Google’s previous efforts, such as Google Buzz, have largely failed. But Google+ is different, in that many people are taking it seriously and suggesting that Google may actually have a new, easy to use tool that could rival existing social networks.

At present, Google+ has a few different aspects to it. When you first sign up, it collects everything you’ve done on previous Google services together at once. For heavy Google users, this makes things a bit easier to start, although slightly creepy, as the system pulls every person you’ve ever emailed for years and presents them to you in a list. You can then categorise these people into your ‘circles’.

Circles

By nature, Google declares that you share things with different people and group them together in your mind. So you can create different “circles” for different sharing levels. You might find something cool that you want to share with your work colleagues, while your personal information can go only to your closest friends. At first glance, this seems like a good way to organise things; like many people, I know I personally have those groups of people from different times in my life, and I’m sure you do too; different jobs, different schools, different levels of friendship.

Photos

Google uses its purchased Picasa technology to store your photos. If you’re already using Picasa, you’ll find all of your photos right there, though you’ll still need to choose who you reveal them to. Future photos can be uploaded both in Google+ and through Facebook apps for mobiles. Called ‘Instant Upload’, Google+ will send your photos online as soon as you take them, but won’t share them until you’ve set your privacy settings.

Hangouts

This functionality is basically Skype built in to Google. You can start a ‘Huddle’ conversation, adjust your webcam and microphone, and invite friends to chat with you. Up to 10 people can enter a ‘Hangout’. This is actually a good idea, integrating a different service into Google so users don’t have to rely on apps installed on their computer, but we’ll have to see about adoption when the site launches more widely. It wants to be a replacement for the unplanned meetup in person, like happens for many of us at uni, but in the real world. It could also be a great feature for families if migration does occur from Facebook to Google+.

Huddle

This works like a chat room, turning your text messages into a single conversation with one of your ‘circles’. So if you’re all trying to go to a movie, you can coordinate in a single conversation instead of trying to get multiple people together.

Sparks

This, another very clever idea, leverages Google technology to bring you stories that you might be interested in. If you’ve listed one of your interests as ‘books’, Google will present you with all the recent stories about books and invite you to share them with your friends.

I quite like this one, as it could help me do a quick round-up of recent news in favourite sectors. I would still want to use Google for actual, impartial search, though those are apparently few and far between these days.

Privacy

This also seems a good move towards more privacy. You don’t have to share your personal news with your boss if you don’t want to, and you can screen out those people you’ve added just to stay in touch with but aren’t particularly close to. You can share whatever you like with whoever you like. Those people can also +1 your news or leave a comment, just like on Facebook.

Google, however, are open with the fact that they’re using the underlying happenings of Google+ in search results. So, if something gets shared on Google+, it’s highly likely that it will go on to influence search results. Of course, we know that some things we share will probably influence search results anyway, like on Facebook and Twitter, so in that sense this isn’t really new. It just means that Google+ isn’t breaking any boundaries on the privacy front, even if it does look easier to use.

Stay tuned for more information as we get it, including a hands on experience!

Google+: First Impressions is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

In the early hours of May 2^nd a team of US Navy special forces raided a mansion in the small Pakistani city of Abbottabad, located in the north east of the country around 100km from the Afghan border. During a fire fight with insurgent forces it is reported that Osama Bin Laden was shot and killed and after recovering his body the corpse was buried at sea by US naval officials from the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson.

Although controversy and conspiracy continue to cloud the exact details of the operation, code named ‘Neptune Spear’, one of the most intriguing insights to arise from the event was however not the incident itself, but the medium through which the news was broken to an unsuspecting world.

Hours before President Barak Obama’s now famous address, the raid on Bin Laden’s $250,000 mansion had been unwittingly ‘liveblogged’ by an Abbottabad resident. Sohaib Athar (Twitter username @ReallyVirtual) roused by the unusual noise of a helicopter flying over head at 1am Pakistani Standard Time originally issued one seemingly commonplace tweet, observing that, ‘Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).’

The tweets which continued on for several hours catalogued a series of explosions and supposition that a helicopter had been shot down. After reporting that apparently one person had been killed in a helicopter crash Mr Athar who studied for an MBA at the University of Central Lancashire further in a tweet that, ‘I think the helicopter crash in Abbottabad, Pakistan and the President Obama breaking news address are connected.’

By now of course this was only one of a fury of microblogs being sent all across the globe in what was later revealed to be the highest sustained rate of tweeting in the service’s history which over a three and a half hour period preceding and following President Obama’s address averaged at over 3,000 tweets per second. The news itself was actually revealed by former chief of staff to Donald Rumsfeld, Keith Urbahn who a further hour before the President’s official statement tweeted that, ‘So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot damn.’

