Google has done more tinkering with the algorithm so far this year than ever before. This is mainly due to playing catch up to what’s actually happening online. Whereas Google once gave credit and authority to valued, aged content that attracted lots of links over a period of time and hosted on a well established site, it now has to consider the speed at which stories go viral.

Two major changes that have happened is a leaning towards ‘freshness’ and ‘link velocity’. My recent story on Ashton Kutcher and Twitter quickly went to the top positions for a variety of keywords, I still hold two positions for ‘oprah twitter episode’. It was purely freshness and relevance that had helped.

Not so long ago quickly getting links into a page would have signalled something strange to Google, but now Google has seen the light, they realise that a breaking story will get syndicated and mentioned around the web, on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

So, the more conversations you join, the more likely your fresh content will gain links quickly and climb the rankings. In essence you need to:

• Have constantly fresh content
• Attract links quickly – Link velocity
• Get those links from trusted sites with a social element

The down side to this of course is what happened to certain car keywords, where spammers used it to build ranking to sell phony security software. Google have created some big holes with these changes that Blackhatters are exploiting, which means more changes to come.

Social Media Strategy

In a social media world where every blog has posts on 10 ways to XYZ it’s easy to see why many can get drawn into the doing before doing too much of the thinking.

All to often social media campaigns fall down because they start downstream, they are focussed around platforms or content or interactions. Twitter is the hot new kid on the block so let’s have some, rather than creating a well rounded social media strategy that’s aligned with business objectives.

If you start upstream it will be easy to see where everything fits in, creativity may be needed, in some cases just downright hard work, but you can’t prescribe the approach until you know where it’s going and how it fits in with everything else.

Upstream is where the thinking takes place, downstream is where the thinking is implemented and tasks are carried out.

Do you hire an agency? That’s decided upstream, formulating strategy is all about opportunity and capability, is there an opportunity that suits our goals and if so do we have the capability to take advantage of it?

Once you have a strategy you can start to formulate a plan, select platforms, decide on content and how to interact.

Whatever you do, don’t be task driven or creative driven, neither will work if you don’t have a social media strategy.

I’m going to put together a little toolkit that will hopefully help people easily put together a social media strategy and sell it to their boss, I will update this post when it’s online.

Ashton Kutcher

In this episode of the iGary TV podcast I take a look at what’s happened on Twitter this week. A few weeks ago the words ‘a plus k’ wouldn’t have meant much, but since Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk), of 70’s Show and Dude Where’s my Car fame decided to race CNN (@cnnbrk) to be the first on Twitter with 1 million followers everyone is aware of it.

So, the story so far, Ashton decided he wanted to beat CNN to 1 million followers on Twitter and pledged $100,000 to a charity if he did. Low and behold he did win the race.

Ashton Kutcher hits 1 Million Followers on Twitter

But, there’s been a backlash, or should I say #backlashton which is the search tag being used by people upset by the whole thing on Twitter.

#backlashton

Some have accused Ashton and CNN of gaming the system as Ashton had over 1,000 billboards given free to help him.

Ashton Kutcher @aplusk Billboard

Using mass media to collect followers on Twitter isn’t what social media is about, it’s all a bit retro, social media is about building an audience, engaging them, building trust and joining the conversation. Personally I don’t see too much wrong with what they did, but I don’t think it’s best practice, I wouldn’t like to see big brands following this example and Twitter could have acted better by allowing people to unfollow Ashton and CNN, instead there was a mysterious error.

How to Unfollow Ashton Kutcher

The great thing to come out of this is that Oprah (@oprah) is now on Twitter.

Oprah on Twitter

Oprah has made 10 Tweets and has over 300,000 followers, not bad for the first day!

With Oprah now using Twitter it could change the demographic profile of Twitter, which currently stands like this.

Quantcast Audience Profile Twitter

It could swing the age/gender profile more towards certain brands.

More importantly it could influence the Technographic profile of users, especially in the USA and UK, creating critics and creators out of spectators and inactives.

Technographics

By getting people involved as critics and creators means they are more likely to do the same elsewhere and as evangelists come from these groups this can help your brand.

Data from Forrester Research Technographics^® surveys, 2008. For further details on the Social Technographics profile, see groundswell.forrester.com

How USA Korean BBQ firm Kogi are using Twitter to keep users informed as to where their trucks are.

Think it’s impossible to make washing machines fit into social media? Think again. Matt, a 16 year old from Macclesfield, UK, has created a Youtube channel dedicated to his washing machines, watch for more

A look at which social media sites do and don’t use nofollow tags on profile links such as Linkedin, Seesmic, Furl and Technorati and questioning why some social networks place nofollow on profile links.

I can see why nofollow is used on comments, but, your social network profile is yours, you are the editor, so a link to your own site shouldn’t have nofollow on it.

Some social media sites don’t add the nofollow tag, LinkedIn is probably the best and most under utilised. Instead of acepting the default My Company text for your link chose ‘other’ this allows you to enter the anchor text for the link.

Obviously if this gets abused I’m sure they will add nofollow, but for now, link away…

How a potential Cisco intern gained infamy with one misguided Twitter post and how quickly Cisco found and reacted to the post.

iGary Podcast Episode 8: Twitter can cost you your job from Gary Reid on Vimeo.

This week saw a young lady from California get on the wrong end of social media. MSNBC covered the story here, but basically she posted this on Twitter

Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work

Of all the firms to pick Connie chose Cisco, probably one of the more social media aware out there, having been probably the only major company to do a complete product launch using social media.

The slideshow detailing this launch below

Most large companies monitor their brand online. Using something like Splitweet you can easily input a few keywords and see every post that contains them, like this

Splitweet Brand Monitoring

The moral of this story, be careful what you say and who you say it about!

Download the podcast iGary Podcast Episode 8: Twitter can cost you your job

I went to the Social Networking World Forum and here’s my podcast

The exhibition hall wasn’t jam packed with the usual suspects and unfortunately I missed the talk by Dirk Singer from PR agency This is Cow.

Thankfully Dirk put his slides on Slideshare and blogged about his talk here.

Looking through the slides it looks like Dirk was telling a compelling story, if you don’t do it some one else will and had two great examples from Twitter, first is the Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/sainsburys

Twitter Sainsburys

And the feed at http://twitter.com/southwesttrains

South West Trains

Neither official, neither ‘on brand’.