Google+ warns brands to hold off before getting an account

Google is currently working on a business version of the much anticipated Google+ social networking site, and is asking brands not to use the current version to create a profile. Much like its rival, Facebook, they will be cracking down on brands using profiles instead of the new product, which will be released at the end of this year. Christian Oestlien, Google+ project manager said through YouTube:

“We are focused on optimising for the consumer experience, but we have a great team of engineers building a similar optimised business experience for Google+.”

According to NetworkWorld, the new commercial product will include rich analytics, with the ability to connect to Google products, such as AdWords.

Google is currently inviting a small group of business and brands to take part in a series of tests to see how consumers interact with them via the service’s stream and its Circles and Hangouts features.

Our advice to charities would be to wait for the new product to be released while people are still finding their feet with this service. I can’t imagine that people will be massively engaged with the service in terms of brand offerings while they are building up their communities and waiting for when (and of course if) Google+ really takes off.

Google authorship

Google is gradually rolling out a new algorithm that will display author information in search results to help users find specific content easier. To identify the author of an article, Google checks for a connection between the content page (such as an article), an author page, and a Google Profile. According to their Webmaster tools page:

In confirming authorship, Google looks for:

1. Links from the content page to the author page (if the path of links continues to a Google Profile, we can also show Profile information in search results)
2. A path of links back from your Google Profile to your content.

This new authorship algorithm encourages prolific bloggers to get a Google+ account to tie all of their content together and make it easier for Google to create reciprocal links between them.

This is another important step for Google towards social search. Now they are collecting a much more rich set of data from their developing social services, they can add that into their algorithm, which will have quite a dramatic impact

beautiful justice

Curiosity made me do something shameful this weekend: Buy the News of the World. I was intrigued not only about how NotW would handle their scandalous closing, but also about which charities accepted their offer of free advertising and any clues as to whether it would be a good or bad marketing move.

The pros

• 4.5 million copies reported sold – and a huge level of readership beyond that.

• An opportunity for smaller charities to create press adds that they wouldn’t have been able to afford before.

• A low risk testing opportunity.

• A delicious sense of vigilante justice – playing Robin Hood (I imagine)

The cons

• Association with a ‘toxic brand’

• Risk of offending current donors and even beneficiaries

• Risk of violating Acceptance or Refusal of Donations Code of Fundraising Practice code in your organisation

It must have been a difficult decision to make so quickly. Would their donors forgive them for associating themselves with an ‘immoral’ organisation? Would others forgive them for passing up an opportunity to gain money and publicity?

Each charity had different considerations to make in deciding whether or not to take up the offer that was emailed to 16,000 charities nationwide. Rethink chose not to advertise and received overwhelming support for not doing so from their Facebook community because of how NotW spun stories about people on incapacity benefits. Scott Jacobson from St John’s Ambulance, however, noted that their mission and the need to publicise it, was more important than how the opportunity came about.

“‘Knowing that one of them might one day use the information they receive to save a life suggests we used the right criteria in making this decision despite the unfortunate way the opportunity came about”

I noticed that the charities that did advertise weren’t so keen to integrate their press ads online and many failed to even acknowledge the huge one page spreads they received in a blog or even tweet.

We’d be very interested to hear what effect the adverts had for the charities that took them up.

WordPress reaches 50 million.

WordPress announced on Sunday that the platform had crossed the 50 million self-hosted blog milestone.

According to IT portal yesterday that Andrew Nacin of WordPress tweeted. He wrote, “Total WordPress sites just passed *50 million* today”.

We’re looking forward to seeing if this triumph will fuel some new and interesting plug-ins and features.

and finally …

I stumbled across Join my village this week. It’s a site where companies donate money to charities dependent on how many ‘clicktivists’ visit and interact with the site. Although this idea isn’t exactly new, I thought it was carried out really well, and allowed the ‘clicker’ to get such a good sense of how and why the money was being raised. The companies also match any personal donations that you make. So far it has raised an impressive $711,975.

Lucy J

Tags: beautiful bytes, clicktivism, Facebook, Google, Press, press ads, social, social media, social search, wordpress