Featuring Content: Our Freshest Newsroom Contest Winner
Congrats to @ProcterGamble for winning our Freshest Newsroom Contest! Find out what makes them so “fresh” –> bit.ly/IPFresh ^MLS
— Intrapromote (@intrapromote) January 26, 2012
Congrats P&G! Freshest Newsroom Award Winner!
We’ve been conducting The Freshest Newsroom Contest for a few weeks now, and while there were many fine entries and two top contestants (Best Buy and CDC) we are bestowing the Virtual Blue Ribbon on the P&G Corporate Newsroom.
Dig just below the surface and P&G offers all of the typical news and multimedia archives a journalist would require. It’s this newsroom’s home page and its distinctive Featured Content theme that’s really worth a long look if your company is designing a newsroom.
- P&G gives busy users and journalists a quick take with their P&G Featured Views mini-slider. This preview mode provides short news snippets accompanied by meaningful images. Clicking through on any of these news previews shows the user a short news announcement with accompanying PDFs and resources provided as separate downloads. Printing, sharing and emailing icons are in plain view at the top of each article.
- On either side of the newsroom home page one finds a clean layout. The left navigation is short and self explanatory, and the right hand side of the page offers an uncluttered column containing a search box, list of media contacts, P&G social media links and the latest P&G tweets.
- Beneath the Featured Views section are the P&G Featured News Releases; presented in a similar format to Featured Views. This is a very user-friendly presentation that allows the user to see a variety of news pieces without scrolling. It’s not necessary to click through on most of the releases as they are succinctly summarized in the Featured summary.
- Completing the newsroom page layout is the P&G Featured Video. It is only 1:12 minutes long which is a perfect length to tell a story without losing the audience’s attention.
Congratulations P&G, our first annual Freshest Newsroom Award Winner!
Managing Your Personal & Professional Social Profiles (Part 3)
Join our own @MaryLeeS as she discusses how Social Media Privacy is really now Search Privacy bit.ly/IPSocMed2 ^MLS #privacy
— Intrapromote (@intrapromote) January 25, 2012
Part Three: Social Media Privacy has morphed into Search Privacy
This post is the third in a five part series addressing the management of one’s personal and professional social media profiles. (Did you miss Part 1 and/or Part 2?)
Most of us are quite familiar with Facebook and its ever changing Privacy Settings. We know that every time there is a Facebook update, we need to go in and deactivate whatever changes they made arbitrarily – we know the drill. But when is the last time you updated your Google Profile? Have you delved into your Google+ Privacy settings? What about your other Social Media profiles? Why does it matter?
Last week, Linda O’Neill discussed Intrapromote’s POV on Google Search Plus Your World with Erik Dafforn. In what Erik describes as “One of the most dramatic changes to search results in years”, Google has significantly increased the input of certain social signals for certain users. What does this have to do with Privacy? Depending upon how you have your privacy settings set up on your social media accounts, your profiles will be showing up more prominently in Google Search Results than ever.
Take this quick search for Intrapromote’s illustrious President, Erik Dafforn, as an example:
You will notice the following:
- Erik’s Google+ profile shows up in instant search results
- Erik’s LinkedIn & Twitter accounts are listed prominently
With Google having the largest market share (66.6% in December 2011) by far, it is important to take a closer look at your Google Profile Privacy settings.
First of all, if you want Personal Results to show up in your Search results on Google, you do have to opt in. You may do this in your Search Settings as seen below.
Now that you have Personal Results turned on for Search, what is the easiest way to manage all of your different profiles? Fortunately, Google has Google Dashboard to manage all of your profiles associated with Google products. From your Google Dashboard you may currently manage settings for your Google Profile, Google Analytics, Android Devices, Android Market, Blogger, Buzz (yes it’s still listed!), Calendar, Chrome, Contacts, Docs, Friend Connect, Gmail, Google Music, Google+, iGoogle, Latitude, Picasa Web Albums, Reader, Google Talk, Google Chat, Google Voice, YouTube and any other Google product that you may have signed up for!
Check out this video about the Google Dashboard below:
Google Privacy also has a YouTube channel, which is a great resource for further information on the topic.
Although Google related profiles are very important, that is not all you need to look at. As we found with our search of Erik above, LinkedIn and Twitter profiles regularly rank high in search results.
