to your friends and like-minded people much easier and faster than email. The usage of email communication can reduce a lot among friends and personal communication. More about this has been discussed in my earlier post Email Vs Social Networking Sites.
2. Facebook you friend: People will not be searching for personal details of their friends on Google first. They will try to find it on social sites like Facebook, Twitter… So, the new verb will be Facebook your friend and try to find his/her personal details. “Hey Bob, can I have your phone number?” “Dude, Facebook me and you will get it”. Yes, this is the way it goes. Social search will be important in the coming year.
3. Branchless Banking: The trend of online shops is matured. Now, banks will not boast of the number of branches they have and the footprints they have all over the country or the world. Online banking will be the trend. They will assure of high security and will stick to the regulations and will have customers who will operate their accounts only online. You do not need to have to go to the bank at all.
4. mCommerce: eCommerce is on internet. mCommerce is through mobile phones. Mobile phones are being used for money transfers and bill payments. They have been hardly used for retail payments. The trend will be that users will use only their mobile phone to make payments instead of entering their credit card number in it. This may work for downloads, apps or other upgrades.
5. Draw money from POS machines: You just need not use your card at POS machines to pay for your purchases. You can as well as the retailer to give you cash after swiping the card. For this you do not have to go to the ATM machine again to draw the money. I am sure if this comes, then there will be certain strings attached to it by the bank.
6. Outsourcing will lead to Crowd Sourcing: Business will try focusing on crowd sourcing as it is an open call to a group of like-minded people and they expect to get better ideas. Business will look out to develop new technology or would like the community to test it out. This is already being used by Google and will extend to other business as well. Not only this, political parties will try to use this for canvassing; Ad agencies will find this very lucrative. This will be the best way to collect donations from the masses as well.
7. Social Media Analysis and Stats: Organizations will jump in this social media to keep the brand buzz alive here as well. But, they will also like to get the analysis and stats for the same. The same way as we have for the website. Agency will provide these services and more tools like radian6, buzzgain, Filtrbox will come up to help the organizations to get more filtered and useful data to help them analyze and plan the strategy.
8. Video driven communities: We have seen YouTube. Now, we will have communities driven by the videos which will lead to conversations. Momversation, sponsored by Target, is driving conversation and community around the issues of moms.
9. Leveraging Offline meets with Online Connections: People will tend to meet offline with the like-minded people whom they met online. Networking groups will lead to such meet-ups. More and more websites and people will come-up to have such meet-ups. Businesses will also have to plan a strategy as to how to leverage offline to online connection. Something needs to be done to get it reversed.
10. Semantic Web: This buzz was earlier as well and will continue in 2010. It will offer a wide range of possibilities to build more applications with deadly features, which can enable users to use it.

Email Vs Social Networking Sites

I remember a decade ago, I was frequently visiting the internet café near my home to check emails and reply to them. Also, I used instant messengers to find like-minded friends or chat with friends. Now, the days have changed. Many folks, especially the teenagers use internet not to send and receive emails, but to log on to sites like Twitter and Facebook to know what their friends are doing and post a tweet or write something on their wall.

Earlier, I used to keep my calendar update to remind me of the birthdays of my friends. I used to send them a e-greeting or send an email wishing them. Now, I use Orkut or Facebook directly and wish them. I do not have to wait for the calendar to remind me. The networking site will remind me of their birthdays.

Earlier, to be in touch with my college class mates, alumnus or ex-colleagues, we used to have a group in Yahoo or Google. And we used to exchange emails. Now, I do not have to. I have these sites and they are in my network always, and I can access it where ever I am moving.

Will all this is phasing out the life of emails?

If the social sites are being used for personal use and friends, then yes. Friends are using less of emails and more of social sites to contact. They feel this media very comfortable as they can blast out one tweet to many. This media provides them the instant information. This media not only provides posting of messages but, at the same time allows them to chat, share photos and videos without using another website or app. This one social platform does it all. So why will they go and upload the video or photos somewhere and provide the link in the email after selecting the friends’ email addresses from the address book?

But, how far this social media communication will be successful for within the corporate if they stop using emails? Will the corporate allow such communication in their organizations to build healthy network among the employees? Yes, organizations need to open up. Organizations can build the networking sites accessible only to the employees and they will have all the stuff here. Zappos is extensively using the Twitter now. Organizations can use such media on intranet for better knowledge sharing and transparency among the levels. One-to-one communication can also be provided in the platform to maintain confidential communication. You will not need, a sharing folder to exchange files, need not need to use the intercom to contact the other person, do not have to check calendar to see if your boss is free, you do not have to switch windows or install other apps to communicate… A separate interface for customer communication can be provided. Customers can also log in to see the status and the discussion happening about their project. Customers can chip in-time to update the developers or the folks working on the project.

