When searching for “Nikon Facebook” Google you will notice the first listing occupies 3 listing spaces – dramatically increasing its click through rate (CTR).

Nikon's Facebook listing in Google almost trebles in size.

From a business perspective, the change helps protect brands who driving traffic to their Facebook page, in the form “Find us on Facebook”, from leakage. In my experience users are often as likely to use a search engine like Google as well as searching within Facebook when looking for a brand.

Previously Google has shown traditional listings as

The new set of Social reports help webmasters measure the impact of your social activity and evaluate the effect social media has on your Analytics Goals and Ecommerce activities.

The 4 new social analytics reports aggregate and display key data points to help you see the complete picture of how social marketing and media affect your business. This enables you the webmaster to see where Social Media was involved and any given point of the funnel.

The new social reports are now love, you can find the Social Value Overview, Social Sources, Social Plugins, and Conversion Reports in the Traffic Sources section of your account.

Hello on-site social measurement! A quick round up of each of the features:

Social Plugins:
Allows you to see how your websites content has been shared via various social channels and over time  – this is incredibly useful for publishers and bloggers alike.

Social Sources:
Who is driving traffic and how often.  Measure the engagement of your social traffic based on on-site metrics such as time on-site.

Visitor Flow:
One of my favorites. This lovely report shows us the journey of social traffic when it reaches our website. Enabling you to identify the popular parts of your website from a social perspective.

Social Value Reports:
Measure the impact of  social campaigns by connecting them to your Google Analytics on-site goals and transactions. This enables you to identify which social networks deliver the highest business impact.

Social Pages:
Identify the social networks where users are engaging with your websites content. Learn about each community, and identify your best performing content on each network.

If you are just starting out in Social Media, or have a non-digital background now is a good time to learn about Google Analytics. I highly recommend you study at the Google University and get yourself accredited too.

Source: Google Analytics EDM – Monthly Product Update April 2012

https://www.google.com/analytics/web/#report/social-plugins/a5585841w12609734p13231111/

One of the many SoM outings I won't forget.

Firstly, the decision was probably the toughest I have ever made – even more so than leaving sunny Birmingham 3 years ago – but I certainly wouldn’t of be capable of tackling the new challenges ahead without skills I learned & support I received during my time at SoM.

Switched on Media is fantastic place to work and grow. The team are great; fun to work with, smart and hard working. I first started as an SEO specialist and progressed to an Account Manager working across all digital channels. Over the 2.5 years I spent with the company I worked with some fantastic clients and saw it grow rapidly from strength-to-strength. This was heavily facilitated by the directors  Andy Jamieson and Scot Ennis -  two very talented and passionate entrepreneurs who I’m very proud to of been mentored by.

I left with some fantastic memories, polished talent and a great deal of friends for life. I In this post I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who was a part of this journey.

I love Lolcatz, who doesn’t? I also like the odd peak at College Humor & even Saracastic.com.au. Crazy sites like these are aimed at the youth and the youth-within. They websites attract millions of pageviews and are heavily fueled by social media sharing. As a result most of their posts go “viral” without any effort at all.

Over the past 12 months I’ve noticed the that mainstream media has lowered its threshold around valuable content. Covering at times what can only be referred to as pointless content. Is this solely because this type of content is potentially viral? Of course, tabloids have been doing this for years. A part of me condones this movement by the mainstream media, but where do you draw the line?

Yesterday in their “Breaking News” section, News.com.au covered a story titled: “Man opens bag of Cheese Rings, finds one” a story that was indeed “har har” funny but was it really front page news?

The iTabloid has risen. It’s cheaper than ever (Free) and it wants your pageviews.

I’m still not sure about how I truly feel about SOPA and PIPA – both pose a variety of pro’s and con’s toward modern life and business as we know. However, seeing content like the above re-written for our naive minds to handle is nothing new. My good friend Kevin posted an intersing thought on Facebook this morning:

SOPA is nothing new. History has taught us well. With the invention of the printing press, everyone could print and it allowed newspapers, encouraged thought, and then gave way to dissent. It was regulated, books and newspapers were banned. We now have safe books and newspapers.

Same thing happened with radio; anyone with a two-way radioset could broadcast, it allowed small groups of rebellion to form and encouraged thought and then dissent. Rules were put in place, radio now belongs to an elite few playing safe messages and Top 40 songs.

Along came television – it was regulated pretty much straightaway and now we have safe programmes we know we can let our children watch without giving it a thought.

