Trends in social sharing

Mashable writes of a study conducted by digital agency Beyond about the ever-changing nature of social and sharing. And with all these catch-all trend pieces, there's an amazingly long image to accompany the report. See it at bottom of this post.

The report lends credence to certain trends you might be seeing:

"First, sharing to selective lists — the Google+ Circles model — is on the rise. While only 40% of social media users have grouped their friends and followers into lists, the concept appeals to 62% of users.

Second, frictionless sharing — Spotify songs shared to Facebook, for example — is on the rise. Some 67% of social media users have allowed an app to post to their profile, listened to a song that was automatically shared to their profile or read an article that was automatically shared to their profile.

Third, discounts and giveaways will spur sharing of branded content. People are more willing to share content if there are incentives. Some 60% of social media users say they would opt to post about a product or service if they were offered a discount or deal.

Fourth, the rate of social sharing will plateau as Facebook reaches the majority of the world’s population. New users are more excited than seasoned users to share content, and as all users become veterans they will be less frequent sharers.

Fifth, sharing will become personal again, as it was in the early days of social networking for many of us. New apps will focus on personal achievements and actions.

Sixth, the same three factors — informing friends, expressing an opinion and humor — will continue to drive us to share content. Some 88% of users update their status and 85% add photos multiple times per month."

Changes in your Google Life

If you blink, you might miss changes at Google!



It seems that each new day brings a new variation of your online Google experience. Guess what, you're right?

The Next Web is there to make some sense of many of these changes. They write:
"The search giant is slowly but surely getting all of its ducks in a row to become more of a complete solution for consumers. For the first time ever it seems like Google knows exactly what it wants to be when it grows up, which is pretty much everything to everyone. A lofty goal for sure, but since it launched its social network Google+, the entire company has shown a renewed interest in how consumers view and use its products."

Indeed. Google isn't falling behind in social, it's screaming ahead. What did you notice today in Gmail? The new black bar, right? The black navigation bar is being rolled out to users and appears on all of Google services such as Google Reader and Gmail.



While not everyone is onboard with using Google+ on a daily basis, by having Google tie together its offerings with a seamless interface between among its products, it's giving its users a full-on social online experience without leaving the Google universe. I'm OK with that, how about you?

The Next Web adds:
"Think about how fast Google has made the transition from a pretty boring and untouchable entity into an absolute social machine, especially when it comes to its own products. By eating its own dogfood, the company is showing everyone else why Google+ has legs and stands for something more than just a “Facebook killer”."

The social networking race is in full swing - RUN with it!

Use News.Me to 'newsify' your Twitter Stream

I can always depend on Netted by the Webbys to push out news about useful and interesting tools to use in our daily online lives. Today, Netted highlights News.Me - They write:

"Poised to fill the void left by Summify, the service combs your Twitter stream then sends you a daily email with the five most popular stories based on the tweets of people you follow. To give you an idea, high profile tweeters like New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof have made their digests public. News.me originally gained clout with a free iPad app (still available; still awesome) that aggregates full, ad-free articles culled from your Twitter feed and stores them for offline reading.

Thanks, Netted! Signed up to try! Here's how News.Me looks on that iPad

Social Media Pros Podcast launches at Convince & Convert

Jay Baer, head converter at Convince & Convert, today announced the launch of a new podcast for and by social pros. It's called "Social Pros Podcast: Real People Doing Real Work in Social Media."

Episode 1 of the Social Pros Podcast features Taulbee Jackson, CEO of Raidious, the social and content agency that built and is managing the Super Bowl Social Media Command Center.

Click over to the Social Pros Podcast page to listen and read along to the first episode. Or just click to download the Podcast MP3 here.

Next week’s guest is Scott Monty from Ford Motor Company.

Taptu for your Social news reading

Call me a Taptu fanboy. Never heard of it? It's a great mobile app for newshounds like me.

Taptu is a social news feed reader that lets you add, remix, search and share streams from your favorite web sites, blogs and social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. You can add your favorite sources and topics directly from our StreamStore (including importing from Google Reader), DJ them on StreamStudio and finally share the ones you like the most. It's available for Android and iPhone users.

