We are very pleased to introduce you to Kickstart America .US, a wonderful group that focuses on the power of small business owners.    We hope you take a few moments to check them out here and enjoy!

I was invited to give a talk recently by Deborah Ager for a group of Search and Marketing professionals in Virginia. At first I was planning on doing the same talk I usually give, one I’ve been giving for years about why my companies embrace what we call Search Engine Simplicity.

Something told me that this was the wrong talk for this crowd when I was on my way there, further validated when I spoke to some of the people in the group before hand.

So instead I spoke completely off the top of my head on two things:

1- The importance of  pondering what Google is going to do NEXT rather than NOW, and preparing for that eventuality, and,

2- What we will all do if Google suddenly ceases to exist (or, more likely, no longer be relevant to our businesses – remember when Yahoo was a search company?) .

After talking to people following the event, I realized that I’m overdue for this year’s Google Strategy Session for 2012. We’re doing it workshop style this year due to my lateness – and also because I want to travel to Africa to see my ailing father. (He’s better but he can’t fly as we’d hoped, so I want to go to him.)

Which of course led me to create this blog post about why looking beyond the fix-it tactics are so important: if you start thinking strategically, you can often avoid the issue of having to fix something altogether.

But strategy is more than being prepared for the changes happening now or even six weeks from now.

Is What Google is Doing Now Unimportant?

In a word, no. It’s very important – how will you know how to present your company to Google if you don’t know what Google finds acceptable these days?

At the same time, that’s more of a tactical mindset – that only tells you what to tweak right now. Google’s current status is a weather report. You can look outside and tell it’s sunny.

So can you look at the top search publications – and a few that aren’t at the top, or aren’t in search – and tell what Google’s doing right now, or has done recently. For Example, in non-search publications you have:

• A Googler’s frustrated rant on the inner workings of Google, accidentally posted in public on Google+
• The New York Times posits that Google cannot be both a big company and not evil
• Another Former Google employee’s explanation of why he left Google (See also CNN’s coverage.)
• Gizmodo’s article, The Case Against Google (which also links to its reprint of EFF‘s reaction to Google’s new privacy policy, another must read)
• CNet asks if Google Has Lost Its Magic
• A Writer from the Atlantic with his theory on Why many have fallen out of love with Google search sesults
• Cris Crum of Web Pro News asks if Google Deserves to Be Labeled Evil

And all of these things have relevance today even though they aren’t directly about Google or Google search. But not just in that public perception often affects what a public company does. It’s also particularly helpful when current trends and hints of future actions come from the horse’s mouth.

Google Tells Us (at least part of) What It’s Doing

Sometimes you can even get answers straight from Google. They’ve freely announced recent plans to change or adjust, including:

• Search Plus Your World, and other recent changes in search & the Google algorithm
• Local search changes and updates, mobile integration, Universal Search and other algorithm improvements and changes (ongoing gradual changes to Google search that added up to what’s currently being perceived as a big shift, dating back to 2007)
• Google’s slow shift towards social mixed into search first announced in October 2009, prior to Search Plus Your World,  including the quiet emergence of Google Social Search, the +1. and the much louder debut of Google+, and Google+ business pages
• Google’s navigation bar and search page redesign, emphasizing certain products
• Google’s shift in direction, leadership, and product focus, including closing or shifting away from certain products
• The integration of Chrome and Android in everything from browsers to mobile to TV
• Changes in Google’s Privacy Policy, and their implications

All of those signals about the current status of Google are important and to be duly noted, both the official stories that lean on fact and the editorial opinions that are based on observations – even if the conclusions they draw border on hyperbole.

Sometimes that hyperbole becomes fact in the future. Or it may give you a clues for what not to do. More significant is the ability to build yourself a kind of almanac to Google’s future moves, so you can start preparing your company today.

It didn’t take rocket science to predict that Google results would be heavily integrated with video and other multimedia. Though there were doubters in the beginning, you don’t have to be a genius to realize that narrow topic or niche specific blogging is one of the fastest ways to gain favor with – and steady traffic from – Google web search as well as many of its other properties.

True, change didn’t used to happen this fast even on the web. So thinking about the future of Google was left to search experts. But it does now, and if you’re a business owner, or thinking about launching a startup that in any way could rely on Google for exposure, it’s time to integrate, at minimum, a yearly look at what current trends in Google could turn into next year.

The combination of what Google is doing today and mapping of current trends to guess what it might do tomorrow, is a good place to start the basis of your Google Strategy. Otherwise, if you start with next steps such as content and keyword optimization, you could create the wrong type of content, or fail to optimize the right documents for keywords.

What will Google Do Tomorrow?

