We’ve seen a great number of cool Google logos throughout the years, but today’s doodle, available on the U.S. version of Google’s search engine, is one of the most intriguing yet.
The logo is animated, and reacts to the pointer of your mouse: move it closer to the logo, and the particles will disperse, “running away” from the mouse pointer.
Unlike some other Google doodles, this one is unclickable, so we don’t know for sure what’s the story behind it. It could be Google’s birthday which falls on either September 4th, September 7th, or September 27th (depending when the folks at Google decide to eat cake), but Google usually celebrates it on the last date.
If Google indeed chose September 7th as the date to celebrate its 12th birthday, well, happy birthday, Google! If there’s a different story behind today’s animated logo, we’re sure we’ll hear about it soon.
Maria Ogneva is the Director of Social Media at Attensity, a social media engagement and voice-of-customer platform that helps the social enterprise serve and collaborate with the social customer. You can follow her on Twitter at @themaria or @attensity360, or find her musings on her personal blog and her company’s blog.
Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should measure everything. Social media is very easily measured with various indicators like share of voice, reach, retweets, and comments. However, measuring without a clear objective in mind won’t bring you closer to success.
Nowadays, its not enough to have and execute a social media policy. You need to be able to gauge its success, measure it, and see that it remains healthy and vibrant.
Having already written about the differences between “monitoring” and “measuring” and how to properly conduct the former. Now, we turn to some best practices to help you measure your brand’s overall social media health, as well as the effectiveness of your various online initiatives.
Read on for the seven steps to getting the most out of your social media measurements.
1. Have a Goal
In order to properly measure your social media efforts, you need to know why you are engaging in social media in the first place. This objective will dictate not only what you do, but also how you measure what you do. Let’s take a look at some objectives and the corresponding metrics you’ll measure for each.
If your goal is driving awareness, you will be looking at metrics like share of voice, reach, readership and engagement with content (measured in action vs. views).
If you need to increase satisfaction through better support, you need to look at sentiment, satisfaction rates in surveys, speed of resolution and percent of queries resolved.
If creating better products and doing market research is a goal, you need to focus on top market trends and satisfaction with various competitive products.
If developing customer advocacy is a goal, you should be looking at who your advocates are, measuring their influence and reach and their engagement with your product and content.
All or none of the above could apply to your particular objective. It’s important to be specific about your purpose and to measure towards that end.
2. Get Your Departments on the Same Page
Social media is not a silo. You need to set up your organization for success by better aligning necessary departments to work as units towards a common goal. Understand what goals are important for each department, and set them up for success with strategies and metrics that make sense.
You will need to establish a process by which your departments can communicate and share the right metrics with the right people on demand. Will you create a dashboard that’s easily visible by every department or simply send email recaps? Will they be customized to match the interests of each department? Can you export raw data and easily share charts and graphs?
3. Always Consider Context
Metrics without context are meaningless. If you know your share of social media conversation is 35%, what does that mean compared to your competitors’ shares or their change over time? Always look at metrics over time and inside of a competitive landscape.
4. Select Your Platform Wisely
Just like with monitoring, selecting the right tool for the job is the next step after figuring out your strategy. Here are some aspects you should consider when selecting a platform:
Data – Which data do you need? Which channels are you going to measure?
Reports – Identify how you want to share and present information. If you are going for a premium tool you should definitely be receiving embeddable and emailable charts and downloadable raw data. You can even automate delivery of reports and dashboards via email.
Actionable insights – There’s a big difference between data and insights. Don’t forget the importance of an analyst within your organization, even if it’s a part-time effort of your social media specialist.
Budget – Do you have a budget or can you only afford a free tool? Keep in mind that cheaper tools can sometimes be harder to use or come with less features. “Free” may cost you more time in the long run.
Ease of use – If you have limited resources, your platform must be easy to use and allow you to get your job done quickly. Consider productivity-boosting alerts and workflow modules, automation and advanced analytics.
5. Conduct a Full Social Media Audit
Now that you have selected your platform, start by conducting a full social media “audit” with the specific metrics you are measuring. Note where you and your competitors are today and use this as a baseline against which you will measure at least once a month.
Conducting a social media audit can also help you monitor the current share of conversation of various players and channels. Through this process you can find where to listen for service issues and where you should be building relationships with thought leaders and influencers.
6. Dig Deeper in Your Channels
Start by measuring volume of conversation in aggregate, across all channels. You should also evaluate performance by channel, for yourself and for your competitors, to find which sections are performing well and to help give your numbers specific context.
A surface look at metric like share of voice, buzz and sentiment allows you to understand what’s happening during an identified period of time. However, to get the most out of your social media analysis, you need to dig deeper. If you discover a spike in negative sentiment or a spike in buzz for one of your competitors, you need to dig in and find out what’s driving it.
7. Do A/B testing
Do you have a couple of campaigns out there? Are you curious about the adoption of certain product features or what content is getting the best response? Social media measurement can help you conduct the right analysis to figure out what’s working and what isn’t. Similar to how you can test web traffic patterns against website copy changes, you can measure the public’s opinion of things you try.