Although many questions still remain over the validity of Twitter as a journalistic or even commercial resource the power of live-feed news it seems is undeniable and the impact of having access to an exclusive insight can be tremendous, just ask Sohaib Athar whose Twitter followers jumped from a respectable 751 on April 30^th to 101,526 two days later! Although this was of course a unique scenario it does demonstrate the growing influence of live-feed news and in an age where presidential candidates are announced over Facebook and Royal engagements revealed in a Tweet the growing impact of social media even, or perhaps especially, upon the most official and governmentally sensitive aspects of our culture is undeniable.

Social media and the fall of Osama Bin Laden is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

Herein is one of the problems with relying on so many other people for our data and actual methods of working. Already, our websites are hosted in places we can’t control, our marketing activities take place on Facebook, Twitter, Quora, and Foursquare, and work simply cannot happen without access to the internet. How many of our readers out there would struggle to get any work done without email? Even jobs that have nothing to do with the internet are often reliant on it for basic communication – you can just pick up the phone, of course, but it’s simply not as easy. It’s the same in your house, though, if you think about it; we’re all crippled if the power goes out or if the water stops running. We don’t generate these things ourselves, we pay others to ensure that we receive them.

The cloud is simply not any different from the services we rely on. As the saying goes, you should never put all of your eggs in one basket, and neither should you rely on any one service for your online marketing. I would never advocate that you abandon your website for a Facebook page, for example, no matter who says the trend is going in that direction. Have multiple methods of marketing and try new things; that way, if one ever does fail, you’ll have plenty in other areas to keep you busy while it gets back up and running.

For the general cloud industry, however, Amazon’s downtime is very worrying. If it can happen to them, it can happen to anyone, and in an industry that asks small to medium size businesses to rely on them for everything, Amazon’s failure is a catastrophe. This failure has certainly damaged their credibility in the cloud field and undoubtedly caused doubt in the minds of many who had previously relied on the cloud with no worries. Amazon, however, have their eggs in many different baskets, and can afford to take the hit. If all of your systems go down, can you?

What Do Cloud Failures Mean for Your Online Marketing? is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

However, creating a company page and getting your employees to show their affinity to it is only the first step. To enhance your business and use LinkedIn efficiently there are a number of steps you can take:

• Get listed in the service provider directory. Whether you are a travel agent or a tax advisor, LinkedIn’s service provider directory allows individuals to detail their role and the company they work for together with their experience. It is the perfect tool in advertising business on an individual level, attracting consumers in a personal and accessible way.
• Join relevant LinkedIn groups. This device enables you to discuss popular topics with professionals in the same industry. It promotes an interactive approach to discussions as you can like and comment on posts. Moreover, you can view the most influential people in your discussion by checking the Top Influences board or by clicking on an individual’s profile image to see their group activity. As a result, your profile will be present in discussions and other LinkedIn members will explore your profile and the company you work for.
• Create your own group. LinkedIn also gives you the opportunity to create your own group and instigate discussions relevant to your business. You can invite professionals to join your conversation and increase your membership in a number of ways. You can send out invitations to your LinkedIn connections and contacts that are not on LinkedIn, and if they accept they will automatically become members of your group. Alternatively you can allow group members to invite people to your group by turning on member invitations in your group settings. Finally you could send out mass invitations by uploading a CSV file of your email addresses.
• Participate in LinkedIn Answers. This is a platform for enabling you to share your business knowledge and gain advice from experts in your industry. You can ask a question simply by entering your question and selecting the appropriate category to place it under. It will then appear instantly under the answers tab, on your profile and on the LinkedIn homepage of your connections. Questions asked by others will appear under the answers tab, or when a connection asks a question you’ll receive a Network Update on your homepage. Your own answer will appear under the question you answered, as a network update on the homepages of your connections and on your profile. The answers you submit become part of your profile and demonstrate your expertise to your connections and potential business partners.
• Join your LinkedIn company profile with its Twitter counterpart. You can then share your tweets on LinkedIn, and your status updates on Twitter.  Twitter offers a broader perspective of your company and provides more instant communications for your followers. However, combining the two sites doesn’t mean that all your tweets and status updates appear on both sites. You can choose which tweets appear on your LinkedIn page and which status Updates appear on your Twitter account. As a result you have complete control over which networks see what.
• Install company buzz. This device allows you to follow tweets about the companies, products and people you need to follow from your LinkedIn homepage. You have the ability to modify the topics you’re tracking and add new ones to watch.

