Eat Sleep Social » tools

Google +1 – another great idea by Google engineers for Google engineers.

Mike Phillips — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 09:26:01 +0000

Google unveiled their recommendation service, +1, yesterday. It’s a simple enough system, you can essentially recommend search results in Google with the click of a button:

This service has the potential to be very useful, no doubt. But to how many people? You can only get recommendations from your network who also have (and use) a Google account. It’s only going to be useful to the 10% of the population who have both a Google account and friends with a Google account. How many of your friends have a Google account that they are signed into when using Google? 90% of my friends don’t have an account. And of the 10% of my friends that do, only a fraction I want recommendations from.

And that’s the second point. The numbers of potential contacts that I can get recommendations from is low, but, they’re all pretty similar. They all have early adopter tendencies; they tend to be up on the latest trends etc. And most of them work in a similar industry to me, follow other similar people etc. Google tools are great, but they are used by a niche set of people. And getting recommendations from a group of people in that niche is only marginally more useful than from just one person in that niche.

The issue is Google never really scaled beyond search. A handle of people have accounts for YouTube, even fewer for Gmail. How many of your friends have a Google account that they are signed into when using Google. Now compare that to how many of your friends have a Facebook or Twitter account. Big difference.

For services like +1 to be useful they have to both be used by a large chunk of your network, and have different types of people from within your network recommending. Otherwise it just becomes noise. Google needs to encourage more users to sign up for accounts, and sadly, this service won’t do that. Google should be encouraging users to sign up when they download chrome, which people have been doing in their millions.

Having said all that, it is very reassuring to see Google launch a tool that I am actually considering using. What do you think? Will you use it?

Credit goes to @steevbishop for the snappy title

Social Media Platforms and how to use them

Mike Phillips — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 10:55:26 +0000

Here’s a very brief guide to social media platforms and how they are used for traffic generation and social branding. It’s based on my previous post, but has a more updated model. Let me know your thoughts, still a work in progress.

View more presentations from Mike Phillips.

Social Media Platforms Landscape Venn Diagram

Mike Phillips — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 11:36:04 +0000

The social media landscape is vast, with different tools and platforms offering different services. Each of these platforms can be used in different ways by brands, so to simplify thing I’ve created this Venn diagram to show how the different platforms fit together. You can see a bigger version by clicking the image.

Store your hashtag mentions and conversations

Mike Phillips — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:31:58 +0000

Ever wanted to be able to export all uses of a particular hashtag? Well, turns out you can, and very easily with a tool called The Archivist. And the company behind it? Twitter? Tweetdeck? No, Microsoft!

Tim Aidlin and Karsten Januszewski of Mix Online have produced a tool that allows you to pull in tweets from a specified hashtag and store them for later analysis. The great thing is that when you first run the tool it will pull in as many mentions as it can find, but if you then leave it running ti will auto refresh every ten minutes. Not only does it produce pretty graphs itself but it also allows you to export to Excel for more in depth analysis.

This tool is very useful to a great number of people for many different reasons. I manage a number of brands on a day to day basis, and being able to track certain hashtags is incredibly useful, especially when we run campaigns using a specific hashtag. And just a few days ago I attended a conference where the use of a hashtag was prolific, using this tool @Jas was able to pull in all the tweets and store them for later reference. Incredibly useful, something I expect to be on a fairly regular basis. Thanks go to @Jas for pointing me in the direction of this great tool!