Remember to measure your general social media health comprehensively at least once a month and track responses to particular programs more frequently. Commit the right resources and choose your platforms wisely. Don’t be afraid to experiment and always measure!
This series is supported by Gillette. Learn more about Gillette and its products at Gillette.com.
Video is a tricky spot for most blogs and personal sites, especially when that video is meant to represent you. While everyone likes to watch videos (just look at the exponential growth and popularity of YouTube), it’s a little more difficult to create, edit and host your own videos. This isn’t to say incorporating a video into your online presence is an impossible feat, but to do it properly requires some digital finesse and forethought.
Technically speaking, simply making a video is pretty easy. Hit the record button, stand in front of the camera, turn the lights on and say something. Instant video. Unfortunately, that alone won’t make it a good video.
Video is about content and production: What’s in it, and how it’s presented. For most personal blogs, it’s more important to provide great content (some of the most popular viral videos have some of the shoddiest production values), but much depends on what you want your video to accomplish. Is it an online resume? Clips of your work? Or just something funny for your audience to chew on?
Below we’ve got some quick tips on how to enhance your online presence with video.
Utilize Video Resumes and Introductions
Using video resumes and introductions is a great way to make a first impression. It’s also a great way to shoot yourself in the foot. You could be (and probably are) intelligent, charismatic, ambitious, and attractive, and thankfully, a good video will help you stand out. But beware, a bad video could hide your best characteristics.
Most sites give general, but usefultips on how to set yourself up for success if you’re going to create a video resume. Be organized, dress professionally, speak clearly — all things your parents told you to do and all things you would do in a real interview. The tips are general because you need to tailor your resume, and video, for each job application.
A video introduction, a brief video embedded into your homepage, uses many of the same concepts. It is intended, however, to give a general impression of who you are: Your motivations, passions, and what readers can expect from your site. If someone clicks on your video, it’s because they want to see you, the person behind the site.
Some of the most important tips for these personal videos are: Keep your video to no more than two minutes, find a space where you feel comfortable filming, and avoid having too much clutter in the shot — we want to see you. Lastly, know what you’re going to say and what you want your audience to get out of the video.
Supply Sample Clips
Adding clips of your previous work is perhaps most useful if you have a profession that requires you to be in front of or behind a video camera. Including these clips can be a good way to connect with your readers by showing them real samples of what you do.
The biggest obstacle is usually getting over the fear that people will hate your work. It’s a legitimate, but often unwarranted concern. If you’re a pro, odds are you’ve already built out a video section on your site. For amateurs, think of your clips as a great way to get crowdsourced feedback.
Add a comments section below your videos, and encourage responses to your work. You’ll find that readers will often give good criticism if you ask for it in a courteous and honest way. Of course, there will always be trolls. But odds are high that you’ll get more useful feedback than people calling you a n00b.
Curate Videos from around the Web
Aggregating videos can show your expertise or interest in a specific field, in much the same way that aggregating news stories can. Posting a selection of videos from the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, for example, can show readers your interest in classical music, collaborative arts, or the intersection between classic arts and new technologies. However, if those are your interests and you post random fail vids and cute cats, your readers might not get a good sense of who you are.
Anything you post on your blog or personal site is a representation of who you are. Video’s can be a great way to show your personality, previous work, or interests, but require the same patience as any other medium (you wouldn’t post a blurry or embarrassing profile pic, right?).
Your best bet is to think of video as an extension of your portfolio, a video cover letter where you can share a little bit of who you are. It’s certainly not required, but a video done well can do a lot to enhance your online presence.
Let us know how you are using online video to showcase your work or interests in the comments below.
WikiLeaks is currently in the news because its Afghan War logs comprise one of the largest and most controversial intelligence leaks to date. But while WikiLeaks is relatively new to the public, it is actually a product of a long-established culture. That culture has already had a banner-bearer; a quintessential exemplification of its values — The Pirate Bay. WikiLeaks is akin to The Pirate Bay, but for another purpose.
WikiLeaks disregards the letter of the law and grants political analysts and citizens new information, then defends that choice with an argument for a higher virtue: Freedom of information and knowledge. The founding figures behind WikiLeaks and The Pirate Bay each claim to place that value above all others — that, and a little bit of anti-establishment zeal.
At this point, its name is merely symbolic — a statement of philosophical association. WikiLeaks is not a wiki, but shares the same culture, along with The Pirate Bay, Linux, and the open-source movement. For decades, the members of this “hacker” community have espoused the free flow of information in a world without borders, where no institution, neither corporation nor government, could hinder independent thought and the democratization of knowledge.
The connections between WikiLeaks and The Pirate Bay are not merely conceptual. There are also more direct correlations. Both WikiLeaks and The Pirate Bay have been hosted by Swedish Internet service provider PRQ, which also hosted the website of insurgents in Chechnya who sought a publishing platform that would not represent any established state. It’s the Swiss bank of Internet providers, and a bastion of 21st century hacker values and individualism.
