Google News Becoming Google News Plus?

Yesterday on the Google News blog, product manager Scott Zuccarino announced a new feature for those who keep up with their news through Google: Realtime Coverage pages that include results from Google+. Right now, this option is only available for people who have signed up for Google+ and are checking out the U.S. edition of Google News, but here's a sample screenshot of what a Realtime Coverage page looks like.

Of course, if you hate this feature you can modify your Google News settings to turn it off or simply sign out of Google altogether, but it does look like the search giant is continually looking for more ways to push the Google+ platform. (That's not really a shocker, though, is it?)

If your brand has a Google+ presence, will this new feature help improve your overall Google Search visibility? In a recent experiment conducted by Tasty Placement, the web design and SEO company found that even having a Google+ brand page with a fairly modest number of followers substantially improved Google ranking for a website. While this was an isolated experiment and the results shouldn't be considered scientific, the findings are still very interesting and well worth noting.

What are your thoughts? If you don't have a Google+ brand page yet, are you holding back due to lack of time or some other reason? Has this latest integration with Google News pushed you to rethink your position on G+?

How to Avoid Personalized Google Search Results and Ads in Chrome

Personalized Google results are supposed to be useful. The idea is to deliver the most relevant content for you based on your past searches. The problem is that there are often scenarios where you don’t want personalized search results. If you are trying to do research then you may well find this personalization extremely annoying. Thankfully there is always a way to get round the problem.

Google personalizes your results using two methods. One uses your Web search history whenever you are logged in to any Google service. The other uses a cookie to store your search information.

If you are logged in to a Google account, on any page of Google results you should see a globe icon at the top right and you can hit that to Hide personal results. You simply hit the person icon to switch back but you’ll find it probably switches back automatically when you start a new session. If you want to make it permanent then hit the Gear at the top right and select Search settings then scroll down until you see Personal settings and choose Do not use personal results. That will now work for you when you are signed in to your Google account but when you sign out you may find your results are personalized again.

If you aren't signed in to a Google account then go to http://www.google.com/history/optout and select Disable customizations based on search activity.

There are other ways to avoid personalized results.

One of the simplest ways is to add &pws=0 to the URL of a search query. If you use Google Chrome then all you have to do is click on the “wrench” icon at the top right and select New Incognito Window. Chrome’s incognito mode will automatically add &pws=0 to your searches so you shouldn’t be getting personalized results.

This SEO blog face-off gives you an analysis of the results you might get with each method. It seems that turning off personalization in your Google account may be the best option to avoid personalized Google search results.

If you want to avoid personalized Google ads there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that there’s an extension for Chrome users called Keep My Opt-Outs which prevents ad personalization via cookies. The bad news is for anyone not using Chrome because that’s the only browser it works for.

Prismatic: A Great Social Media and Discovery Tool (and My New Addiction)

I spend a heckuva lot of time everyday searching for and reading the latest news and opinions on project management, content marketing, the economy, higher education and several other topics that are near and dear to my heart. While I love the actual "reading" and "discussion" parts of my day, the "searching" part can be enormously frustrating. Sure, I get a lot of great recommendations from people on Twitter and Google+, and Alltop is an awesome tool that helps me manage feeds from my favorite publishers, but I also like finding new authors and sites.

Of course, I'm greedy enough to want to be able to do all of those things with one tool. When hearing about some new social media or media discovery tool, I used to rush to check it out. Unfortunately, most of the time I was disappointed -- not because the new apps were bad, but because generally, they performed the same functions as the ones I was already using. So, when I first received an invitation to try Prismatic a while back, I simply filed it and figured I'd take a look when and if I had time.

About a week or so ago, I heard some others praising Prismatic and remembered the invitation so I decided to go ahead and take a look for myself. And, WOW, I sure do wish I had checked it out sooner. It's really both a social media and a media discovery tool. It links up to your Twitter account and uses info from there to help give initial recommendations for topics and publishers you might like, but it also has a global search tool so you can dig down into any topic you want. I'm including a screenshot below so you can get an idea of what the interface looks like.

Prismatic also lets you save topics and specific publishers to your Interests list, favorite stories so you read them later, see recent tweets that have been made about each story, tweet the article yourself, find related stories -- well, in short, it does almost everything I want to do. I still use HootSuite to help me schedule certain items and track results, but I've replaced almost all of the other apps I was using in the past with Prismatic. If you haven't tried it out for yourself yet, I highly recommend it -- and, let us know what you think!

Why You Should Be Using LinkedIn

I’m a big fan of LinkedIn and you should be too. Forget about the inconvenient line on Facebook between work and life, or the need to have multiple Twitter accounts to cater for different niches. With LinkedIn you are on a purely professional platform where the aim is to network and promote yourself. There are groups for discussions and advice on all kinds of industries, there are job listings and tips galore, and there are lots of like-minded professionals looking to connect. 


Best of all LinkedIn serves as your online resume which is ideal for freelancers of any type. It is a free advert for your services that you can optimize and promote. If you do it right then the work will come to you. This infographic does a great job of showing off what LinkedIn is all about. So don’t delay, come and join me on LinkedIn.




