Facebook’s Like button promotes online interaction and sharing among a user’s group of “friends.” The Like button is very powerful because people are more likely to act upon recommendations from friends vs. strangers. Like has also become popular as an intuitive public rating system for all web content including videos, blogs and websites. The more likes and tweets your page has, the greater chance you have of going viral. Everyone loves their piece to go viral, but these spurts of fame have a tendency to burn out and die quickly. The weakness of the Like button is that Like offers only small window of visibility, either on a viewer’s news feeds or on their wall. The valuable personalized Likes are quickly buried and whatever positives the Likes once had- disappears. From Facebook’s perspective this is good because it encourages the user to keep posting to get the positive feedback. From the user’s perspective the constant quest for thumbs up can be exhausting.

Facebook’s little thumb needs to pay attention to two positive advantages Google’s +1 has that could potentially leave this hitchhiker in the dust. These are Google’s massive market penetration and the duration of +1’s influence.

The size and diversity of Google’s businesses alone makes Google’s +1 a little darling and a threat to the Like button. Google controls most of the advertising dollars on the Internet through search and they own high traffic sites like Youtube, Blogspot and Google Maps. In addition, they are determined to remain a player in the mobile device market, have recently developed their own browser and new apps are appearing daily. The +1 button will work seamlessly across all things Google and this enhances its value for advertisers, users and businesses.

You can also count on Google incorporating +1 into their Social Media algorithm in addition to Facebook and Twitter. Google is likely to disproportionately weight the +1 and this fact alone will increase +1’s market penetration.

Market duration relies and feeds off of Google’s market penetration. Google’s +1 doesn’t rely on a platform like Facebook to be useful and relevant to a user. Rather, +1s are displayed to a user anytime they use Google search. When a Google user is logged into Google they will be able to see the +1s from their friends along with their search results. Furthermore, this feature cleverly extends to paying Google Adword customers. The contextual placement of +1 is potentially very powerful. For example, let’s say a friend of yours is a horticulturist and he has +1ed public gardens all over the world. The next time you are in St. Louis and want something to do, your “public garden” search will include your friend’s +1 recommendation for Busch Gardens at the top of your search and you are likely to take his recommendation. Some reviewers have seen the “logged into Google requirement” as a limitation of the +1 rating system but this is irrelevant on smart phones and other mobile platforms. Moreover, +1s will potentially increase click through rates. People generally want whatever they think other people want. Google’s inclusion of +1s in Adwords should increase click though rates and dramatically impact Adword real estate.

It’s almost impossible for any webmasters and marketers to keep on top of all the new Internet developments, and it’s tempting to wait until +1 is established before jumping in with both feet. However, we think this is a fantastic idea and are taking the chance that it has legs. Source ranking is something search has never managed effectively and Google’s development of social layers and +1 has the potential to dramatically improve Goggle Search. +1 at the moment is source agnostic but the entire reason social media tags work comes back to the fact that a user will place a higher valuation on information based upon his/her perception of the source’s legitimacy, expertise and knowledge. Some recommendations are just more valuable than others and these are subjective judgments.

Furthermore, the +1 lends itself to the future introduction of a 100-point rating scale and this would finally create a useful Internet rating system. The American Robert Parker made his name and radically changed the world’s wine industry with his introduction of a 100-point scale. Google could easily do the same in the future with the +1.

This was just launched Tuesday, so we hope what we are seeing is phase one. As of today, Google AU is only showing the products if the user clicks on Shopping on the left nav menu. This extra click will not product much traffic, especially this early. On Google US, five shopping results are displayed as part of Universal Search, directly on page one. They have enticing pictures, pricing, reviews stars, and store names. As a preview of the prominent attention we can expect in AU once they put the results mixed in with natural results, I googled ‘vacuum cleaner’ on Google US:

Currently many of the items displayed in Shopping AU are Ebay listings, but we expect that to become more robust as businesses learn how to push the data to Google. We have been assisting our clients with this in anticipation of this day. Google gives priority to the age of the product feed, so the sooner you are participating, the better.   Visit the Google Merchant Center to get instructions on submitting your data.

Only products fed to Google will show up here, so we recommend two immediate actions: get your data feed to google, and set up your product reviews using the hreview microformat John wrote about last week.

We are still seeing very nice returns with our press release submissions, from a buzz perspective, a traffic perspective, and from a link building boost. From the SEO perspective solely, including 3-4 hyperlinks using anchor text is acceptable and will produce some backlinks.

