Google Social Search

Google Social Search is now live.

Impressive idea…

Here is a short description of the service from Google’s website:

With Social Search, you’ll be able to more easily find relevant public content from your social circle, such as the following:

• Websites, blogs, public profiles, and other content linked from your friends’ Google profiles.
• Web content, such as status updates, tweets, and reviews, from social services that your friends have listed in their Google profiles.
• Relevant articles from your Google Reader subscriptions.

Here’s what you need to do to check it out:

First you’ll to have need a Google Account.

After you’ve setup your Google Account, go opt-in to Google Social Search and  then create your Google Profile.

When this is complete, you’ll need (if you don’t mind sharing this info with Google) to share your social profile info with Google via your profile’s links (i.e. Twitter, FaceBook, Google Reader…).

Google will crawl and index your friends and serve up special selections from your circle of friends based upon your search query.

The following video from Google gives a little more information. I’ll give an update once I have some interesting results to show.

I personally performed several searches that should have produced super relevant results from my social circle, but didn’t have great results. Finally, I did a search for “Pictage” and got the following results:

Google Social Search results for the search term "Pictage".

Conclusion:

I have to say, I am much more impressed with the idea than the beta results. Although, I would look for this type of feature to be much more common in the future.

What do you think? Have you gotten any cool results from using Google Social Search?

Please leave a comment below and let us know what you thought about this post!

Twitter Strategy 101 | FolioMojo | 4 photographers

Twitter is all the buzz lately, as I’m sure you’re well aware. Twitter can be used to great effect in building your business, if you have a strategy and know some basics about how to operate. This post seeks to give the basic tools for a simple Twitter strategy. Enjoy!

Twitter Etiquette

• Be genuine – Be yourself, and tweet yourself.
• Don’t SPAM – No one enjoys your [nameless] pharma sales pitch!
• Add value – Ask if your Tweet will add value to the community before posting.
• Skip the auto DM, you don’t need it and it just fills up my inbox.

Design and Branding

• Profile design – Use a design that is consistent with your personality or business.
• Photo of you –  This personalizes and humanizes. People like to see another person communicating with them, rather than an automated tool or a faceless voice.
• Links – Place a link to your website or blog on the profile. Then go further and add a link to your Linkedin page, Facebook, etc. on the image background.
• Contact info – It might be a good idea to include other ways people can contact you including other social networking sites.

Listen, Engage, Interact, and Communicate
This is a conversation community. That means two-way communication. You’ll find so many people that simply use Twitter as another ‘Push’ marketing channel where they post about themselves without regard.

• Monitor your brand – In some cases it might be useful for you to do searches for your name and brand name to see if anyone it tweeting about you. You can use the search function at search.twitter.com.
• Monitor your friends questions – This goes right back to being useful. If one of your friends has a question that you might be able to answer, why not help them out?
• Connect with customers – Satisfied customers tell 3 people, unsatisfied customers tell 3,000.
• Poll your followers – Use a service like Twtoll and share the results with your followers.

Develop relationships with your customers, friends and colleagues, and most of all, follow me here @foliomojo, twitter.com/foliomojo!

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