These techniques all assist in building company profiles within LinkedIn and promoting businesses. For small companies in particular, LinkedIn provides access to others in their industry and potential consumers all within the ease of a click. To achieve the maximum potential of social networking sites it is important to take an interactive approach and discover all the tools the site has to offer.  LinkedIn affords great potential in securing small businesses a place within their industry and offers a promotional opportunity to reach their target market.

The Benefit of LinkedIn in Promoting Small Businesses is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

Facebook launched its awards system yesterday which they are calling “Facebook Deals”. Whilst it is explained as revolutionary to most the users it is actually nothing really that Foursquare do not already do. The main difference is that with the backing of Facebook’s large user base the idea could now take off, much like many other ventures started by other companies that Facebook has left in its wake.

For those unfamiliar with how Foursquare did it, here is a quick summary of the Facebook Deals system:

• Using your smart phone handset you open your Facebook application and you need to click on the places button.
• You then need to check in to a one of the nearby registered locations that pops up. Depending on the size of the area you are in this list could either be very long (London) or very small (Beverley!)
• Places with deals are highlighted with a yellow flag and you can then see the deal by clicking on the destination and seeing the deal before then deciding to check in or not.
• Finally you check in at that location in order to claim the deal which you then present to the member of staff within the business.

A lot of the hype around the concept is justified as it has the potential to be huge and not just seen as an update to the Facebook system but rather a change to the way people shop. With Facebook now having more than 26 million users in the UK the potential for shops and services to target these people whilst they are out and about is huge.

The service is expected to take off with advertisers because redeeming an offer will show up in customers’ Facebook news feeds, essentially advertising the products to their friends and peer group. The potential for offers and promotions to go viral amongst friends is then really exciting for companies and a big incentive for them to sign up to the programme. Emily White of Facebook UK noted at the launch that “The wisdom of friends has taken over from the wisdom of crowds.”

The main concern will be of revealing your location and checking in at places meaning you are giving away even more details online than before which will cause concern among parents mainly. This does seem to be the way social networking is going though and is going to happen, for some it’s even an appeal or a status to be associated with certain shops, businesses or restaurants for example (who wouldn’t want to tell everyone they were checking in at the fat duck).

Facebook Deals: The End Of Foursquare Is Looming is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

The new proposal which was revealed by the social media giant on Friday came to face immediate criticism from security experts and advocates of personal privacy. In a post on the Facebook Developer blog it is stated that access to this data is ultimately decided by the user and the user alone, an opt-in or opt-out system. However, just as senior technology consultant Graham Cluley outlines in recent a Mashable article, this by no means renders the system infallible. Facebook users are at a very real risk by a growing number of disingenuous and potentially malicious applications which have been manufactured to phish for private data or simply have users input information themselves to gain access to hidden content. Most of us will have by now seen posts banging around on our news feeds which exclaim something like, “You won’t believe what this guy did to get off work” or any other statement of a similarly inflammatory or bizarrely intriguing nature with a video cap to boot.

What Cluley suggests is a filtering of apps which genuinely and quite usefully could utilise a user’s information to benefit their online experience. This would mean that other applications, legitimate or not, which have no reciprocally advantageous motivation for accessing such data would not even have the opportunity to offer an opt-in data sharing service, but would have their access limited by default.

The suggestion that these applications are opt-in is also somewhat misleading as in a majority of circumstances the actual agreement takes place during a preliminary installation or sign up process. This means that users do not know what it is exactly they are ‘opting into’, a little like buying a house before actually viewing it; perhaps then, the key is to be able to preview the application before subscribing to it fully.

I would certainly agree with Cluley’s stance that a much firmer line needs to be drawn between Facebook, its platform policies and the developers of these rogue apps who seem able to pass through what is currently a net with several large holes in it. A suitable resolution could be so easily achieved and I personally hope that it is, the alternative being that people will simply start to remove their contact information from the website, which would nullify Facebook’s growing use as an online directory.

It seems that the tussle for our personal information is set to continue and perhaps inevitably always will. Like Meghan has already stated, all I can reiterate is commonsense and vigilance, if something doesn’t seem quite right, more often than not, it isn’t. If you intelligently handle the ever expanding world of social media at your disposal then it can be a world of powerful opportunities. What we must not forget though is that it is we, the users, who give it this power and more often that not it is up to us to make our online communities better places to engage and interact in how we convey ourselves, what we post, share or tweet; after all what is a king without a kingdom, or a social network without a society?