The company recently announced its launch for the Samsung Bada platform, helping Taptu in its expansion to feature phones, to its dedication to a cross-platform, global strategy with apps on iOS, Android, Barnes & Noble NOOK Tablet, Amazon’s Kindle Fire and now Samsung Bada phones.

On a recent trip, away from my laptop, I used my phone to graze over my Taptu headlines early and often. The beauty is that the content owner allows either a little or a lot of a particular piece. If you want to read more, you click through to their content website for the full piece.

Reviews are mostly positive for Taptu.
VentureBeat: “...a deeper news reading experience than most competitors, in particular because I was able to easily combine news sources. The app also does a great job of recommending stories.”

The Register: “A good news aggregator should be able to pull information from a broad range of sources, present it in a clear and easily navigable format, and make it as easy as pie to find, add, remove and edit feeds. For me the app that best ticks all those boxes on Android is Taptu.” –

Android Police: “Taptu: Social Media + News + Eye Candy = Success: Overall, this is probably the best news reader I’ve come across on Android. It looks GORGEOUS, is incredibly smooth, and integrates my social networking on Twitter and Facebook.”



Taptu the company started as a privately held company, founded in Cambridge in 2007 and is backed by funding from Venture Capitalists including DFJ Esprit and Sofinnova. The company is based in Cambridge (UK) and Denver, Colorado.

If you're a Android user, give Taptu a download from the Android App Store.

For iPhone users, find Taptu at iTunes.

Google Search, plus Your World

Google is moving more and more into the social search space, apparently to Twitter's chagrin. The company announced yesterday a new search paradigm called Search, Plus Your World, which aims to include A LOT more of your social interactions into your search results.

Google wrote at its blog:
"We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships. We began this transformation with Social Search, and today we’re taking another big step in this direction by introducing three new features:
- Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;
- Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and,
- People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community. Together, these features combine to create Search plus Your World."
But the new Google Search won't include your Facebook and Twitter feed friends info. Search guru Danny Sullivan wrote:
"Search Plus Your World doesn’t cover content on Facebook. Or Twitter. Or Flickr. Or any social network or place where content might be shared to a more limited audience. Currently, “Search Plus Your World” would be better described as “Search Plus Google+”

And that's pissed some off of the other social companies. WSJ Blog wrote:
"At issue is how Google rolled out a new social search that completely ignored other social services such as Twitter and Facebook. The search giant defended its actions saying that it did not have access to crawl content on other sites, including Twitter."

I do like what Google is doing around searches for communities. If you're a leading voice in a certain community, it's likely that your search rankings will rise for your, erm, 'thought leadership'. Google writes:
Starting today, if you search for a topic like [music] or [baseball], you might see prominent people who frequently discuss this topic on Google+ appearing on the right-hand side of the results page. You can connect with them on Google+, strike up meaningful conversations and discover entire communities in a way that simply wasn’t possible before.

It's an exciting time for the Web, connecting people and places rather than links and websites. Watch Google's entertaining video on its search 'transformation':

Gary Vaynerchuk Says "Please, Get it Right - It's 2012!"

Happy New Year! It's been awhile since I blogged here (I suppose it's worth it to mention that I've been doing a fair share of blogging for companies and clients, just not here).

So today, I want to change that. With a simple piece of advice from the always straight-up and sensible Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary shares a video (embed below) with his viewers that he can't believe he even had to make in 2012! In it, he implores those of you (us?) working in social media and more for companies and brands to GET IT RIGHT!



Gary himself writes:
"I hate to call out OWN, I mean no one has done it better than Oprah, that said this Tweet just embodies EVERYTHING that is wrong with the way Corporate America and most businesses and brands for that matter are handling Social sites, it is 2012, it has to STOP, has to. Am I wrong?"

Don't just use these channels to force things down your feed's readers eyes and ears. Use these tools to engage, provoke, enhance, enlighten and ultimately deliver. Nuff said. Well said, Gary.

Where are you spending your social media time?

SAI's chart of the day shows that most of online users are spending time on Facebook. Is that true in your world?