It is crucial that a press release does have a newsworthy hook, and this is challenging.  A new hire, an expansion into another market, results of a survey, speaking engagement, company milestone. A creative mind can come up with a good idea at least every 2 months if not more often.  We suggest to our clients to issue a company-wide memo soliciting ideas, because it is your hands-on staff that may notice a new development; asking staff to frame their thinking in terms of newsworthy events should bring at least 2-3 new ideas.  Bringing in current events is a good way to keep your releases relevant and to bring better results, as many news sources like to talk about the trendiest news topics.  It was election, now it is economy.  Holidays are another relevant time sensitive hook.

The release needs to pass a sniff test though; making up garbage spammy articles will do more damage than good.   The best PR services will not even accept them.  Too frequent is another mistake we see; moderation is best.  If you keep your focus on the buzz marketing perspective (Is this news worth a press release?), then you can generally be assured your release is not too frequent, irrelevant, boring, or spammy. Grammar, punctuation, good writing, these are important too.

Free PR services? Sure, if that is all your budget allows. We do not use them as a rule, but our clients are large established sites with a marketing budget.  If you are a small company and do not want to fork over $2-300 for a release, you can get some benefit still from writing the release yourself and using a free PR service.

Once logged into your Google account you will see an up arrow and an X. If you click on the up arrow you will be increasing the search results for a particular website within “your” (once logged in) search results. If you click on the X you will remove that listing from “your” Google Search Results.

This adds a whole new spin to your Google Search Results, you can customize your results to be what you want them to be. Now this appears handy from the outside, but how many people consistently make then same search query time and again, to the point where they would want to customize the results? I am not sure, but what this will certainly accomplish is people who see really bad websites that do not belong in the result will certainly get nailed out of the results.

I personally nailed a few spam website that did not belong, but after I did this I wondered, where did they go? to Google Jail? Well to late because I have no idea how to get a site back once you click the X, and I guess I need to read about how to get websites back that you mistakenly removed from your search query results? I bet Google is going to get A TON of emails asking this same thing

In addition to this down in the bottom of the search results you will find a few links, one is ‘add a website’, which could be a way to submit a website, or possibly just another opportunity to customize your results. You will find a ‘see my search wiki notes’, which is a way for your to make notes or comments about websites in the search results. And a link for see all notes, which if you click this you are going to see some crazy posts about every website, and this appears to be a function Google is going to remove from this new tool as quickly as they added it, as this will rapidly become the place for spammers to really spam. I can see the Viagra posts already

It is late, and I have been playing, I just wanted to make everyone aware of this new twist Google added to search.

I think Google is using this mostly as a way to monitor their results and will probably track all the results to manually adjust their algorithm in the coming months.

We’re coming up on holiday season in the United States, and for those of us in Internet-related fields that might take on a different meaning than for others. For online retailers like Amazon and Overstock, as well as for the online arms of brick & mortar giants like Best Buy and Wal-Mart, this is the most profitable time of the year by far. But for the many sites that make their money off another Internet business model – no charge for content, profit through advertising – the impact on the bottom line might be quite different.

The collection of holidays celebrated in America at the end of the year is impressive, from Thanksgiving to Hanukah to Christmas to New Year’s. These holidays mean more time spent way from work, more time spent traveling and vacationing, and less time on the computer. The real drag on web traffic, however, is the vacation-prone summer months. XiTi Monitor, a web survey institute, reports that between 2002 and 2007, the months of June through September all displayed negative seasonal effects on web traffic. August was the biggest culprit, with a seasonal drop in traffic of 14%.

How can your site avoid these drops in traffic? Stay away from content that is too season-specific, for one. Sparkplugging, a blog and community for Web 2.0 entrepreneurs, noted major changes in traffic to specific articles regarding tax write-offs and regarding keeping kids busy during the summer. The tax article saw a quick buildup until its apex on April 15, followed by a steep and permanent drop (until the next tax season). The second article, about how parents can keep kids busy, saw a decline after summer ended and kids started going back to school.

To a certain extent, these examples show the danger of existing completely within a niche. While niches can be profitable and often represent a smart strategy, it’s hard to build a successful revenue model around a site that only gets real traffic for two months out of the year. But on the other hand, if your content is diverse and you play your cards right, you can take advantage of each one of the various shifts in traffic. Although it sounds like common sense, it can still be done much better by many companies. Adapt your content to each season when the time calls for it, and then shift back when it’s no longer relevant.

Research the impact that summer and seasonal web traffic trends have on your website, and adapt your strategy accordingly.