Social Media trends for 2010

In 2010, Social Media will become more popular, more mobile and more exclusive. Niche networking sites will be a trend leading to exclusive users following you or being on your friend list. Connecting with people who share common interests, hobbies, and having professional associations will give people a purpose to have you on their friend list. Sites that focus on particular interests such as photography, writing, music, or based on demographics that is, age, gender, occupation etc. will gain popularity. This will help to lessen the clutter and will bring in more value. It will also make it easier for marketers and advertisers to target their messages and audience.

In countries like India, going mobile will be the greatest advantage for social media enthusiasts. Picture this - There are more than 65 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices and that number grows daily. MySpace estimates that 50% of its Website traffic will be mobile within 24 months. All the major social media sites have mobile versions of their Websites. Another reason for organizations to go mobile is the ban on social media sites by organizations. This will see a rise in the percentage of smartphones that will get people to use social media and its advantages will only increase.

The convergence of social media and ecommerce will reach greater heights with companies like Zappos receiving more accolades. Zappos is a classic example of a company using social media to showcase its culture to the outside world. Zappos CEO, Tony Hsieh, tweets more about his philosophies of life rather than business. Dell is another successful brand that has optimized social media for business. There are several interesting aspects of how Dell uses social media to leverage its business. They have an active presence in every social media channel and have used this as an opportunity to connect with millions of customers.

Online reputation management is another aspect that will see growth. ORM deals with monitoring the reputation of a brand online, dealing with negative comments and protecting your brand via social media channels. Monitoring, repairing and managing are the three steps that companies need to work on for online reputation management.

Google Friend Connect lets users to connect with friends on different websites. Google reports over 5 million sites using friend connect while Facebook Connect has around 15,000. Google SearchWiki is nothing but social media search. SearchWiki allows anyone with a Google account to change the order of search results and make notes about each result in Google. This will help to improve core search results. And will help to rank websites in the future.

The channels that will be widely used across businesses are microblogging sites such as Twitter. The biggest advantage of Twitter is that it lets you network with people in your industry, there is a lot of freedom and space for carrying on conversations. Helps you get the desired traffic and views to your blog. Twitter is in fact a central point for social media activities.

Source: Businessweek
Techcrunch

Google OpenSocial to launch Thursday

Google is working on new project “OpenSocial”. Google wants to create an easy way for developers to create an application that works on all social networks. Google’s goal is to fight Facebook by being even more open than the Facebook Platform. If Facebook is 98% open, Google wants to be 100%.

OpenSocial is a set of common APIs (Application programming interface) that application developers can use to create applications that work on any social networks (called “hosts”) that choose to participate. The three common APIs with input from partners that allow developers to access core functions and information at social networks:

• Profile Information (user data)
• Friends Information (social graph)
• Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

Partners are in two categories: hosts and developers.

Hosts are the participating social networks, and include Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle.

Developers include Flixster, iLike, RockYou and Slide.

The URL will go live on Thursday, 1st November, so keep watching!!!!

Source: Techcrunch

How GOOGLE calculates the quality scores

Google is constantly updating the formula used to calculate your Google Quality Score. The lists below outline some of the core components.

Used to Calculate your Minimum Bid:

* The keyword’s click through rate (CTR) on Google; CTR on the Google Network is not considered
* The relevance of the keyword to its ad group
* The quality of your landing page

Used to Calculate Ad Position:

* The matched keyword’s CTR on Google; CTR on the Google Network is not considered
* The relevance of the keyword and ad to the search query

Used to Calculate Eligibility to Appear on Sites within the Content Network:

* The ad’s past performance on this and similar sites
* The quality of your landing page

Used to Determine Ad Appearance on a Site-Targeted Site:

* The quality of your landing page