How LinkedIn Works by Infographiclabs

Beta of Really Cool Social Media Tool

Yesterday, I had a demo of a social media tool I thought I'd share with everyone.  It has a lot of potential, and they are making some great investments in its growth.

Everyone knows how difficult it is it to compose a tweet.  You'd think with only 140 characters, it should be a breeze.  But with hashtags, mentions, retweets, and shortened URL's, it takes me like an hour to do a good one!  Okay, well slight exaggeration, but you get the picture.

You can definitely do the autopost strategy.  But you're really not inserting your own original thoughts into the tweet.  So how effective is that on a long-term basis?  You're also not leveraging any of the hashtags or tweet targeting tools out there.

This company, Mashoutable, is trying to change all that with their easy to use tool.  It allows you to construct tweets with a few clicks of a button incorporating data from your own twitter feed, followers, and what's trending out there.

Join their Beta, and make sure you give them lots of feedback:
http://mashoutable.com/

Have fun!

Yes! You Do Need a Company Blog

The most accessible way to dip your toe in the waters of content marketing is to start a company blog. It’s a tactic that can work for any size of business and if you do it right then it will generate targeted traffic that would otherwise cost you a lot of advertising dollars to pull in. According to HubSpot research more than half of all Internet users read blogs at least once a month and more than one third of U.S. companies use blogs for marketing purposes.

The potential value of blogs is definitely being recognised. According to the Content Marketing Institute blogs are one of the most popular content marketing tactics and while 51% of marketers used blogs in 2010 that figure went up to 65% in 2011.

Easy To Set Up

One of the big attractions of starting a company blog is that it is relatively easy. Not only can you find plenty of free platforms, from WordPress to Blogger, they also have CMS (content management systems) on the back end that anyone can learn to use. This makes it easy to add users, and to create, schedule and publish content. It’s worth noting that a solution like WordPress is probably the most attractive because you can host the blog yourself and assimilate it into your existing website.

7 Reasons To Start a Company Blog

You company blog should be the foundation of your content marketing efforts. It can act as a central hub for all of your marketing activity. That’s just the beginning, because blogs are a great idea for a number of reasons. Let’s take a closer look at the big advantages.

1. Increase in Traffic – According to the same HubSpot research mentioned above, companies that blog get 55% more website visitors.
2. Targeted Traffic – Not only does the blog pull in more traffic, it also pulls in targeted traffic with an interest in what you are selling. HubSpot reports that 57% of businesses have acquired a customer through their company blog.
3. Cheaper Than Advertising – To get that targeted traffic through traditional advertising channels would be far more expensive.
4. You Own The Blog – The blog is owned by the company so there is no reliance on a third-party or time limit on its effectiveness.
5. Blogs Establish Thought Leadership – What better way to show off your industry expertise than by writing useful and insightful blog posts?
6. Blogs Feed Social Media – People love sharing great content and they are far more likely to share something from your business website if it is perceived as useful.
7. You Can Post Any Kind of Content – There are no real limitations with blog posts. You can post photos, artwork, audio or video files along with text in various forms from casual blog posts to in-depth articles and beyond to white papers.

As you can see there are plenty of reasons to maintain a company blog and it is undoubtedly one of the most cost effective strategies you can pursue when it comes to promoting your business. If you do intend to start a company blog then you must realise that it is a commitment. We have discussed classic content marketing mistakes before and posting the wrong kind of content or not updating your company blog regularly are just two relevant examples.

Next week we’ll take a look at how to make a company blog work with some useful tips you can implement for blogging success. 

What Do You Think of Visually's Infographic Creation Tools?

If you're an infographic junkie like me, you've probably heard of Visually -- a great site with tons of infographics and infovideos on almost every subject imaginable. Not only is Visually an awesome source for information, it's also a terrific site to browse when you're looking for design and content inspiration.

A few weeks ago, Visually rolled out the first stage of its instant infographic creation tools. When I heard the announcement, I immediately rushed to the site to check the new feature out. Unfortunately, it seemed that I wasn't the only one looking forward to this addition. At that time, when I was trying to test out the creation tools, the site kept hanging or sending error messages back to me -- probably because so many people were trying to access it at once.

Although I did manage to test the tools a bit that day, I finally decided to wait with intentions of going back later when all the initial kinks and traffic issues had been worked out. Of course, we all know how that goes. With so many other things on my plate, I forgot completely about testing the tools again until this week.

However, I did manage to find an hour to play around with the infographic creation app yesterday, and I can definitely see the potential. Right now, the options are still fairly limited and you can only create a handful of different infographics, all of which utilize Twitter or Facebook data. So, while the customization potential currently isn't that great, I can still see how a lot of potential for this application -- especially if Visually continues to develop it and incorporate new features.

As an example, for one of the infographic options, all you have to do is enter a Twitter hashtag. Then, after a few seconds of processing time, you'll wind up with an infographic that gives information about that hashtag's performance over the last month. Here's the result for the hashtag #contentmarketing:

If you've tried out the tool, what do you think of it? What features would you love to see added?