As we examined earlier, Google has had a major shift in the way the public perceives it.

And it’s no accident that there were a series of both minor and major shifts in what the company’s public aims and issues were driving this. If we look at those trends, we can make guesses about what the next trends will be. They may not always be precise – who saw Google+ coming when Twitter just started out? However, even wrong guesses can help us plot the direction a trend is going, which is more important than being exactly right about predicting a future climate.

IE – it’s more important to realize that search and social were going to merge back in 2009/2010 than it would be to predict whether the catalyst would be Google+, the former integration of Twitter into Google search results, or what some saw as a potential partnership between Google and Facebook prior to Facebook’s relationship with Microsoft.

And we should make those guesses – or find an expert we trust and follow theirs – despite the potential risk of not quite hitting the mark.

Sometimes you’ll be a bit off base, we all are. I made a huge proclamation on Google HotPot – the only other time Google made me out to be such a big liar was with Google Wave.

Both times I was off the mark but saw the shift before the product change. Google HotPot was folded into Google Places – it didn’t disappear, it just folded into another product. Google Wave.

The point is – even without an exactly correct prediction, even when my speculation was off – which really only pulled my average of correct guesses to 93% – there was enough value and education in those decisions to have made them worthwhile.

Making those predictions led to deeper exploration into Google Places, which paid off big for people who were quick enough to hop on the Google Boost  and subsequent flat ad rates through Google Tags before that program was discontinued and partly re-introduced later as AdWords Express. Not to mention businesses that got a head start on Google Places before it became popular.

And the mis-step with Google Wave gave great future insight into knowing whether a Google launch of a product feature would be successful.

Last year, I had a search strategy meeting about this same thing, where Google was going next, and how to be prepared for this shift.  I talked about how much more heavily Google would be looking at Realtime, Local and Mobile. And 90% of what I predicted is unfolding as I expected, though not exactly as speculated.

Next time: How Do We React – Better Yet, How Do We Move Proactively?

Cross post from Leveraged Promotion.

Fortune cookies live extended lives in my refrigerator. The practice somehow prevents me from buying too many sweets, as my monthly to quarterly craving for something starchy and sweet competes with my deep loathing of things going to waste. When shopping, I’ll think “but I have all those fortune cookies in the fridge.” 90% of cookies end up back on the shelf.

(What? I’m not perfect.)

If you can’t read it, the one above says “Listening, not imitation, may be the highest form of flattery.” As time marches onward, it becomes more of a lost art to find someone who is truly paying attention to what you’re saying.

Someone who is reading instead of skimming.

Someone who is really hearing what you’re saying, and processing the meaning instead of just waiting for their turn to speak.

That is intensely true on the web. So much data is flying out at everyone that it’s becoming more difficult, just due to sheer volume of incoming streams, to discern what is valuable. Knowing this, if we want to create content that will be noticed, even embraced, we must produce what our customers want – it shows that we’re listening to not just what they tell us directly, but what we hear in passing when we spend time around them.

It’s not enough to merely love thy customer in theoretical thought.

We must love the theoretical “they” in deed, in action. In all this talk of the social media conversation, we must be good listeners. It is at least half of the art.

Think of romantic relationships, of looking up to grown-ups in childhood, of your last dispute as a customer yourself. In those situations, what is more frustrating than not being heard? What is more insulting than having someone seem to hear you but not really be listening?

For some this would plunge us back into the problem area – too much noise to be able to listen to the voices. And yet how do we hear the conversations at our own table in a crowded restaurant? We focus on the voices speaking to us.

But this listening is the first step. Because if you listen, your customers will tell someone of their pains. In those pains, some solution is entwined with your product or service. That solution then only needs to be introduced in a noticeable, natural and polite fashion.

Coming up- five places to find the most important customer conversations, and ten things to listen for intently.

Status bar widgets and progress indicators for Firefox 4+.

That status bar was removed in Firefox 4.0. While some of the status bar items did find new homes, some did not, and you might not like where they ended up. There were also some nice innovations during the development of Firefox 4.0, such as progress/links/status in the location bar, which unfortunately didn’t make it to the final release.

 
Status-4-Evar aims to bring back (some of) the old status bar items, give you more control over the built-in Firefox features, and provide new alternatives.

Check it out.

The Office was on again tonight.

And in our series looking at the increasing automation of the social web, how our small businesses are representing us online, aspects of our business culture, and their intersection through the lenses of satire, comedy and drama, it prompted me to revisit a quote from an episode earlier in the season.

Image of Robert California courtesy of Sabre Corp

Let me tell you how I buy something these days. I know what I want I go on the internet, I get the best price.

