I Got A Golden Ticket! But Is Google+ All That Glitters?

So no surprise in the social world. The hottest invite to a beta launch this week is Google+. Google has finally stepped into the ring with Facebook to take on the social giant. Is it ready for prime time? Well that remains to be seen on a great many levels, but I'll say it's worth trying for sure. Google's tools are always very good, solid if you will. But the past has shown us a line of projects that never got the attention they deserved such as Google Wave and others. There's a great deal of discussion of whether or not much of that (Google Wave) technology might be repurposed in Google+ — yet another item that remains to be seen.

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What Creative Dreams Are Made Of

It's funny when you have the perfect storm of client and creative willing to swim in the deep end. Such is the case with Google. I did an early post on the product of these shoots and how it embraced the power of campaign like Honda's "The Cog" and kinetic art as a whole. But any creative will tell you that involvement in creative such as Google's "The Speed of Chrome" would be heavenly. Enjoy!

The Buzz On "Google Buzz"

While the world is still doing the best to figure out just what buzz.google.com actually does, we do know the following:

• It works with gmail (Google's free email service)
• It allows you to post your emails and it's contents a recipient, group of recipients or the general public
• It allows you to tag in content into your messaging fromt the web
• Pushes YouTube video and flickr respectively as it's delivery medium of choice (IMHO, the best at least today)
• Comments to posts are then sent to your inbox, much like email replies
• Social integration with Twitter, Picasa and more
• Google buzz makes recommendations on content popularity and I'm assuming profiling criteria based on what it finds in your gmail account and posts

Smart phone integration:

Related Mashable.com articles on Google buzz:

• Google Buzz: What It Means for Twitter and Facebook
• What Google Buzz Means for Mobile
• Google Buzz: Competitors and Experts React
• Google Buzz: Will You Use It?
• The Location Implications of Google Buzz

The "Demi-Phone" Has Arrived To Slay Satan

What we 'actually' know:

Operating System : Android 2.1
Device Name: Nexus One
Manufacturer Branding: Google
Hardware Manufacturer: HTC
Carrier Unlock: Yes
Network: GSM
Chipset: Snapdragon Processor
Launch Date: January/February 2010
Display: 3.7-inch display
High-resolution Capacitive multitouch OLED screen
Keyboard: Onscreen keyboard only
Hardware Buttons: HTC scrol ball
Size: Thinner than the iPhone 3GS
Other: 2 mics, one in the front for talking and one at the back to reduce background noise

Engaget has the best review thus far (Key Findings):

• By all appearances, the company will have a new phone portal where buyers can pick between an unsubsidized, unlocked Nexus One for $529.99, or sign up for a two-year agreement with T-Mobile and purchase the phone for $179.99
• Google Maps with no pinch-to-zoom
• 5 megapixel lens and flash took sharp (iPhone 3 megapixel, no flash)

Other items of note based on buzz:

• Open system
• Higher Resolution 800 x 480
• Thinner than iPhone
• 1Ghz Processor, 512MB RAM (Almost 2x more than the iPhone GS)
• Video recording 720×480 pixels at 20fps (iPhone is 30fps)
• Same charger for the Nexus One works with Bluetooth headsets
• Alphabetic list of all installed apps
• Does not Sync your Calendar with Exchange
• Replaceable battery
• 10k apps vs. "one meelion"

Guy Kawaski says:

"The Nexus One is a serious challenge to the iPhone—particularly because this is version 1 of Nexus One while the iPhone has been out for years. It is the phone that Palm should have created, but that’s another story.

Right now I cannot use a Nexus One as my primary phone because it cannot sync my calendar (something my teenage son doesn’t care about), I use it all the time (without a SIM card, just as a Wi-Fi device) while my iPhone charges around the house. The day that calendar syncing works will be very interesting."

The Beginners Guide to Social Media Monitoring

I know that there are 10k lists of online applications that will help track your brand in the social spectrum. There are also myriad of pay-per-use and subscription based buzz metric application that are wonderful such as Radian 6 that will allow you to monitor your brand in just about every conceivable way.

But here's the deal, you just want to get started and you don't know how. First I'm going to outline some simple tools you should become accustom to using and then, the latter portion of this post will be a long list of tools for you to try over time to see if any of them fit your needs. OK? K.

Let's start here:

1. Google Products – You don't need to know or use them all, but I want you to understand what they are and that they're free for you to use.
2. GMail – There are plenty of reasons to use Gmail but first and foremost is that you want to keep your Social Media Monitoring contained well within the walls of it's own email account or you will go crazy. So start by walking through the process of creating an account.
3. iGoogle – iGoogle allows you to create your google page into a robust social media dashboard. By going to sites, blogs, magazines, competitors and industry specific sites that effect you, start to collect their RSS feeds and add them to your iGoogle page. It's built so you can create tabs, organize, edit settings and move your feeds around for the perfect feel.
   
4. Google Alerts – Once you have your Gmail and iGoogle setup, star by creating keyword alerts around your company, brand, competitors and industry.
5. TweetDeck – TweetDeck is a great tool, not only to use for your personal and professional engagement on tweeting but it has robust searching and details on keywords, hash tags and tweeters. Oh, and it's free.
6. Socialmention – Lastly, set up a list of alerts like googles at SocialMention and note your ongoing  ’social rank’ score across and array of media types.

