ethnicomm – the blog part I

Facebook is working on facial recognition. Initially, they will recognize that a face exists in a photo and provide the opportunity to identify the face and tag the person simply by typing in the name. No more having to make sure your mouse clicks on the centre of the face first – Facebook will automatically create a box around what it believes is the face. With over 100 million photos uploaded every day, I guess Facebook realized that they must make tagging faster and easier.

What does this mean for businesses? Uploading pictures of your staff and customers (with permission of course) will help spread your Fan Page across their networks. Since you’re already using social media, it is wise to strategically leverage the marketing tools that are available.

Almost every Facebook user has uploaded at least one photo. I think every Facebook fan page should have at least one photo – even if it is just of yourself!

Ever wonder how much your Facebook Fan Page is worth or what you could do to make it more engaging and effective? I just tried out vitrue’s beta Social Page Evaluator service. I’m not sure what beta signifies other than the fact that the service, terms or aesthetics may dramatically change? Google Alerts launched in 2003 and still shows beta.

The Social Page Evaluator told me that my Facebook Fan Page is currently worth $245 with a potential value of $1836. The site suggests three contributing factors to my page’s current value and “potential applicable suggestions”: Posting Frequency, Post Type and Short URL. I was not impressed by the suggestion they provided for Posting Frequency. Apparently I am either posting too often or not often enough. This is the kind of suggestions I’d expect from a politician – wishy washy, non committal…but having the appearance of taking a stand! My Post Type is good. I am making effective use of multimedia and dynamic wall posts but could do better by using wall apps – this would allow me to utilize Facebook’s “share” function and hopefully get friends of friends to become fans. The description under the Short URL section is that URLs should be short and easy to type so that it increase the chance that a visitor will click on them. I did not understand what they meant here – should I not use my bit.ly account so I can track people’s behaviour?

Three additional points could be seen by clicking on the “Other Best Practices” button. These were really good tips for the average fan page creator or owner.

1. Build an audience – drive traffic through cross-promoting on other associated official fan pages.
2. Optimize your fan page by completely filling out the profile and blurb box information.
3. Engage the fan by posting 2-3 times per day; solicit comments and respond in a timely fashion. They suggest using bit.ly as your branded URL shortener….woohoo that’s what I use!

Additional features on the site allow you to compare your fan page value with other brands; see what impact increasing your posting frequency or level of engagement will have on your page value (called fan-tasize); and track your page value over time. These features will probably be more useful once some history is collected on my fan page as well as other fan pages.

Let me know what your fan page is worth and if you feel the Social Page Evaluator is a useful tool.

I came across this really interesting infographic on social media demographics and just had to share it!

As you can see, Facebook does have a lot more females than males but I was surprised to see MySpace up there as well. LinkedIn has the most educated users. What I would like to see is a cross-tabulation or cube of age/income/gender/education level. Any excel wizards out there?

A new search engine launched today and I was thrilled to read that it indexes over 120 billion pages or three times more than any other search engine according to their press release.  What other search engine is relevant?  The one where the Cuil guys came from – the one that should feel no threat – at least not yet. Cuil may be the biggest search engine but as you will see, biggest is not necessarily the best.

I was curious to see where I ranked on my keywords compared to Google. Not because it is important to me (well ok it is) but because the keywords I chose are part of my web strategy and if they’re not helping me rank higher and bring in traffic, they are useless.

So…I Cuil-ed the keywords (somehow I don’t think that it’s going to become a verb like Googling).  It was lightning fast in telling me the number of search results. Unfortunately, getting those search results to show up on my screen was slower than the new Facebook page refresh!  Out of 13 results on the first page, 4 were for one particular company. Cuil claims that they “focus on the content of the page and then present a set of results that has both depth and breadth.”  I don’t think so!

One key phrase, and I mean KEY phrase, yielded 14,500,000 pages on Google but only 114,518 on Cuil.  Even “web strategy” was poorly represented (98,756 results). In the time it took to roll my eyes, Google showed 31,600,000 results.

I also searched for ethnicomm to see if my homepage showed up. NOPE. In fact, a client’s homepage that had the words “web strategy by ethnicomm inc.” popped up several pages in. I would have tested it out some more before commenting but I didn’t want to wait 10 minutes for the content to spit out.  I’m sure things will improve over time but right now, I don’t have the time to waste on Cuil. And why does it look like cull on my computer?

On a positive note, the layout is aesthetically pleasing, I am not bothered by Adwords and the short descriptions seem a bit more informative. Maybe Google will learn from their ex-employees.

If you’re looking to switch to a better search engine, it is not Cuil!