Posted: April 30th, 2012 | Author: theWebDetective | Filed under: Marketing and SEO | No Comments »
Could Pinterest be the silver bullet for retailers on social media? Pinterest is clearly resonating with online consumers in a big way. To put it simply, customers who find a product via Pinterest are more likely to purchase it than those who find the product via other social networks.
SEE ALSO: 10 Video Tips for Businesses on Pinterest
Pinterest is hot. In fact, in March 2012 the site served up 2.3 billion page impressions to over 4 million unique visitors a day.
Who are these people? Why do Pinterest users respond so strongly to products that are pinned? This infographic from Tamba breaks down the stats, explaining why Pinterest is so powerful with its consumption-friendly audience.
Shared from Mashable.com
Posted: April 27th, 2012 | Author: theWebDetective | Filed under: Fun, Marketing and SEO, Techy | Tags: android, google, google play | No Comments »
n March 2012, Google made a bold move with the creation of a new digital content service called Google Play. Google Play combines the Android Market, Google Music, Google Movies, and Google books into one service which can be accessed from the web and from any Android-powered device.
From a long-term perspective, Google Play is meant to be part of the unifying force behind the company’s mobile strategy. In August 2011, Google acquired Motorola Mobility in order to boost the Android ecosystem, and just a few days ago Google announced plans to build and sell Android-based tablets directly to consumers rather than through their hardware manufacturing partners. (Google has already tested the waters of hardware sales to customers with the Nexus One back in 2010.) It’s clear that Google wants to move away from the name “Android” and begin to brand all of their mobile distributed services under one clear name.
What’s not clear is why they chose that name.
Android users were familiar with term “Android Market” and knew what it stood for easily (even with Google Music, Google Books, etc. as standalone apps within the market). However, the name “Google Play Store” — or is it just “Play Store”? — feels just as rushed as Google Play’s launch. The Android Market is one of the operating system’s major features, because your apps and downloaded files were synced across your Android device. None of that changes with Google Play, but the re-branding may make it more confusing for newer Android users.
The Google Play Store wasn’t the only name change — Google Music, Google Movies, and Google Books are now called Google Play Music, Google Play Movies, and Google Play Books. On devices, this is shortened to Play Music, Play Movies, Play Books, and there are also new icons for each of these apps.
Google Play’s launch is also centered mostly around US Android tablet and smartphone users. The full suite of Google Play apps are available here in the States, but a full global roll-out is still pending. Users in the UK and Canada have access to the Play Store, Play Movies, and Play Books. Australia has access to the Play Store and Play Books, and Japan has access to the Play Store and Play Movies. Every other country in the world just has the Play Store, which puts the entire Google Play ecosystem on pause until implementation in other countries is fully complete. (There’s a thread on Google+ about the Google Play roll-out that has well over 260 comments about this.)
The same goes for Google Play on Google TV. Google Play Books, Google Play Movies, and Google Play Music are said to be available on the Google Play Store on Google TV, but that’s not the case across all Google TV devices (namely, the Logitech Revue). Google Play Music is available for Google TV, but not the other two services. This may be part of Google’s plan to completely phase out support for the Revue (perhaps in anticipation for a newer, better Google TV set-top box), but for now, Revue users will only be able to use Google Play Music.
Google is moving full force with marketing Google Play, and has even given the service prominence in their ubiquitous navbar, which is present across a majority of Google’s services. Including Google Play front and center for users (along with the bright red “New” superscript) is a little blatant, but doing so would make users who are unfamiliar with the service take notice.
There’s no doubt that Google Play is a step in the right direction for Google with regards to strengthening their mobile brand and readying their digital media hub for their upcoming line of tablets. And, like any of Google’s products or services, this is only the beginning. However, they will still have to go a long way to ensure current users that Google Play is more than the sum of its parts.
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Posted: April 5th, 2012 | Author: theWebDetective | Filed under: Marketing and SEO | No Comments »
Every month, Google makes tons of tiny changes to the way search works. It shares them in company blog posts that present a list of carefully scripted bullet points with mysterious code names in an inscrutable order.
The company never comments on the changes beyond what they say in these announcements. But it’s always informative to spread the puzzle pieces out on the table and see what Google is up to. Here’s what changed in March.
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As always, there are tons of items in this month’s search quality highlights. This month, there are 50. Some of them are minor, some are redundant, and some you just don’t need to worry about. But here’s a breakdown of the interesting changes.
Search Quality
If Google doesn’t work tirelessly to improve the quality of search results, its competitors can catch up. As Google Fellow Ben Gomes told ReadWriteWeb recently, the hard problems in search quality have to do with understanding the user’s intentions. Learning to interpret synonyms is a big step there.
Google’s search results often suggest synonyms for words in a user’s query, and some of last month’s updates turn down the aggressiveness of those. Google is also “eliminating duplicate logic” for synonyms in cases when no further suggestions are needed.
Other quality changes include better detection of people’s names and improved identification of quality image results. Google is also bringing its preferences for page freshness to other kinds of queries beyond just news.
Google also refreshed the Panda algorithm adjustments designed to suppress spammy sites. It never elaborates much on those changes beyond tweets like this:
Search Speed
We learned from Google Search Project Manager Johanna Wright that speed is the unsung hero of search. Users don’t notice speed, they just get used to it. When something slows them down, they get frustrated. So Google often changes search features to make them faster, even if users won’t notice.
Last month, Google reduced the number of back-end server calls needed for auto-complete, a search feature built purely for speed. It also improved language detection for auto-completing queries.
Another change improves results for people who use the Google search box to navigate to websites, which a surprisingly high number of people do all the time.
Social Search
Google’s recent incorporation of social network signals into search has freaked some people out, especially the fact that it uses Google+ in situations where other social networks would be more helpful.
Well, last month, without making a big fuss, Google launched a change with the code name “Prof-2″ that “improves the comprehensiveness of public profile pages in our index from more than two-hundred social sites.”
Google also improved the personalization signals in social search (but won’t elaborate further), and it rolled out the +1 button in search for more countries and domains.
Universal Search
Google’s Universal Search brought images, videos, maps and more alongside webpages in search results. Now Google provides direct answers to questions, too, instead of just linking to a website with the answer. It even does complex math. Google improved the accuracy of its short answers to questions by relying on semantic data from Freebase.
This month brought improvements to other kinds of rich search results Google provides. Mobile searches for Android and iOS apps now include icons, ratings, prices and download buttons. The Russian Hockey League (KHL) and UEFA Champions League both display live scores in search now, and Google launched a feature to find tennis scores, too.
Privacy
There’s no huge privacy news this month, but the two privacy-related changes are noteworthy. Google now signs users out on all machines whenever they change their password, eliminating the chance of staying logged in by mistake. The SafeSearch algorithm was also tuned this month, making it more precise and adding new ways of making unwanted adult content less likely to appear.
Article from Read Write Web
A Googler