Or I don’t know what I want and I go to a small store that can help me. The era of personal service is back. You are back. You’ll find that customers will pay our higher prices and then they will thank us, and we will say to them “you are welcome.”

Robert California – The Office

Here’s what I hate about buzzwords.

Though intended as shorthand, so everyone within a group knows that we’re talking about the same thing, they get so over-used and re-appropriated, they become meaningless, especially to people who are outside the insider group. Which is also often the group that most needs the clarity of a shorthand term, to help them hold a new concept in their mind.

I made up a term years ago to explain a way for companies to address this shift through social media, in a nutshell. But by the time I was ready to publish widely about it, there were already 6000 discovered mentions on the web describing a completely different set of ideas.

It was then that I gave up on attempting to coin new terms, and decided to just speak English. (Imagine that!)

When I saw the episode of the Office the quote above is taken from  several months ago, it helped me understand how to talk about this change in the world that I believe things like social media are merely a symptom of, the sway in the world away from flights of fancy or wild, unattainable promises, into the desire to create a reality we can actually live happily in.

This reality of course, includes our work life, home lives, family lives, personal relationships, short term goals, and life long aspirations. We look to reality now, but we want to create reality in our mind’s image.

Our culture is soaked in this change, and it’s reflected in everything from how we respond to advertising to the topical shift in the top charts of the personal development books.

This shift is why the used car salesman approach to getting people to buy things is dead, it’s why no number of free kittens could make you read an article on an topic you just don’t care about.

And it’s why the era of personal service is back: no matter who we are, we all live on both the side of the customer and the corporation.

We can believe in the fantasy of the evil corporation, or we can realize that as entrepreneurs or people who have jobs, we work for these same entities.

We can do the bare minimum to keep our jobs or companies or realize that there’s a real person on the other side of each transaction, with feelings, dreams, maybe even kids and a mortgage.

So we’re no longer making purchases based on who has the lowest price. I gave an example of this once: to me, eggs are eggs. To my brother, there’s a very important health-conscious difference between what kind of eggs you buy. You’ll get more money out of him than me for this purchase, and if eggs were that important to him, he might even go to a special store to buy them.

Maybe even a small store that has farm-fresh eggs laid by hens on an all-natural organic diet.

If you sell eggs?

Your job is

• to find out where he is online and be there,
• make yourself easily found by people like him, or
• both.

That’s engagement.

Yeah, I know, we’re back to buzzwords.  But just for a second. Let’s throw that word away again and really think of what the purpose and meaning is of all this software, all these web apps, all these catch-phrases.

They’re there not only to tell us what we already know – that being human and reaching out to the best quality people for us, using technology works better than spraying the general area of our known target customer with tools that simply reach the largest quantity of people with communication that would barely pass as grunting in person.

I’ll leave you with the words of Robert California, this time spoken by him. Really think about what he’s saying when he says the era of personal service is back.

In essence that people not only will but want to pay you more for that human connection, your help with a handshake, perhaps a smile, and some eye contact.

And think of how close you can come online. And how you can close the loop offline.

Scroogle SSL search (lets you search with Google anonymously).

On a personal level, your support for Scroogle says that search engines should not be tracking you and retaining this information indefinitely. Not only does Google scrape much of the web, but they keep records of who searches for what. If information about your searching is accessible by cookie ID or by your IP address, it is subject to subpoena. This is a violation of your privacy. Someday Google’s data retention practices will be regulated, because Google is too arrogant to do the right thing voluntarily. In the meantime, you should not be leaving your fingerprints in Google’s databases.

Here’s the link.

Morgan Lighter

Customer of the Week © by Steve Ganz

Twitter, Facebook, Path, Instagram – they may all individually fail some day.

But the concepts of a social life, play, work – World- these are not. We turn on the TV and watch and laugh at how out of touch Dundler Mifflin and Veridian Dynamics are.

But are we laughing at ourselves?

Is that why it’s funny, because we see our lives unfold and laugh to keep from crying?

Apparently, yes.

What makes a show like The Office a hit comedy may be a specific element of truth: most of us hate our jobs, or at least the corporate environment.

How is this relevant to being able to leverage social media for business? And where does loving the customer come in?

We’ll come back to that in a moment. First let’s take a deeper look at this notion that we’re a nation of job-hating automatons.

In recent years, “find a new job” has become one of the top New Year’s Resolutions. The Deloitte Shift Index [pdf] points out that 77% of Americans lack passion in what we’re doing for a living.

These figures are quite damning, but they aren’t without a glimmer of hope. I refer you specifically to more research by Deloitte - slide 92 of their presentation of the 2010 Shift Index  mentions having workers who are passionate about what they do as a solution to turnover due to job dissatisfaction.

