Although Google Buzz is being phased out (and merged with Google+) businesses can now add themselves to Google+

From the Google Blog:

For businesses and brands, Google+ pages help you connect with the customers and fans who love you. Not only can they recommend you with a +1, or add you to a circle to listen long-term. They can actually spend time with your team, face-to-face-to-face. All you need to do is start sharing, and you’ll soon find the super fans and loyal customers that want to say hello.

A number of pages are already available (see below), but any organization will soon be able to join the community at plus.google.com/pages/create.

Direct Connect from Google search
People search on Google billions of times a day, and very often, they’re looking for businesses and brands. Today’s launch of Google+ Pages can help people transform their queries into meaningful connections, so we’re rolling out two ways to add pages to circles from Google search. The first is by including Google+ pages in search results, and the second is a new feature called Direct Connect.

Maybe you’re watching a movie trailer, or you just heard that your favorite band is coming to town. In both cases you want to connect with them right now, and Direct Connect makes it easy—even automatic. Just go to Google and search for [+], followed by the page you’re interested in (like +Angry Birds). We’ll take you to their Google+ page, and if you want, we’ll add them to your circles.

That sounds like a good SEO opportunity to me!  HubSpot also do a good write up on Google+ for business and how to add yourself.

More great resources from Hubspot. This time a five minute video on how to create a facebook page. Not only that – but once you have created the page, Hubspot gives you an idea of what and how to post AND how to measure what you are doing.

Here are the 5 steps:

1. Choose a Classification
2. Complete Basic Information
3. Fill the Page
4. Take Advantage of Features
5. Play and Track

They also include a freebie ebook – How to use Facebook for business

Sound familiar?  You need to have software know-how.  Learning a bit of html doesn’t go amiss, plan content, network, attend trade events, learn new platforms, recruit and train, publish and join the conversation… At some point, surely, these roles will more become defined – but until then, ‘Jack of all Trades’ kind of fits….

People I have shown Research.ly to are often shocked.  “What?! It has the data on every tweet?” Yes. Everything you have put out there. Over three years worth. And it can take that and slice and dice it anyway you want:  positive or negative sentiment, gender, location, top retweeters, who made the first tweet on a trending topic. It is one of the new platforms developed by the team at PeopleBrowsr.

When I showed it to one clinical researcher in the office the response was ‘I am never going on twitter, ever.’  ‘People presume they are having a private conversation, albeit in a social space – they don’t expect to be tracked, comments analyzed and remembered’.  Well, what goes online stays online and these are powerful platforms.

Research.ly

What does Research.ly do? It is a search engine and analytic tool for social media and it’s very good for those topics that get a lot of conversations happening. For example a new clothing store – Zara, has just opened in Sydney – and instantly you can find out who is talking about it, where, and top proponents of the store.

Viral Analytics Platform

Let’s take that a step further.  Research.ly translates that data as a Viral Analytics Platform. You can just as easily search for a peak in conversation over the last three years and find out what was being said using the datamine.  Take for example the case of the dating site eharmony.  They had a spike of online conversation over a year ago in January 2010.

Click on the spike and it takes Research.ly seconds to find the conversations about a discrimination lawsuit against eharmony (for excluding gays and lesbians).  Using the datamine, eharmony can see exactly what was said, who said it and the sentiment. Top right of the screen you can search other topics like this years South by South West.

The platform also slices and dices the conversations by community and builds a score card – so that you can see who the top 15 communities are that are positively mentioning a brand.  The communities are defined by looking at people’s twitter bios – in other words how people define themselves.

And then it takes the top three communities and finds those people within them who are the very top positive influencers for the brand.  What does that mean? That a company can find it’s top advocates – champions.  These people will create a good online conversation for them – and that worth a lot of bucks to some companies.

Customise Viral Analytics

Let’s take that a step further. The Viral Analytics platform can be customised – in this case CocaCola get realtime data of the conversations across twitter, facebook (pages), blogs… for any number of accounts and keywords and they can also export the data. They can do the same for the competition, in this case Pepsi, RedBull,  Dr Pepper. The team have also just added (this is very new) – a workspace tab -  you can look at who is tweeting within your company.  This is a very powerful tool indeed.

So, PeopleBrowsr platforms – real-time data, a social search engine.  That remembers, tracks and analyses.

More excellence from Pew Internet – this time on teen trends using social media. Adults (18-29) still more likely to use social networking sites but only just.

What I really like about these slides is the girl scout case study (over 1,000 girls aged 14-17) – it looks at how they feel about, and use, social networking sites.

Pew Internet/Girl Scout Joint Webinar on Social Media