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Knowledge Graph: Google Officially Announces Its “Things” Results
Google says this makes it smarter
By Chris Crum
Google has formally announced the “Knowledge Graph,” its way of providing results about “things”. We’ve reported on the products of this a couple of times, as Google has been testing them.
An example would be when you search for a band, and Google puts some boxes on the side of the search results page with some specific info about that band. Likewise for movies, actors, books and people. According to the company, it also includes landmarks, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, celestial objects, works of art, and more.
The main theme of the Knowledge Graph, as Google is presenting it, is that it is making Google smarter and better at giving you answers. Better at distinguishing what you mean by certain queries, which may come with more than one meaning. Googles gives the example of Taj Mahal: “do you mean Taj Mahal the monument, or Taj Mahal the musician? Now Google understands the difference, and can narrow your search results just to the one you mean.”
Google put out the following video talking about it:
According to the WSJ article, Google’s 2010 acquisition of Metaweb plays a significant role in what is now known as the Knowledge Graph.
“Google’s Knowledge Graph isn’t just rooted in public sources such as Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook,” says Singhal. “It’s also augmented at a much larger scale—because we’re focused on comprehensive breadth and depth. It currently contains more than 500 million objects, as well as more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects. And it’s tuned based on what people search for, and what we find out on the web.”
I’m guessing there’s some Google Squared in there too.
“How do we know which facts are most likely to be needed for each item? For that, we go back to our users and study in aggregate what they’ve been asking Google about each item,” explains Singhal. “For example, people are interested in knowing what books Charles Dickens wrote, whereas they’re less interested in what books Frank Lloyd Wright wrote, and more in what buildings he designed.”
The Knowledge Graph is “gradually” rolling out to U.S. users in English.
About Chris Crum
Chris Crum has been a part of the WebProNews team and the iEntry Network of B2B Publications since 2003. Follow Chris on Twitter, on StumbleUpon, on Pinterest and/or on Google: +Chris Crum.
Posted under Google, SEO, Social Media, Web Development | No Comments
12 Social Media Rules of Engagement for Small Businesses
By Kim Deppe
Promoting your business on social media can be helpful in extending your brand, gaining visibility, and building relationships with your customers. Done right, it can be an inexpensive way to market your company.
But too many times I see companies plastering up a Facebook page just because everybody else is doing it. Or, they shoot out a few tweets and after a few days or weeks give up because no one is paying attention.
Is social media the right tool for your business? Here are some guidelines to help you use social media as a strategic marketing tool:
| 1. Have a purpose. Like any other marketing strategy, social media should be a tool that helps you meet a goal. You wouldn’t just go out and start buying ads without knowing what you want to accomplish, so don’t do it with social media. It might not cost anything to start a Facebook page, but there is a cost in time and that’s also a valuable resource.
2. Don’t sell. Social media is social. People use it to relate to one another and just like you wouldn’t walk into a party and start pitching your wares, you shouldn’t hard-sell on social media, either. There are ways to get people talking about your products or services, but you have to tread softly or risk losing your audience. 3. Be prepared to invest time and effort into your social media marketing. You will need to understand your target audience and how best to approach them. You need to understand what interests them, and know what it is you have to say that is valuable to that audience. Don’t post or tweet just to do it – make sure you have something to say or you will quickly be dropped by your readers.
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Posted under Social Media, Social Networking | 1 Comment
7 Sneaky Ways to Use Facebook to Spy on Your Competition
via Kristi Hines @ KISSmetrics
Previously on KISSmetrics, I covered the art of 7 sneaky ways to use Twitter to spy on your competition. I don’t really consider it spying so much as simply competitor research, but spying makes it more James Bond-like. And who doesn’t want to pretend to be a secret agent every now and again?
If your competitor doesn’t have Twitter, or you’ve exhausted what you can learn in 140 character bites, let’s continue by learning how to use Facebook for competitor research. Here are some sneaky (or little known) ways to use Facebook to learn more about your competitor’s online marketing strategy.
1. Find out your competitor’s strength on Facebook.
When it comes to competition, the first thing people want to know is if their competitor is using something and how well are they using it.
Facebook offers a simple link.getStats console that will give you basic statistics about any domain’s popularity on Facebook.
For example, if you wanted to check out the popularity of Southwest.com on Facebook, enter southwest.com and click on Call Method to get the following:
This shows the number of likes and shares for their root domain, along with other interesting tidbits of data.
You can also enter the fan page URL in the Test Console of your competitor to get some basic popularity data about their fan page as well.
Note that you’ll need to visit their Facebook fan page and grab the URL directly out of the browser as it won’t return any data for http://www.facebook.com/southwest but will for http://www.facebook.com/Southwest simply because of the capitalization of Southwest.
2. Get the competitor’s raw Facebook data using the Facebook Open Graph.
By using Facebook’s own Graph API, you can view the basic data setup of any Facebook entity.
Let’s say you’re in the process of setting up your fan page. Maybe you’re not sure what category you should place it in or what information you should fill out. By finding your competitor’s fan page and appending their username or fan page ID number to the http://graph.facebook.com/ URL, you can see all their basic details in one shot without even liking their page!
If you put one of my personal favorite restaurant fan page’s username into the URL, for example, you would get the following.
Fan Page URL: http://www.facebook.com/chipotle
Open Graph URL: https://graph.facebook.com/chipotle
For fan page URLs that don’t have a simple custom username, simply put their fan page ID number in place of the username. The fan page ID is the 15 digit number at the end of fan page URLs in this format: http://facebook.com/pages/page-title/123456789012345/.
You can see even more applications of this on the Graph API page. You can use it to grab basic information about events, groups, applications, status messages, photo albums, and much more. Basically, anything that isn’t private can be discovered.
3. Find out what freebies excite and encourage your competitor’s fans to like their page.
One of the best ways to get more likes on Facebook is to offer a freebie in what is known as a reveal tab or fan gate.
Red Bull, for example, found that extreme videos would attract more people into liking their page, and with 21 million fans, they must have been right! If your competitor has a similar tab with content promised to people who like their page and their page has lots of fans, you might want to try this strategy for your own fan page.
4. See what the competitor’s fans love and hate about their brand.
One of the best things about Facebook fan pages is that the majority of information is open and available for public consumption. You generally don’t even have to like the page to find out what people are saying – just go directly to the wall and ignore the welcome tab / reveal tab.
Once you’re there, you may only see updates from the page itself, and that’s not where the gold lies. Just below the photo strip at the top, you will want to select the Top Posts link and then filter with Most Recent. You’ll be able to see posts by the page and posts by fans on the wall in chronological order. Then you can read the updates and find out exactly what fans of your competitor love.
This includes everything about the brand like the products and services they provide as well as everything about their status updates, photos, videos, etc. This can give you a great idea of what you should be doing with your business and your Facebook strategy if you want the same love from fans too!
The flip side to seeing everything a fan loves about the competition is seeing what the fans despise. Surprisingly, a lot of people will like a fan page just to complain about the products and services of the brand who owns the page.
This can give you some key insights into what things your brand can improve upon in hopes that the people who are unsatisfied with your competitor may come check you out instead!
5. Learn how to respond to criticisms.
Whenever you see complaints on the competitor’s fan page, you might want to laugh unless you have been struggling to find better ways to respond to criticism on your own fan page from disgruntled customers. If that is the case, you can learn how your competitors respond to negative posts on their wall.
Having the interaction lumped into one update makes it much easier to follow the conversation from complaint to resolution compared to when a customer and competitor are going back and forth on Twitter.
6. Follow all of your competitors in one place.
Ok, this one isn’t necessarily sneaky, but it helps you organize your sneaky spying. 
At the bottom of the left sidebar of a fan page (usually beneath the number of people who like the page or the list of pages that the fan page likes), you can find a Subscribe to RSS link.
Using this option, you can then subscribe to all of your competitors fan page status updates in your favorite RSS reader. This means you don’t have to like the page to see what their latest updates are and you don’t have to visit multiple pages regularly to check on their updates.
My preferred choice is Google Reader because you can also easily search the updates using the search feature for particular keywords and you can organize your pages into folders by type.
The only downside of this is you’re only getting the updates by the fan page itself, and not any updates posted by fans. But it’s still a nice way to monitor your competitors’ strategies without having to keep visiting their page routinely.
7. Advertise to your competitor’s fans.
This one is a bit of a dirty trick more than a sneaky trick, but I’ve seen other brands use it to some successful degree, so it felt wrong not to mention it.
Imagine your biggest competitor is having some kind of crisis. For hosting companies, it would be massive server downtime. For automobile makers, it would be major recalls. For a restaurant, it would be an outbreak of food poisoning. This is all stuff you can learn about if you are following your competitors closely via their fan pages as previously mentioned.
Now image you could put an ad right in front of all of their fans that addressed their biggest concern. For hosting companies, it could be an ad that says 99.9% uptime guaranteed. For automobile makers, it could be an ad that says your brand has the least recalls of them all. For a restaurant, it could be an ad that says they have a five star rating!
Well guess what? You can! Facebook Advertising lets you target ads down to specific demographic details.
The best part – you can also target your ad to fans of a competitor’s fan page using Precise Interests!
Once you enter a brand, it will estimate the people you will reach (assuming that you have a country selected). You can even add in multiple brands and competitors for each ad.
Your Sneaky Facebook Strategy
There you have it – seven great ways to use Facebook to learn more about your competitors and their Facebook strategy. How do you use Facebook for competitor research? Please share your thoughts in the comments, and happy spying!
Posted under Facebook, Marketing, Social Media | No Comments
Google’s New Privacy Policy: Close But No Cigar
By Adam Levin via BoingBoing.net
Last week was a pretty good one for the notion of privacy in America, which has increasingly become forlorn and tattered as a result of the advancement of digital technology. First, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Jones that warrantless GPS tracking of a criminal suspect by the FBI was unconstitutional, and then later in the week Google announced its new privacy policy, a model of simplicity and fairness with one sizeable flaw. Oddly, this particular decision by the court sheds some important light on the particular problem within Google’s otherwise admirable new privacy policy.
The decision of the Court in United States v. Jones was accompanied by two concurring opinions, one written by Justice Alito, and the other by Justice Sotomayor. The unanimous decision and ruling found that the government violated the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures because a tracking device had been attached to the defendant’s car without first obtaining a warrant. The placing of the device constituted a trespass, akin to breaking into someone’s home or filing cabinet.
Justice Alito’s well-reasoned concurrence went further, arguing that the notion of physical trespass as a predicate to finding a warrant necessary was outdated, and that beginning with the wiretapping cases of the 1960s, courts began to recognize that a more appropriate standard was whether or not a person had “a reasonable expectation of privacy” in a given situation. This approach, argued Alito, was far more effective in dealing with privacy issues in the digital era—as opposed to limiting the Fourth Amendment to the law of trespass, which essentially dates back to 1215. Justice Sotomayor’s opinion spoke to the world as we know it, and she couldn’t have been more spot on. She wrote:
… it may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties… This approach is ill-suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks. People disclose the phone numbers that they dial or text to their cellular providers; the URLs that they visit and the e-mail addresses with which they correspond to their Internet service providers; and the books, groceries, and medications they purchase to online retailers… I for one doubt that people would accept without complaint the warrantless disclosure to the Government of a list of every Web site they had visited in the last week, or month, or year.”
Justice Sotomayor separates the notion of intrusion from that of physical trespass while simultaneously untangling the often-confused ideas of privacy and secrecy. Why should anyone expect that the information that a customer has to provide to their bank will be made available to the Government without a Court-issued warrant? Absent that warrant, anything you intend to keep private should be kept private. Justice Sotomayor cited the decision in the 1967 case of Katz v. United States “[W]hat [a person] seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.” Justice Sotomayor’s logic preserves the sanctity of the Fourth Amendment in the context of the massive flow of digital information available on the Internet today, and as such, it is a very important opinion. However, the Fourth Amendment restricts only what the government can do; it bears no relation to the activities or policies of individuals or organizations. There are plenty of other laws that in one way or another seek to protect the privacy of personal information from misuse by the private sector, but the best protection an individual can have is the attitude and policy of the entity to whom one’s information is voluntarily entrusted. Happily, but slowly, major players on the web are taking steps to protect your privacy, or at least to let you know just how and why it can be forfeit. So last week’s announcement by Google (probably the largest collector of information on the planet, outside of Beijing) regarding privacy is not only important, but very timely in light of the Court’s decision in the Jones case.
Google’s new policy is exemplary in its brevity, comprehensibility, and candor. If you disagree, try reading one from a bank or a wireless carrier (emphasis on the word “try.”) In simple language, it sets forth—among other items—the kinds of information being collected, how Google and its associates may use that information, and what you can do to limit that usage. It really does tell you everything you need to know, for better or for worse, and as compared to the policies and procedures of other information collectors, it seems reasonable and fair-minded. It does, however, embody one glaring mistake, best illuminated by the light of Justice Sotomayor’s concurring opinion.
Contained in the “Information Sharing” section there are assurances that information provided to Google will be shared with third parties only in limited circumstances. Google lists four circumstances, the first one being when, “We have a good faith belief that access, use, preservation or disclosure of such information is reasonably necessary to (a) satisfy any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request…”
Hold on, Bucky.
What exactly constitutes an “enforceable governmental request?” This sentence should read: “We will share information with a Governmental entity only when presented with a valid search warrant issued by a court of competent jurisdiction.” Such a provision would make it obvious that by giving information to Google, you do not intend to waive your constitutional rights, and it would make it clear that despite the fact that your information was shared willingly with a private sector entity, you reasonably retained an expectation of privacy against Government intrusion. If everyone’s privacy policy had language of this type, sooner or later every court — and every legislature — would remember all that stuff about the Fourth Amendment.
Of course, you may still be dismayed by the fact that Google is able to share your information with anyone at all, whether private or public. Arguably, that is the price we pay for all of the service and convenience that companies like Google provide to us, free of charge. But, that is a conversation we must reserve for another day. The old saw is that the requirement of search warrants makes crime easier for the bad guys. In the Jones case, the defendant was given a life sentence for, among other things, harboring a linebacker-sized cache of cocaine — and that conviction was overturned by the Court’s unanimous decision. And that is the price of freedom.
Posted under Google, Social Media | No Comments
The real truths about social media marketing
by Richard
Enough is enough ! That’s how I feel about all the BS that is being written about social media marketing. I actually read an article yesterday that said that ROI is not important when implementing social media marketing. Can you imagine someone asking for more budget dollars and people to implement something that has no proven ROI ? Talk about job and career suicide. Here are the truths about social media marketing from my POV.
The Truths On Social Media Marketing:
1ne: Pulling dollars from other digital marketing initiatives into social media is a stupid idea.
There I said it. Regardless what the people at Facebook would have you believe your branded website, online search and online advertising is a hell of lot more important than your social media pages.
2wo: The number one reason people follow a brand on social media is to get promotions/discounts.
Think that people are going to follow your brand because they really want to have a relationship with your brand ? Then please stop drinking that Kool-Aid. There are very few brands that people think are cool and want to be part of. Brands like Apple, Starbukcs and Trek are far and few between. It’s not cool to say “Tide is my detergent and I love doing laundry” or “I love Barilla pasta”.
3hree: If you can’t connect brand/business ROI directly to social media then why the hell would you invest so much money in it ?
Yes, maybe you do need a social media presence but if you can’t at the end of the day connect ROI and show management how the dollars you are investing into social media is actually driving ROI than you’re trying to drink Kool-Aid in a cup without a bottom.
4our: Even when companies are on social media a majority of them do not listen to consumers
70% of Companies Ignore Customer Complaints on Twitter and more than 50% of companies on Facebook don’t respond to peoples posts. This sends a message that either you’re not listening, which pissed off consumers a lot, or that you don’t really care. The number one reason this happens is because the person monitoring social media for your company is only doing it part time or they don’t have the authority/marketing skills to talk for your brand.
5ive: “Likegating”, requiring someone to Like you before they can interact with your brand on Facebook is both ignorant and is clear indication that you just don’t understand the basic principles of social media.
Enough said if you have to ask why then you really need to spend a lot more time with consumers and less time in the office.
6ix: Too many social media “experts” are great at telling you what you should do but when you ask them what they have actually done their resumes are blank.
They like to write books or promote themselves as speakers at social media conferences and when you ask them what they actually did for brands/companies, beyond vanity metrics such as number of “Likes” or “engagement” you get a blank stare. These are people who don’t understand that marketers today are under increasing pressure to to show real results with their budget dollars. Going into management and saying 25,000 people Like us on Facebook while sales are tanking is pissing on an electrified fence.
7even: There are only three reasons to implement social media marketing; to reduce costs, increase sales and improve profitability.
You can spend hours talking with people via Twitter or Facebook but if they don’t become a customer or choose your brand at the store than why in the hell would you spend so many resources on them ? Oh that’s right because they MAY have better impression of our brand. Well today it’s more about price for a lot of products and people are trading down and dropping brands to save money.
What I am really trying to say here is that we as marketers need to get closer to our customers and consumers to understand just how important our brand is in their lives. How much thought is really going into choosing a salad dressing brand or detergent vs. a computer or appliance brand. Where are the key decisions being made and how can I as a marketer be there when they are making these decisions. This is probably the most important skill any marketer can have.
Posted under Marketing, Social Media | No Comments
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