Facebook postpones plans to share your info is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

But there is a limit to how much we’ll want social media to invade our lives. Many people already think that Twitter, for example, is for broadcasting what they’ve eaten. You can have conversations about what you had for lunch, but you won’t find that many people are interested. Unfortunately, a new Samsung twitter-equipped refrigerator isn’t doing anything to cast doubt on that theory. The fridge can do plenty more useful things – including play music from US service Pandora, research recipes from Epicurious.com, and display your Google calendar – but naturally it is the fridge’s capability to tweet that has caused the most sensation.

At this point, it is genuinely appropriate to question just how much influence we want these social media services to have over our lives. We’ve integrated smartphones into our lives out of the house, so we’re accessible to friends and co-workers 24/7. We’re checking into places across the world, which means that even if we don’t answer the phone we can be found pretty easily. We use our real names on Facebook without a backward glance, something widely considered a bad idea ten years ago, and post the classic security questions without really thinking of it. Due to posting relationships and the fact that women often include their maiden names, I can find out the mother’s maiden name of most of my friends. I know their birthdays. I can even find out when they’re going on holiday. And soon I will be able to chat with them even when they have a spare minute away from preparing dinner.

My advice? Think before you tweet, before you broadcast your location to everyone on your friends list. Prune that list and make social media work for you. From a marketing standpoint, these devices are brilliant. We have more information than ever before on our current, potential, and missed customers. But there is a limit, and we should think carefully before we reach it, before we build ‘social’ into literally everything we touch. Unless, of course, that’s what you want. But we all need a bit of a break, even if it’s just at our refrigerator door.

Has Social Media Gone Too Far? is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

First just to clarify what I mean by a Q&A website or network. This is a place where you can go to ask questions and then allow the network’s community to answer them. You are likely to receive a number of answers to your question and you can then vote on which one was the most helpful at the end. There are obvious rules of etiquette and conduct and you have to categorise your question to help people find it but essentially that’s the basics.

Yahoo Answers

I like Yahoo answers the most for numerous reasons but mainly because it has a large user base and questions are quickly contributed to. It also contains a reward based incentive to use the network, which is that as you answer more questions and vote on answers you get points and with more points you raise your authority level which gives you more privileges.

Whilst this may seem trivial, for an individual not going on to promote their business or to network to develop their career you could ask why even use the network. Whilst it is nice to help people, to just go on and churn out answers for a few hours to people who could quite easily find out the answers themselves seems a waste of time without making into a sort of game which Yahoo does with the level points builder system.

The new network – Quora

Why am I talking about this now? Well there is a new contender into the Q&A website marketplace and it is doing a lot of things right over the previous efforts from others that have led to them not being that popular. The new Q&A network is called Quora. It’s quite a drastic improvement because rather than signing up to a new network, they have made the very sensible choice of integrating with both Facebook and Twiter from the outset. From the moment you create your account you instantly follow all your friends on both networks and you don’t need to set up new profiles as its pulled in from your FB or Twitter accounts.

It offers much more than this though. It offers a simple way to select topics to follow (the UI could be improved a bit to make it more obvious to how you add new topics) and once you have a couple chosen you are directed to your homepage where you are then fed in questions on any of your selected topics. Here you can then choose to ask questions or help start to answer them. When you answer a question you can then opt to have it posted on your FB or twitter accounts to both promote your knowledge and the use of Quora in general.

It contains many other features that are useful but I will let you see these for yourself by signing up as it will ultimately change dramatically over the coming months anyway as the large influx of new users (myself included) start to find problems and suggest improvements which is typical with any social based network.

Who should be on Quora

Like with any of the mainstream social networks Quora is likely to have a very large following and considering it has only been live to the public since June 2010 it is growing really fast. This is in part due to the ease of signup thanks to the social network integration.

Really in my opinion any business should be on this at some level just like with Twitter, FB and Youtube etc. It gives opportunity for businesses to get their teams on there and impart their knowledge onto would be customers and partners. As an individual you also have the incentive of impressing your friends with your knowledge and future potential employers with your ideas.

These are currently the only incentives for going on and I believe my argument still holds weight in what will motivate the larger population to really participate in answering questions. There are obviously niche groups who have a vested interest in that topic and want to be seen to know the answers, but there are still going to be lots of questions people post to simply save themselves time looking up the answer. Without some kind of incentive to help people answer these it could put people off.

I will follow this up in the coming months once the network has had more time to develop but in the meantime I would advise that you check it out.