Fast forward to 2012 and we have SOPA. Thing is, the Internet does not belong to an elite few (like print, radio and television before us). The Internet, and its collective power, is bigger than governments and political leaders. It is faster than any form of media before us, much bigger and more influential. More is at stake. Our lifestyles and lines of communications are at stake.

Thing is, do we trust ourselves?

We’ll do you? Personally I’m amazed that we’ve even got this far without internet censorship – seriously it’s been almost 20 years in the western world since the introduction of the internet. I’d be completely for it but there’s some key reason’s why I’m not – PIPA won’t stop piracy and SOPA will cripple publishers & the internet economy.

PIPA: Pirates are smart – they’ve always been one step ahead. This won’t change a thing. New domain, new server. Heard of UserNet?
SOPA: Will I still be able to write my own tailored description on ebay? Write this blog post like this?

Truthfully I don’t have the answer. I don’t think anyone outside of governments does. I do however get some sort of comfort in the sense that the people co-oridnating these law’s know things that we’ll never.

But anyway, back to my first point, what were Google’s top algorithmic changes in 2011? highervisibility.com have releasd this lovely infographic rounding up the years most significant algorithmic changes.

The latest comes from Videoinfographs.com, where last week they released the video titled “The World of Social Media 2011″ – showing all the latest facts & figures about social media.

Statistics I Found Noteworthy:

• 11% of the world is now on Facebook (Dec 2011)
• There are now more Facebook users than motor vehicles – 800,000,000 Vs 750,000,000.
• Every 60 seconds there are; 510,000 posted comments, 293,000 status updates & 136,000 uploaded photographs
• Twitter is now at 225,000,000 users – although I’m not sure how many of these are bots….
• Aged demographics of LinkedIn’s population are: Age 18 – 24 = 21%, Age 25 – 34 = 34%, 35 – 54 = 36% & 55+ = 7%
• YouTube has over 490,000,000 unique visitors each month generating 92,000,000,000 page views
• Lady Gaga overtook Ashton Kutcher to be the most followed person Twitter with 15,864,000 followers

Surprised by these statistics? I can’t help thinking how or rather when the rate of growth will slow – especially with regards to the Facebook population.

2011′s Remembrance day is even more special – on the 11 hour of 11/11/11 we will host our 2 minute silence & war memorial services on a date that won’t happen for another 1000 years. Not only that, but its also the 90th year since the Royal British Legion began Remembrance Day.

Show your respect digitally and wear a poppy profile picture on your Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or other social networking accounts.

Want a Poppy Profile Picture to?

If you want one to, right click & save the remembrance day profile image below and set it as your Twitter or Facebook profile picture.

Transparent Profile Picture

Facebook Poppy Profile Picture for Remembrance Day

Regular Profile Picture

Poppy profile picture for Remembrance Day

Don’t forget to share the digital poppy with others.

Also make a remembrance day donation on-line.

Thank you

Takethislollipop.com calls this out big time. Check out the website, allow the app access to data just as you would a friend and see what happens.

Dare to take the lolly?

I’m sure it grabbed your attention right? Don’t you think it’s kind of ironic that you made friends with it? It got your photos, knows your friends, found out where you live! Its probably scared you into being a little more careful with your Facebook information hasn’t it. Is this what we needed? Personally,

The question on my mind is – where do we draw the line around 3rd party access to personal sources like the OpenGraph? Should advertisers even be allowed access to it? The truth is our data can and is misused.

To promote Google+, Google has concentrated on leveraging its owned assets – giving little or no attention to paid & earned channels. We’ve seen a revamp of the Google homepage, a Google wide top-navigation banner, +1 in search results & even Google+ sharing buttons – all giving prominence to the Google+ Social Network.

The latest update comes to Adsense. I received the email below from the Adsense team stating; Google will start rolling out the +1 button to both text and banner advertising creative’s. Something I hoped Facebook do a long time ago – so much so that I made a “like” button enabled banner.

Hello,

In the next month, we’ll introduce the +1 button and personal recommendations to display ads. The +1 button will begin to appear on AdSense for Content and AdSense for Mobile Content display ad formats — image, animated gif, and Flash. +1s will be one additional signal to help determine an ad’s relevance and we’ll continue to show the ads that will generate the most revenue for you.

We previously launched the +1 button on Google search and for publisher sites to make it easier for people to share and discover content across the web. Soon, your users will be able to endorse specific ads and make the ads more likely to appear to their social connections. We believe that these recommendations could help your readers notice ads on your site more, leading to higher returns for you over time.

If you prefer not to show the +1 buttons on display ads on your pages, you can opt out in your account. For more information please visit the Inside AdSense blog.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense team

Kudos Google.