Yes, a day may come when email will be extinct.

Google launches new social search function

Google Social Search is an experimental feature that helps you find relevant public web content (like blogs, tweets, status updates, reviews, relevant articles from your subscribed RSS through Google Reader and any relevant content linked from your friends’ Google profile) from people in your social circle. Your social circle means your Gmail contacts and contacts from social sites listed in your Google profile. For example, search for ‘adventure sports’, and Google Social Search will provide the reviews by your friends and other contacts in the search results.

You can join the Social Search Experiment here. Once you have joined, Google may bring up results from your friends and other contacts. These special results appear at the bottom of the search results page, in a section labeled "Results from people in your social circle".



Now, to improve the search result quality we need to have quality social circle who are engaged in submitting public web content by way of blog posts, tweets and reviews. If your social circle is weak, you may not get the right search results. So, increase your social circle with people who blog and tweet very often about the things you are interested in or want to search. Ha… does it sound simple?

But, read it on Search Engine Land that, Google Social Search went down for a while. Google has confirmed this is a temporary issue and that a fix will be in place in a day or two.

Domain Names to be Non-English Soon

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) — the non-profit group that oversees domain names — is holding a meeting this week in Seoul. Domain names are the monikers behind every website, e-mail address and Twitter post, such as ".com" and other suffixes.

One of the key issues to be taken up by ICANN's board at this week's gathering is whether to allow for the first time entire internet addresses to be in scripts that are not based on Latin letters.

That could potentially open up the web to more people around the world as addresses could be in characters as diverse as Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Greek, Hindi and Cyrillic — in which Russian is written.

"This is the biggest change technically to the internet since it was invented 40 years ago," Mr Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of the ICANN board, told reporters, calling it a "fantastically complicated technical feature."

He said he expects the board to grant approval on Friday, the conference's final day.
The internet's roots are traced to experiments at a US university in 1969 but it wasn't until the early 1990s that its use began expanding beyond academia and research institutions to the public.

Source: Deccan Chronicle

Engineering College Aims To Donate INR 10 Million for Kurnool Flood Relief

G. Pulla Reddy Engineering College, Kurnool, AP in India is the college where I completed my engineering. This is the college which broomed not only me but may such people to build their career. I owe the college, my teachers and staff a lot - because of them I am at this point of career.

Last month the town, Kurnool was submerged in water. The college alongwith the ex-students is co-ordinating to collect donations and extend the help to the needy in Kurnool and the near by towns and villages. The college aims to donate ten million rupees towards the relief for the flood victims of Kurnool and adjacent towns. The college popularly known as GPREC among the students and alumnae has launched a new website www.savekurnool.org to coordinate the donations.

More than 300 people died in the southern states of Andhra Pradesh and North Karnataka after the worst floods in years. Livestock and crops have been lost as well as numerous homes destroyed, leaving more than 200,000 people homeless and vulnerable to hunger and disease.
The move to have a website for the cause is to generate funds from the former students of the college who are residing outside India. This will help the NRIs to extend their bit for the cause.

The G. Pulla Reddy Trust has already donated one million hundred thousand rupees and the college management and staff have coordinated and donated five hundred eighty six thousands rupees towards the cause.

I request each one of you to extend their bit for this project to help the society. It is the time to give back to the society.

At Last Twitter is Making Money

Google and Microsoft are in talks with Twitter separately to strike a deal to include the tweets in the search results in real-time. Both the search engine rivals are engaged in separate talks with Twitter according to a report from Wall Street Journal’s website, AllThingsD. It also reports that numbers of scenarios are being discussed to compensate Twitter for its huge and potentially valuable trove of real-time and content-sharing information, generated from the data stream of billions of tweets from its 54 million monthly users.

"This could be a way for Twitter to make some money, and maybe more than just a little money. It finally means a business model for Twitter, or at least the beginnings of one. And, of course, it means real revenue, which is very important. Not just in licensing revenue from Google or Microsoft, but also in potentially getting a piece of the action on an ongoing basis. So there could be considerable upside here for Twitter," said Dan Olds, an Analyst with The Gabriel Consulting.
This is good for the search giants and Twitter. For us we get the search results as a mix of web results and personal messaging. But…

• will this not spam Twitter with all the tweets of the folks who want their website on the top of the search results?
• how well these tweets can will be segregated as natural or real tweet to a spam one?
• what will be the criteria or filter used to get the tweet included in the search results?
• how can retweets be managed in the search results? Will they also appear?

The bottom line is if the deal (or deals) is (or are) through then Twitter will have a business plan.

Related post: What Can Be The Search Algorithm for Twitter Search?