Question and Answer Networks is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

1.      Brand monitoring. As anyone in charge of social media should know, someone does need to be regularly checking up on the various social media profiles over the course of a holiday. The internet never takes a holiday and it’s always best to be aware of what’s being said about your brand, whether you’re at work or not. Over the Christmas season, ecommerce brands should take particular note, as the gifts have been distributed and reviews and feedback will be spreading instantly across the internet. Your team should ideally be ready for any problems caused and accessible in case help is needed. Your customers may choose to contact you through Twitter or Facebook, so having someone kept on a semi-regular watch can help quite a bit.

2.      Keep it steady. While many of your followers are going to be off celebrating with their families and enjoying their Christmas season away from the computer, there will also be plenty at home browsing the internet, particularly in the latter stages of the holiday.  Keep a steady stream of content going for these users, but remember not to inundate your profiles. Those who have been away may not be inclined to catch up, so save the important announcements and offers for the New Year. What’s worse, if your updates are blocking friends’ feeds and overwhelming the page at a time when others are quiet, you’ll find that followers may decide they can do without you after all.

3.      Remember SEO. If you run a blog, you’ll probably want to keep posts going up over the holidays. Not only will this satisfy my point number 2, it will ensure the search engines don’t get confused and crawl your site less frequently for a time. This is especially important for ecommerce sites that have offers or prices in their meta descriptions over on the main site. With the VAT change, you’ll want Google to crawl your new edited pages as soon as possible; otherwise, customers may stumble upon your site expecting prices to be lower than they are. Not much is a bigger barrier to conversions, so make sure everything is accurate as soon as it applies. In this case, much of the work can be finished off and scheduled before you leave the office for the break.

4.      Save your link bait. If you have fantastic post or social media ideas, Christmas is not the time to get them going. Give them a week and a half to percolate as you go about your holiday season. You’ll find that they’ll be more refined after the break and you’ll have an audience with lunch hours to fill spreading your content once again.

While you probably won’t be able to unplug completely this holiday season if you’re in charge of your company’s social media, you will be able to take a step back from the PC. But don’t forget to maintain your social media monitoring. An occasional reminder to your followers that you exist isn’t a bad idea, either.

What are your strategies for keeping up to date with social media this Christmas?

Social Media over the Holidays is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

Facebook will begin to fill in the ‘who is this’ box with suggested tags – all the user has to do now is click ‘save tag’ to accept the suggestion rather than scrolling through all of their photos and individually tagging each of their friends which is often thought of as a chore!

As part of an effort to improve the overall user experience of Facebook photos, along with the launch of bigger thumbnails, group tagging and drag and drop photos, Facebook predicts that tag suggestions will encourage users to upload and tag more photos. Not only are Facebook improving the overall user experience, they are also making the process much more simplified.

What does this mean for Facebook users?

Facebook is ultimately making it easier for users to share photos and memories with their Facebook connections. So for a social occasion where your sister is in 50 of your photos, rather than going through and tagging each individual photo, facebook will group photos that it believes your sister is in and suggest that you tag all 50 in one simple click.

While this is all good and positive, many users have their doubts with this feature.

Privacy concerns?

Despite the fact that Facebook user interface is becoming increasingly easy to navigate and use, the facial recognition may sounds a bit frightening to those who have privacy concerns with the social network. While this feature will save time and effort when uploading photos, it is only natural that Facebook’s users are wary of a feature that can recognise faces and do the job of tagging photos for them.

Luckily Facebook gives users the ability to opt out of tag suggestions in their privacy settings, so it is entirely down to each individual as to whether they want to see Facebook suggesting who might be in their photo.

Another concern would be that users have no way of accepting if their friends tag them in a photo that Facebook recognises as being them. I think that a further improvement to this feature would be for users to be prompted to accept a tag in a photo before it is published to avoid being tagged in embarrassing or bad photos of yourself. This way, people will be able to control this part of their online identity and privacy before it makes its way into all of their friends news feeds.

Although Facebook have said that suggestions will only appear if the product has high confidence in it being the right person, I still think people will become annoyed if cases arise where people have an identical twin or are very similar looking to one of their family members and find that they are getting tagged as the wrong person.

According to Chris Cox, Facebook’s Vice President of Product, this feature is being rolled out in the US over the next few weeks. I for one can’t wait to have this on my profile and see just how accurate this exciting new feature is!

Here at WMpS, we are interested to hear about user experiences with this so feel free to get in touch to let us know your opinion on this, be it good or bad!

Facebook Photos get ‘Tag Suggestions’ is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.