Especially in regards to business, LinkedIn is a profile that most of us would WANT to show up in search results. LinkedIn has a newly re-designed settings page with privacy options prominently displayed as shown below:
When it comes to Twitter, it really depends upon what you are using Twitter for (personal vs. professional). Twitter does not have a lot of privacy features aside from protecting your tweets from public view. As a good rule of thumb, never Tweet anything that you would not want seen by the world (including employers and journalists). You never know when a national publication may pick up and quote your tweet on a subject and always assume potential employers are searching for your Twitter account to review. In Part 1 of this series, there’s a good example of how this can backfire on you — especially if potential employers or customers are using tools like Rapportive.
And don’t leave out your new Social Media accounts as well! It is generally a good practice to search out privacy settings in each network when you first set up your account. You may have caught Intrapromote’s Katie Hehn and her recent blog post about Creating a Unique Brand on Pinterest. Interestingly, Pinterest has just one Privacy Setting and it is all about Search!
How you have your privacy settings set on your social media profiles is now more important than ever. After all, you will probably prefer that a potential employer find your polished LinkedIn profile over your Milli Vanilli Fan Pinboard….”Girl you know it’s true!”
Follow Mary Sutter on Twitter:
Deconstructing Google’s Above-the-Fold Layout Algorithm Change
@intrapromote‘s own @ErikDafforn Deconstructs Google’s Above-the-Fold Algorithm Change bit.ly/IPSEO2 ^MLS
— Intrapromote (@intrapromote) January 23, 2012
Last Thursday, Google announced an algorithm update designed to target pages whose above-the-fold layouts are significantly ad-heavy:
…we’ve heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it’s difficult to find the actual content, they aren’t happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away. So sites that don’t have much content “above-the-fold” can be affected by this change.
Characteristically, Google declines to say exactly what above-the-fold ratio of ads to content will trigger the algorithm. Instead, it suggests that readers run their own sites through Google Labs’ “Browser Size Tool,” which is designed to show (with rather crudely drawn lines) how a site appears in various resolutions, and what percentage of the browsing public can see various parts of your content based on known statistics of browser resolution distribution. Here, for example, is a shot of the home page of the Christian Science Monitor, pulled on a screen resolution of 1280 x 800 (click to enlarge):
The Christian Science Monitor home page, run through Google's Browser Size tool
The X and Y axes are aligned with various resolutions, and the curved lines represent the percent of users who live within those resolution confines. I’ve outlined the ad locations in red — a horizontal banner at the top, and a block in the lower right. As these two areas are the only paid ad space in this particular version of the “above-the-fold” area, one would infer that the CS Monitor has little to fear from this particular algo change.
As do most sites, according to Google’s Matt Cutts, who penned the blog post: “This algorithmic change noticeably affects less than 1% of searches globally. That means that in less than one in 100 searches, a typical user might notice a reordering of results on the search page.”
JS code from the Christian Science Monitor (click to enlarge)
While trying to sidestep the euphemistic glory of a phrase like “reordering of results,” many people had a common question: How, exactly, is Google determining which content blocks are ads? What about site-specific (but, perhaps, not textual) images or widgets? After all, even Google isn’t immune from snagging a few dolphins in the tuna nets, as multiple updates to Panda have confirmed.
No one’s talking specifics about the technology behind determining which content is ad-based. But my own hypothesis is that since Google is already adept at parsing through JavaScript files, it has a pretty good understanding of the links and code that go into building ad structures, versus other “similar” structures such as a scrolling panorama of images linking to “top stories,” social media assets, and other widgetry.
In short:
- Check your site with the tool.
- Try to look objectively at the content viewable by, say, 65% or so of the general population, to determine whether most people would find the layout annoying or distracting.
- If you have ad blocks taking up “lots” (sorry for the vagueness) of the viewable space, try to scale back, and confirm/deny your results by segmenting your organic traffic and closely looking at measurements such as path analysis and bounce rate.
Google itself took some heat from the furnace of irony in, among others, Danny Sullivan’s column on Friday. Using several screen shots taken by himself and others, he illustrated that for many queries, Google’s own search results page can, depending on the resolution (which defines the “fold”), be taken up entirely with paid advertisements.
But don’t try to confirm that with Google Labs’ Browser Size tool. As Danny’s column pointed out (and I confirmed with numerous tests), one site on which Google’s browser size tool will NOT diagnose is a traditional Google search result. So there.
Follow Erik Dafforn on Twitter:
