Bing and the Evolution of Social Search

Bing and the Evolution of Social Search

by Michael Garrity

One complaint that Internet users tend to lodge about Google is that the Web services company tries to force users into adopting all of its various properties to get the full range of benefits from using just one of them.

Of course, Google does this because it wants to keep as many people using all of its many services (search, Gmail, YouTube, Google+, etc.) as it can. For those that do use them all, Google provides seamless integration across its Web properties that allows users to stay logged in on all of the company’s websites, while promising a personalized experience based on their pervious actions – no matter where they are at the time.

Bing's Social Adaptation

Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which is still trying to catch up after Google’s massive head start, has decided to take a wildly different approach to socializing the search process for users. Rather than trying to be inclusive and requiring users to stay within the confines of only its Web properties to provide a social, personalized search experience, Bing has decided to try to extend its social search capabilities as far across the Internet as it can; it did this by partnering with the undisputed biggest name in social media: Facebook.

With Facebook (and its 1 billion users), Bing is able to cast a very wide net across the social Web. After all, many websites now incorporate some sort of Facebook data, whether that’s by including social login in its comment sections or just adding a “Like” button to a content page. This seemingly ubiquitous presence all over the ‘Net is both Facebook and Bing’s biggest asset against Google, and by combining one another’s services (and user data), they may just stand a chance at providing an alternative, less-exclusive and potentially better social search experience.

While the Bing and Facebook partnership began when the search engine provided the Web search functionality for the social network, they have since done much more to integrate the two services. Now, Bing searchers can actually see recommendations and social signals from their Facebook friends as part of their search results by seeing what those other users “Like” or talk about relating to the search query at hand.

Graph Search: An Evolutionary Leap

More recently (as in last week), Facebook announced the beta release of Graph Search, a Bing-powered solution to let users search the content they have shared on the social network. This tool will help people discover information based on data that Facebook has collected from its users, allowing them to search across all of their Facebook content and connections to find new people, places and things.

But the real point here is that Facebook and Bing worked together to create “a unified search experience” that allows users to search beyond Facebook, showing Web search results from Bing that use “social context and additional information” (e.g. Facebook pages). For instance, when a Facebook user searches for something on the site, Bing results will show up alongside Facebook content with additional news and information that is annotated with data about how many people "Liked" and shared the contents of those search results on Facebook. In short, the social network has begun to integrate Bing Web search results into its site search results and combining them with exclusive Facebook data.

Looking Forward

Granted, this is still in an experimental phase for Graph Search, and it is in no way ready to compete with the combined efforts of Google+ and Google’s Search Plus Your World socially personalized search initiative, but what is important is that it finally gives Bing something of a social edge on The Big G. By joining forces with Facebook, Bing not only has access to the social data of a significantly larger user base than Google+, but it also has a much larger group of websites and blogs that integrate Facebook services from which it can pull information and improve its search results.

Perhaps most important, however, is that the Bing/Facebook approach doesn’t really require (Facebook) users to change behavior, as these new social search features are being integrated into each brand’s regular services. This slow, less-obtrusive transition could help spur on the gradual, refined and, ultimately, more successful evolution of social search.

 

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2233490/5-Steps-to-Calculate-Social-Media-ROI-Using-Google-Analytics?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=linkedin

5 Steps to Calculate Social Media ROI Using Google Analytics

Rebecca Murtagh, January 3, 2013 16 Comments

Sixty-five percent of CMOs in the strategic phase are looking to convert followers to paying customers, and 63 percent wish to achieve or increase ROI from investments in social media, according to MarketingSherpa.
While marketing professionals have recognized the mandate to be socially engaged, the monetization and ROI of social media to support business goals still eludes many.
Efforts to promote social profiles, pages, sharing, and engagement are meaningless unless they support a path to conversion and positively impact the bottom line. Many marketers struggle to quantify their efforts and demonstrate ROI, unaware that this data is readily available to them through Google Analytics Social Reports.

Tangible Data Drives Results

While other solutions are offering social media insights, Google Analytics integrates social data in context, providing a holistic view of the website as the center of the digital universe for the brand. Data for metrics such as Network Referrals, Pages, Plugins and Visitor Flow are automatically captured in Analytics Reports connect-the-dots between content and community.
Once a dollar value is assigned to each Goal as a Conversion, Google Analytics enables a dollar-based definition of social impact, revealing which visitors, social platforms, and content drive high-quality customers toward conversion and the bottom line.
Marketers no longer have to work to draw assumptions or guess what is or isn't working. Brands seeking to intelligently adapt social strategy in response to conversion and performance data can now do so with ease.

1. Define KPIs for Social Media

Just as you would define the end goal for any other marketing initiative, key performance indicators (KPIs) are vital to strategic planning and reporting on investments in social media. Whether performance will be measured by purchases, email opt-ins, demo requests, shares, downloads, or time spent on the website, Google Analytics Social Reports allow for KPIs to be reflected as Goals.
The impact of social on each defined benchmark is revealed in an easy-to-read report. And, because a Goal can be identified by URL Destination, Visit Duration, Page/Visit or Event, and assigned a Value, measuring performance of social initiatives as they relate to the specific business model and goals of the brand is available to any website using Google Analytics.
Google Analytics enables marketers to determine exactly how valuable social is to realizing goals and completing ecommerce transactions.