Because staying competitive in the newly globalized labor market requires all of us to constantly renew and update our professional skills and capabilities. The effort required to increase our rate of professional development is difficult to muster unless we are passionately engaged with our professional activities.

(If that quote sounds familiar, it’s because it was also quoted in a blog post on LinkedIn.) It goes on to say:

We continue to focus on passionate employees—we believe this passionate segment will be best able to increase their rate of learning to keep pace with the rapid technological evolution driving today’s Big Shift.

(There’s also a shorter PDF excerpt of this study that focuses just on worker passion.)

So again, how is this relevant to being able to leverage social media for business?

Companies need to embrace social media from within, obviously, as we’ve agreed before. It can’t be this band-aid we slap on to a model that already isn’t working. And what does that mean?

Well, have you ever thought about the irony that some of the companies who most see social media as a band-aid marketing tool than a new way to communicate, are often internally miserable to work at? Almost like the kind of place that doesn’t get social media is that way because its internal culture constrasts sharply with the etiquette of the connected consumer?

How can an organization that its own employees hate then be trusted to communicate enthusiastically with the public?

To answer the question in the title: it’s enough to love they customer if you love ALL your customers.

(And for the record, when I say “love”, I don’t mean in the sense of Curtis Mayfield. I mean “love” figuratively – as in, “gratefully appreciate and behave accordingly”. But that would suck in a title.)

All your customers meaning: both your internal customers and your external customers must have their needs met by your company for you to be successful in social business.

We’ve seen the result of companies wanting to control the message without actually believing in it. How many examples can you name in the last year that had some kind of social media snafu?

And of them, how many would you say truly understood social media to begin with? Of those remaining, I’d be willing to bet that none of them have a good track record at maintaining positive relationships within their companies. As you’ve seen if you’ve read Humanize or Welcome to The Fifth Estate, if failure at social media was a disease, socially unfit work environments would be a leading symptom.

While not conclusive, recent informal studies have shown that being good to your internal customers has at least a correlation to being going at social media. (Just because you’re sniffling, it doesn’t automatically mean you have a cold. But it’s worth checking on, since most people who have colds will have a runny nose.)

Here’s where a devil’s advocate might say “So what if your company isn’t good at social media, as long as it’s still profitable?”

To which I say there’s reason to believe that in this century, the two are, at minimum, linked. If one doesn’t follow the other at some point, there’s at least a correleation.

Gentlemint, Pinterest, StumbleUpon – these things weren’t born in a vacuum. Social media couldn’t thrive if it didn’t fulfill an existing desire, particularly one that wasn’t being fully met.

Instead of looking at the micro, to be truly successful we must examine, dare I say, master the macro. Social media is a fantastic pill, and it reversed our previous condition, and it’s getting closer and closer to being a cure.

But what was our ailment?

Answer that, and you have the next trend to prepare your entity for in years to come.

Which we’ll be touching on a bit in coming days, as we continue our series on this subject.

Tired of being redirected to a local Google site when you specifically want Google.com?

Use “Google dot com”, not “dot something else”. Use Google.com, in English, without being redirected to a country-specific Google site when you’re not in the US.

Search Bar and Context Menu:
By adding and using “Google.com (in English)”, all searches performed with the Search Bar and via the Context Menu in Firefox will use “www.google.com” and not a local Google site such as “www.google.pt”, or “www.google.co.uk”, or “www.google.ca”, or any other to which you might be redirected by default.

Suggestions in the Search Bar:
This add-on is aimed at users of any nationality who prefer using Google.com, irrespective of the language of their query. This add-on does not support Google Suggest since that service is language-specific. Note, however, that unless you have opted out in Google’s Search Settings, you will still be presented with English query suggestions in the Search Box on the Results Page when you query with this add-on. If you search mostly in English and are a fan of Google Suggest and would like Google’s English suggestions to also be presented in the Search Bar, you can use always “.com” – Google.com (English suggestions) instead of this add-on.

Read the Reviews.

This is a short and sweet application that just might be to your liking.

Search 4Shared files. Music, pictures, videos, applications, files.

Here’s the reviews!

Yesterday we talked about how funny shows like The Office and Better Off Ted were/are – until they’re a mirror into our own business lives.

And I wanted to take a closer look at the idea that business is missing several essential elements of social media. Because of how critical human interaction is to the process businesses that are purposely set up with mechanized glory in mind fail.

(For more on this, you have to read Humanize, and at least listen to Welcome to the Fifth Estate.)

For some the answer to a social media’s bad fit is to just skip social media, or put it off for another day.