In The New Yorker’s detailed profile of WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange, it’s clear that he belongs to this tradition. He began his adult life as a computer hacker with no formal education. Though he did eventually attend college, he had nothing good to say of the experience. This was in part because his mother discouraged him from traditional education, fearing it might rob him of his individualism and will to learn. Today, it seems almost as if Assange is trying to live out the radical philosophies of Ayn Rand.
We all know the stories of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs — computer whizzes who dropped out of college because they had technological revolutions to tend to. Assange is in some ways cut from the same cloth, though his choice has not yet earned him dramatic wealth, and his commitment to openness is more radical.
But through his project, the tradition has reached the world stage in a whole new way. Computer hackers with this Internet-born, fundamentalist philosophy of information and individual entrepreneurship are not just dictating the terms of technology and digital entertainment, but of journalism, political discourse and military engagement.
WikiLeaks and The Pirate Bay are also similar in this regard: You can say what you will of the ethics of it all, but you have to admit it’s remarkable.
Procedurally, the ceremony of marriage is a very linear affair. The priest says some things, then the groom and bride say some things, kisses are exchanged, and the couple is married.
Is it odd, then, that Satoko Inoue and Tomohiro Shibata decided to employ a robot called i-Fairy to marry them? Now, perhaps; but in a couple of years, especially in Japan which is already home to 800,000 industrial robots, it might become a regular occurrence.
The bride, Inoue, works for Kokoro Ltd, the company that makes the i-Fairy, a robot usually employed as a museum guide. The husband, Shibata, was a client of the company, so in a way, the robot brought them together. “It’s true that robots are what caused us to first begin going out, and as suggested by my wife, we decided that we wanted to try this sort of wedding,” Shibata said.
All it took was new software, and the robot presided over the marriage without problems, as you can see in the video below. So much for robots not understanding the meaning of love.
It’s your friendly, neighborhood, tiny logo loving designer here.
This may be hard for some clients to accept, but, most designers (you hired us for a reason) are experts at what they do. We all approach design with our own unique brand of fervor, but for the most part, those of us who are experienced professionals know what we are doing.
That being said, due to the recent barrage of work I have been enduring recently, (not complaining) I felt it was time to repost a video that epitomizes almost all of my more difficult clients. Please watch this video, you might recognize some of these folks in the mirror.
Simon Manchipp, one of three creative directors and partners at London-based studio SomeOne, said on Twitter yesterday:
“Logos are dead. Yet we have been featured in the new book Logo Design Love as an example of how to do Logos.
“They are a hangover from old-school thinking about branding. There is no desire by the public for a new logo. They are simply an old-fashioned approach to differentiating products or services.”
Upon questioning, Manchipp explicitly meant, “…that symbols invented to accompany brand names are a waste of time, money and effort.”
I asked David Law, Manchipp’s partner at SomeOne (and the man who kindly submitted SomeOne’s designs for inclusion in my book), what he thought of his colleague’s statement:
“It’s something we have been debating internally for quite a while.
“When you look at brands like O2, its success lies in the richness and depth of its brand world (bubbles, blue grad etc.). This forms a flexible branded platform that is instantly recognisable — you could remove the logo and still know the brand. The logo in itself is not the ‘hero’.
“In the past, brands like IBM and FedEx traded on the logo as the ‘hero’. We see it even today.
“So while we all acknowledge that the logo is not about to disappear — and that it is still an important part of any brand toolkit — there is a case for applying more emphasis on brand worlds.
“The ‘favicon’ or ‘twibbon’ is now the equivalent of the ‘black and white fax’ that we all learnt (years ago) was the minimum requirement for a logo to be recognisable as. These are much smaller applications than we have ever had to deal with, and ones where traditional logos are struggling.
“Brands now ‘move’ as standard — being ‘Apple‘ implies all sorts of physics that lend attributes to the brand and do not rely on the logo to do everything.
“Lastly, the amount of platforms, media, applications (and now ‘experiences’) that need to be branded has multiplied significantly with technology. People simply get bored quicker and brand worlds allow the conversation to ‘flow’.
“Yes, the logo is the ultimate ‘rechargeable battery’ of the brand and is the final distillation of all the brand’s attributes BUT what we are debating (and we haven’t reached any conclusion) is that if the brand world is powerful enough, could the ‘logo’ simply be the company name designed in a simple, ownable way? Possibly, dare I say it, with no symbol to sit alongside it?”
Symbol or no symbol is a valid question, and one I talk about in my book:
“Sometimes your client just needs a professional logotype to identity its business. Use of a symbol can be an unnecessary addition.
“This is something you want to determine at the outset of the project. Ask your client if she has a preference one way or another. If the company is entertaining ideas about future expansion into other markets, it might be better to opt for a distinctive logotype, because an identifying mark or symbol might prove restrictive.”
![robot marriage Robot Priest Marries Couple in Japan [VIDEO]](http://mashable.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/robot_marriage.jpg "robot_marriage")
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