2. Use Data to Make Informed Decisions

Data is only useful when it is applied. Social Reports provide marketers data-driven insight to replace the assumptions previously made through observation and mining what data was previously provided.
Google Analytics uses website data to reveal Social Sources, identifying which social networks drive the most traffic, result in conversion and deliver the most high quality visitors. Access to this data enables marketers to identify the highest-performing networks and define how/whether to invest in other social networks to support KPIs and Goals.
The Visitor Flow Report illustrates which paths visitors from social networks take once they arrive on your website, whether they continued onto other pages, or exited the website. This insight can help identify missing links in the conversion path, and drive strategic content development.

3. Leverage Social Data to Drive Content Marketing

The Content Reports provides comparison charts, revealing which of the social networks delivers the most high-value visitors, and which content is most relevant to those who will convert.
The Pages Report identifies the most viral content, shared by others on the website as well as external sites. Invaluable insights can be leveraged to determine what followers, friends and connections find "shareable" to guide the planning and deployment of future content.
The Social Value Graph provides a snapshot of all Goal completions, identifying conversions resulting from social referrals, allowing for comparison to visitors from other sources such as Search, Direct or other Referral Sources.
Google states “Content that gets shared, wins.” Google Analytics Social Plug-ins Report’illuminates which posts on your website have been shared, which social buttons were used, and where the content was shared (Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.). These insights can be leveraged to build community and promote organic sharing of content.

4. Leveraging Social Relationships

Measuring the impact of relationships with audiences over time is perhaps one of the most elusive metrics for socially-engaged brands. An immediate conversion is not always won. Sometimes, it simply takes time to build trust, present the right offer, or provide the right incentive to win a conversion.
Google Analytics has made it easier to justify the long-term investment in social, by differentiating between an immediate conversion, or one from a returning visitor. Last Interaction identifies a social referral that results in a conversion. Assisted Social Conversions identify visitors from a social referral source that do not result in a conversion during their first visit, but do convert during a later visit to the website.
This data can be invaluable in justifying the long-term investment in social relationships, as opposed to the temptation to simply use social platforms to deliver one-way broadcasts.

5. Use Social Sources to Learn More About Your Audiences

One of the most powerful aspects of social is the mere fact that behind every interaction is a human. Post-conversion customers are easier to define. However, gathering insight into those who interact with the brand before conversion can be more challenging.
The Google Analytics Social Sources Report shares typical metrics such as page views, duration of visit, pages per visit, etc. by network. Analytics reports how many visitors were referred by social each social network; Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, Stumbleupon, YouTube and other networks, and displays which content page URLs were shared on each platform.
Additional insights are provided by what Google calls Hub Partner Networks including enhanced off-site data such as URLs shared on that site, and how they were shared (+1, re-share, comments) and conversations around your content on partners such as Google+, Google Groups, Disqus, Digg, and others. View the current list of Google Social Data Hub networks.

Bottom Line

It has never been easier to calculate the impact of social on the bottom line.

Once A Week, SEO Checklist

http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2013/01/09/once-a-week-seo-checklist.aspx?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter


A new year always brings about new possibilities, which are often predicated on the many resolutions we all make to improve our lives and work during the course of the year.

It’s possible that many of the hardworking webmasters and website owners have resolved to improve or amp up their search engine optimization (SEO) efforts this year to help them find more relevant consumers and increase conversions. However, many of these same Web workers will quickly find themselves faced with the same problems that plagued them in the years passed, most notably a lack of time in an already busy schedule.

No need to worry, though, because here’s some good news for you: It’s possible to maintain a healthy SEO campaign by (mostly) conducting a check up once a week that examines the most important elements of your website for moving up the search engine rankings, allowing you to identify and correct any issues you may be having. And the best part is, once these larger problems are corrected, it will help improve many other aspects of your overall SEO performance.

Just make sure that you regularly follow a version of this SEO checklist once a week, and get ready to watch the inevitable upward progress of your search marketing efforts.

- Use Google Webmaster Tools to check sitemaps

To start, simply sign into your Google Webmaster Tools account (actually, if you don’t have one, the first step is to register one), which can help you quickly identify any issues with your domain. Primarily, you should use this service to make sure your sitemaps don’t have any errors and to review how many of your pages have been indexed. If you find that you have some missing pages, that’s a pretty good indicator that you need to submit a brand new sitemap.xml to the search engines.

- Don’t forget to look for crawl errors, too

Google Webmaster Tools can also help you spot any crawl errors (pages “not found” or broken links) on your site; if these issues are uncovered, they should be considered top priority fixes. In addition, this tool can help you check up on your site speed, HTML problems, such as short or duplicate metadata, and links to your site.

- Look for (and fix) broken links

Having a bunch of dead links on your website is going to hurt your standing with the search engines, so you should make it a point to regularly look for them by using a tools like Dead-Links.com to crawl your website and point out any hazardous hyperlinks that you are unaware of. And once you know which links are bad, you can easily fix or get rid of them.

- Tune up title tags

If you’ve put any effort into your SEO until now, every page on your site should have its own unique, descriptive title (as indicated in the HTML

Push - Media Advice

http://www.pushhere.com/pov/restoring-consumer-confidence/ 

"Clearly, there are multiple ways to go about retaining consumers and accumulating new ones. The bottom line is to display transparency in order to build trust. From here, you can look to research, use your creative powers to experiment with new marketing ideas and, most importantly, show consumers that you care. Put the consumers first by finding out what they want, inviting feedback and working to improve communications."

Raymond James - restoring consumer confidence, "187 year old Skinner"

Dumbest Facebook Post Ever?

http://shine.yahoo.com/healthy-living/dumbest-facebook-post-ever-170100535.html