Business Insider writes:
"Facebook accounts for 95% of social networking time on the web in the U.S., according to an analysis of comScore data provided to us by web publisher Ben Elowitz of Wetpaint."

Facebook proposed settlement with FTC over privacy breaches

This news skipped my notice last week, but I saw it today (thanks to the timely blog post by @Jason).

The Federal Trade Commission offered a proposed settlement with Facebook Inc. over its many breaches of personal privacy for its users. The announcement from the Feds read:
"The social networking service Facebook has agreed to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it deceived consumers by telling them they could keep their information on Facebook private, and then repeatedly allowing it to be shared and made public. The proposed settlement requires Facebook to take several steps to make sure it lives up to its promises in the future, including giving consumers clear and prominent notice and obtaining consumers' express consent before their information is shared beyond the privacy settings they have established."

You remember all the hiccups and curve balls that Facebook implemented without user consent over the last few years, don't you? Well, the FTC ruled that Facebook has to change its practices. It cited:

Specifically, under the proposed settlement, Facebook is:

- barred from making misrepresentations about the privacy or security of consumers' personal information;
- required to obtain consumers' affirmative express consent before enacting changes that override their privacy preferences;
- required to prevent anyone from accessing a user's material more than 30 days after the user has deleted his or her account;
- required to establish and maintain a comprehensive privacy program designed to address privacy risks associated with the development and management of new and existing products and services, and to protect the privacy and confidentiality of consumers' information; and
- required, within 180 days, and every two years after that for the next 20 years, to obtain independent, third-party audits certifying that it has a privacy program in place that meets or exceeds the requirements of the FTC order, and to ensure that the privacy of consumers' information is protected.

Audits for the next 20 years! That's more than a slap in the wrist. Click here for the FTC attorney's more editorial opinion of "Where Facebook Went Wrong." The short of it? "The agency’s 8-count complaint boils down to this: Facebook’s privacy practices often flew in the face of its stated policies and, as one count alleges, the company made material retroactive changes to its privacy practices, without getting users’ consent."

I wonder if this will stifle further innovation at Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg and his corporate communications team crafted this response at the FB blog that reiterated their company stance that in the past 18 months, Facebook has enacted "20 new tools and resources designed to give you more control over your Facebook experience", as well as to announce the establishment of new jobs (Chief Privacy Officer, Policy and Chief Privacy Officer, Products).

There is a bit more to come, as well. According to the release, "The Commission vote to accept the consent agreement package containing the proposed consent order for public comment was 4-0. The FTC will publish a description of the consent agreement package in the Federal Register shortly. The agreement will be subject to public comment for 30 days, beginning today and continuing through December 30, 2011 after which the Commission will decide whether to make the proposed consent order final."

So I guess we'll learn more in the coming weeks. Watch for THAT announcement to come likely on Christmas Eve around 11:30pm.

Where next for Social Media?

Last week's Social Media AZ or SMAZ conference, yielded great tips and good insights into the business end of using social media for brands and business.

I wrote a little more extensively on the day's activities, presenters and sponsors over at the Mint Social blog. Check the link there for more on specific presentations.

One of the highlights for me was a panel on Google + and how that's growing for brands and businesses. As I wrote at the Mint Blog...
"Later in the afternoon to wrap up the conference was a panel session about Google + for brands. While one of the panelists spoke of Google + as 'just another part of Google’s moat around the castle,' and another called Google + 'a better bar where none of my friends are', most in the audience confirmed they are experimenting both individually and for clients how Google + can become a useful part of a company’s overall marketing strategy."

Increasingly, it's obvious that social media has outgrown its simple friend-to-friend beginnings a few years ago to become a massively influential part of nearly every business relationship and transaction. Attendance at SMAZ was far down from the past few years, and even the more local Phoenix-based PodcampAZ has thrown in the towel, declaring the recent gathering as its last (under the current format).

So what's next? We all know that social media is sexy, but where do you take social media next as a going concern when it's become bigger than an industry? It's more a way of life, now. It's human relations! And that's hard for any conference to reign in for a keynote topic. :-)