Today a friend of mine asked me to checkout a video he has created to promote his new store. You can see his video on YouTube Buddha Statues. It is a pretty simple video showing off some of his products and goes a little quick for my liking, but you can get the idea of the range of products he has in stock.
He likes to do video marketing, but was inspired by the recent free videos from Andy Jenkins. There are 3 videos available currently and you should check them out at The Video Boss. Yes it is an affiliate link and I fully trust Andy to deliver on the goods yet again.
I decided I would take a look at what the noise on the video boss was on Google and did a quick search. As I was browsing the results on Google I noticed something I hadn’t seen before; Google included listings based on friends postings and recommendations. This new Google feature is called Google Social Circle BETA and it is going to change the way you deal with the social networking sites such as twitter/friendfeed/facebook etc.
As you can see in the picture below I am connected to Andy Jenkins via Gmail and Paul Colligan via twitter. Now when I Googled Video Boss, Google checked Andy Jenkins’ Google profile, related sites and profiles he had listed to see if Andy had been talking about Video Boss on any of the sites listed in his profile. As for Paul, I am assuming Google just goes through his twitter feed and finds related posts about it. Google is definitely ignoring the ‘nofollow’ tag now I am guessing.
What is Google Social Circle
Google Social Circle is a Google labs project that allows users with google accounts to receive search recommendations based on what their connections talking about. This helps users to find trusted recommendations instead of just taking what Google says is the correct result. Lets say in the past you wanted to find a chicken curry recipe. You would go to Google and search “chicken curry recipe” and bam you have results but how do you know which recipe is actually good? You would have to rely on results of Google. How does Google know if its a good curry recipe? Is there an algorithm for taste built into the system?
I would pretty much doubt it. So you would have to guess whether it is good. With Google Social Circle you can provide your twitter profile link and since you enjoy cooking you follow other foodies. Now assuming you’re signed into your Google account and linked your twitter profile Google will go through the people you are following looking for related posts and sites related to your query. Google has level of connections similar to that of LinkedIn. There is slight variation on it however instead of having a 3 tier system Google has 2 different direct connections and secondary connections which Google pulls information to provide you with second tier recommendations.
Now if your running a business that has a Google profile, twitter or friend feed account this affects you and even if you don’t it still affects you from people talking about your company and services. The more helpful you are to your customers the more likely they are going to spread good karma about your business. The opposite is also true upset someone and they will lets their friends know! If there friends missed it in their twitter feed they might have never known in the past, but now with Google social circle they are much more likely to find out when they are doing their research before buying your product or service.It seems that in the future, good customer service may be even more important than it is today.
Related posts:
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Google ignoring the nofollow tag is a good thing for all of us. As usual Brendan you provide some valuable info in your posts.