But for years now, we’ve needed social media to enhance our search results, and its importance is underscored dramatically in light of Google’s most recent updates.

Be it the solo entrepreneur operating a Kindle publishing mini-empire, a family-owned pizzeria, or a nationwide insurance company chain, you can’t afford to wait until it’s too late to start using social media to help circulate your content – and you simply must have content to be in the conversation, not to mention the fact that it’s the most proactive form of reputation management. 

To simply ignore social media is to do so at your own peril.

People don’t read the newspaper anymore, they log in to Facebook, and let their friends lead them to news web sites or applications. This shift can be seen as a lost opportunity or as an entirely new way to directly reach your customers, and to develop a relationship before they need you. Then you can be the obvious choice when they’re ready to buy.

Which brings us back to the hard part – there’s an extreme disconnect between

• the way companies traditionally work,
• the content most enjoyed by pivotal groups in social media, and,
• how people typically use their various social media tools.

I’m sure you’ve heard this next part before but it’s important enough to repeat.

We Humans Have Built a Machine That Could Destroy Our Livelihoods

Social media is shaped and driven by the things that make us fundamentally human. Forming, operating, and marketing corporations are actions traditionally shaped by the notion that companies are best run as efficient machines.

And yet there are people inside these machines – and it is those people, not the mechanized, politicized, organizational structure, that people will connect to on some level.  So you’ll need people inside the company to connect with the people outside the company via social media.

Here’s where the problems then come – who owns what?

Who is allowed to speak and who isn’t?

When there’s a crisis, what’s the response procedure?

What are the 25 things we have to check off on the list before we can make a blog comment on another blog using the company URL?

In the age of the old media, this was fine. Press releases were mailed or faxed. Showing up in print or television news gave much more lead time to plan all these things out, and put processes in place that we relied on.

Advertising wasn’t subject to the opinions of people because most offended parties were not upset enough to write a letter, which then had to find its way to someone with influence. By that time the commercial in question may have been old news, and a new one in production.

But Twitter is happening

… ten minutes ago.

There’s already a Facebook group somewhere discussing the problem they have with how your company (or one like it) responded to that national crisis yesterday, and how they hope you’ll solve it.

People are acting, moving, and your company is getting left behind.

Why?

There’s a strategic issue at hand here. Because social media is so human and companies are so mechanical, the instinctive urge to slap social media on top of whatever we’re doing often fails. It’s like putting a band-aid on a broken leg- though the attempt at some repair may be appreciated, in practical terms, it’s completely ineffective, and as such, useless. Proper implementation is key.

And the social aspect of the tools are not the only issue – it is the impact the way the new media is being used and changing so many things, so rapidly.

Can We Put Our Companies Back on Track By Cutting Off Our Robotic Arms?

There’s a much bigger wave just underneath the surface of social media that is the threat to any stagnant company. We must change our companies from the inside out in some very key ways.

1. To succeed in social media, we must be people-centered.
2. Once we’re centered on the people inside and outside our company, we will want to listen to what their concerns are, because…
3. … We’ll have to get their attention in a way that’s a bit different than the way people related one on one. To woo them, we’ll have to produce content they find relevant, so that there’s a reason for dialogue since…
4. Dialogue starts the key conversations/connection that lead to subscriptions, clicks, and/or sales. And then?
5. We have to maintain that attention, not merely through content, but through connection, since that’s largely how the web is re-orienting.

I realize that I haven’t proven a single one of these hypothesis, nor am I linking to places where they are demonstrated. There are multiple sources that help bear these examples out that we’ll be discussing in future days.

First up will be our next few discussions, which will rest on a discussion on what being people-centric means in practical terms. How will we need to change? IS your company truly getting there, or is it just paying lip service to the idea? What are the key areas where we need to improve if we are truly centering around people?

This discussion will include some pretty fun embarrassing situations I’ve found myself in. Until then, try this visual exercise.

Imagine a hug. Warm arms that envelop you, the almost palpable wave of emotion migrating from another person to you. Who can truthfully argue that hugs suck?

Not most emotionally stable people.<

And while our mission is certainly not to hug our customers, we often have the intention of embracing technology that helps us serve our clientele. But picture that hug again - only this time imagine that you have the arms of a super-strong robot, who isn't programmed to understand how much pressure to apply.

In your imagination, I'm willing to bet that you either crushed your hug-ee into jelly, or gave them one of those butt-out, barely touching non-hugs. Even in our minds, robots can't quite do the jobs that we can as humans, though they are suited for certain things.

Your robotic arms represent your company, and the person you're hugging represents social media.

Feel me now?