That will get you started to scratch the surface. Now here are the list I spoke about earlier for you dabble in.

Brand Overview:

• HowSociable? – A tool that can measure the visibility of your brand
• Addict-o-matic – Aggregates RSS feeds much like iGoogle to create a workable dashboard

Blog Search:

• Technorati – Technorati’s new search interface. Use it to find top blogs based upon inbound links only.
• Technorati Advanced – Technorati’s advanced search page allows you to search for blogs (rather than posts) based on tags.
• Google Blog Search – Google’s index of blog posts; best for date sensitive material
• IceRocket – Blog search tool that also charts
• BlogPulse – Search for blog posts by keyword

Trend & Buzz Tracking:

• Google Trends – shows amount of searches and google news stories
• Trendpedia – Create charts showing discussions around multiple topics
• BlogPulse Trends – Site keywords and phrases in blogs
• Omgili Charts – Create charts showing discussions around multiple topics

Message Board Search Tools:

• BoardTracker – tracks words in forums
• BoardReader – Search multiple message boards and forums.
• Omgili – Omgili is relatively good aggregator of content. It searches everything from blogs and boards to comment fields
• Google Groups – Searches Usenet groups.
• Yahoo! Groups – Searches all Yahoo! Groups.

Twitter Search Tools:

• Twitter Search – The original and most likely the best
• Twitstat – Creates a tag cloud for last 500 Tweets
• Twit(url)y – See what people are talking about on Twitter
• Hashtags – Real-time tracking of Twitter #Hash tags
• TweetBeep – Track mentions of your brand on Twitter in real time (like twitter alerts for your email)
• Twitrratr – Rates mentions of your search term on Twitter as positive/neutral/negative
• TweetMeme – View the most popular Twitter threads & trends
• TwitScoop – Real-time tweet following with integrated iPhone application
• Twilert – Receive regular email updates of tweets containing your brand, product, and or service

Website Ranking, Traffic & Analytics

• Compete – Competitor site traffic reports. Estimates only of monthly visitor data. Best used on large high-traffic Web sites.
• Quantcast – Use this on large high-traffic Websites. It allows you to compare multiple web sites in one handy chart. Estimates only of monthly visitor data.
• Alexa – Comparative site traffic reports. Includes estimated reach, rank and page views.
• BlogFlux Page Rank – Tells you Google Page Rank for a web page. Use this to compare different websites.

Search Data

• Google Trends – Search trends and see search volume
• Google Insights – Compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames
• Wordtracker Keywords – Displays average daily search volume of a given keyword or phrase
• Yahoo! Keyword Tool – Displays search volumes for specific keywords
• FACEBOOK LEXICON – Displays volume of wall postings for specific term
• Adonomics – Facebook analytics and developer application tracking and graphing
• Google Keyword Tool – Generate keyword ideas for related keywords

Multimedia Search

• YouTube – Search for videos and channels by keyword.
• MetaCafe – High-traffic video search engine.
• Google Advanced Video Search – Search for videos, what else?
• Flickr – Search Flickr for photos, groups or people/users.
• Truveo – Aggregate video search engine. Search videos from YouTube, MySpace, and AOL.
• Viral Video Chart – Displays top 20 most-viewed video (1, 7, 365 days). Includes view counts and charting.
• Guardian’s Viral Video Chart – Weekly roundup of what’s excellent on the web

Social Bookmarking

• Digg – Social bookmarking for news, images and videos
• StumbleUpon – Social bookmarking in the exploratory way the web use to be

Feed Aggregator

• Yahoo Pipes – Feed aggregator and manipulator. Set up pipes for news alerts and overviews creating a matrix of feeds that interelate

Here's a densely conpiled list from my delicious bookmarks that might also be useful as you begin to tinker with alternate options and techniques (oh yes, there will be repetitous content ahead) –

Here's an awesome Slideshare.net presentation from Stephan Betzold at Pier314 that I found to be very thorough.

Social Media Monitoring Tools - An Overview

View more documents from Stefan Betzold.

"Google Audio" Is Plugging In This Wednesday

It's not like I didn't see it before but it seems that Microsoft isn't the only one using Apple as their R&D department. Google seems to be on their own "embrace and extend" model to scoop up the small firms that have reasonably good thinking and see how they can all fit together. I'm not sure however that this is the best idea for Google. I'd think silent partner would be a better return, but then they wouldn't get their pretty logo on it.

They web as we know it, this week, is breaking into more and more of a finite medium. People seek out a specific interests, and then within that a sub-interest and within that they usually plant a seed as the expert deep within that chosen niche. Smart web offerings aren't coming in as the 'all for one' model anymore because frankly, companies like Google, Microsoft and Apple simply have too much fiscal control.

Back Google Audio, it seems a little strange to me that Google would enter this extremely over saturated market but who am I to say what a multi-billion dollar conglomerate should do – I mean they never call ; ) But Google

"Google will announce a new playable-music search service next Wednesday, creating a special box in search results with links to songs to stream and download, multiple sources familiar with the situation told Wired.com. The service — likely called Google Audio — will be powered in part with streaming music from LaLa and recommendations from iLike, the sources said."