Google have been rather busy...

By now i'm sure most people have at least heard of the +1 button from Google, we're currently working out where to put it on our websites for a trial run.

But, alongside the announcement of +1 comes two more interesting and rather low key releases. The first being Google+ and the second being Google's addition of social media tracking within Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools.

Google+ appears to be the latest social networking attempt from Google and will hopefully take into account the lessons learnt from Buzz & Wave! The idea involves a number of strands, listed below and will be available on your mobile (Android, Apple, Blackberry, Nokia/Symbian, Windows Mobile) through a mixture of native apps and web apps.

Circles - An interesting way of sorting your contact into more manageable groups, family in one circle, friends in another.

Instant Upload - I love this idea, I already have an expanded Picasa account and it's pretty obvious that this will have some tie-in further down the line. The idea being that all those photos and videos you have on your mobile can be stored on Google+ in a private album. The best part is that the upload happens automatically, no need to remember to upload manually!

Sparks - Hmmmm, search & RSS combined maybe?

Huddle - A group texting facility sounds interesting, i'm assuming there will be a heavy tie in with Google Voice at some point.

Hangouts - Rolled into the whole package is also Video chat (a swipe at Skype/Facebook?) that you can use between selected friends or whole groups of people.

At the moment it's in limited release but you can register your interest here:

• Google+ interest page

The second roll out is additional code for Google Analytics, not as visually exciting as Google+ but looks great for anyone interested in +1, Like and Tweet action!

Tracking is listed under a new 'Social' navigation option and appears to only be available via the new version of Analytics. If you fancy having a go then you can find further details below: 

• Google Analytics & Webmaster Tools overview via Mashable
• Social Interaction Tracking Code via Google

 

Bye Bye Wututu

Oh well, our experiment with digital signage tracking is now over. Sadly, Wututu appear to have gone into administration... scuppered by the recession!

We have early data so we'll be analyzing the data and looking at how to move forward with another company if the need for this data is deemed important enough!

Goodbye to a great start up company!

Digital signage monitoring

We currently have 24 live digital signage screens across our five campuses at the University and they are a very valuable resources for us to push information out to all students very quickly. However, with another 12 coming online within the next few months what we don't know is, does anyone actually ever look at them?

So, we have now invested in some digital signage monitoring software that will allow us to measure if people are looking at the screens and for how long. A quick glance or a longer stare! The software works by using facial recognition to judge when a person is looking directly at the screen and tracks how long they look for. It also includes metrics on the gender of the person which is worked out with some clever judgement on face shape, hair style, height, etc and proves to be around 90% acurate.

In order to have the software running it needs to be installed on a small stand alone PC such as an EeePC and requires a webcam to be attached to the top of the screen you want to monitor. This then sends the information it gathers back to a hosted server that then displays the results via a dashboard display.

We looked at a couple of different solutions, Quividi, Wututu and CognoVision appeared to be the three leading companies and we eventually chose Wututu as our preferred supplier. As they all do very similar things it did become a costing exercise and Wututu was significantly cheaper!

It'll be an easy installation for us and when we start to receive some stats i'll make sure I post up the initial findings!

A video of how the software tracking looks can be seen below.

The sites down! No, it's not...

So, what can be classed as an acceptable up-time for your website?

And more importantly, how can you monitor that you're receiving the service level you expect?

Most external providers will guarantee a 99.99% uptime due to their vast server network and the ability to mirror sites to allow for any unexpected or planned downtime. But what can you expect from an in-house solution?

Personally, 99.99% up-time should be an achievable figure for both external and internal hosting solutions but how do you monitor the level of service you are receiving? Manual monitoring is an option but can be rather intensive on the resources! So, an automated checking service such as IPPatrol or Site Confidence is probably the way forward. It is possible to have an internal system to check your servers but using an external host gives a true representation of your visitors experiences.

It would be interesting to hear what people expect of their service providers, is it unreasonable to expect a service level as high as an external provider from your internal offerings?

Alert Rank... Harness the power of Google Alerts!

We currently use Google Alerts to highlight any news stories that reference the University and as a way to tackle any negative news or postings in a timely manner. This service is not only brilliant but also free and works as a nice addition to our paid for services. The only slight issue is the fact that it's a bit of a blunt tool and you receive a long list of mentions without any real ranking on how important they are.

So, to cut down on the manual processing is a new tool we've found called AlertRank. It gives you a good idea of how important the alerts are with an easy ranking tool and best of all... it's also free! We've been trialling it for a couple of days and so far the service is working rather well and there are publication tools which look as though they might be useful. Might be worth a look!

A sample snippet of the email you receive is listed below and shows the ranking in green on how important the article is deemed to be:

Alert Rank

Start with the basics stupid!

We have a lot of content on our site and to complicate matters, we also have a lot of editors on our site. As you can probably guess this means the potential for errors is pretty big and the tools we have available to spot these are pretty small. So, when I stumbled across a service that would scan through our site and highlight any spelling mistakes, broken links, CSS issues and provide us with a full site inventory I was understandably interested.

So, I had a demo over the phone with a very nice sales person who ran a scan of our site and kindly pointed out all of our problems (5,000 pages and 94 spelling mistakes...). Well, it's fair to say that I promptly slapped myself for not having thought of a service like this previously and then signed up all of our site for the next 12 months! This is a simple to use tool that will have a huge effect on our site quality and although it's not cheap it's certainly worth the money!

Check out the site and see if it can help improve the quality of your sites.

Site Improve

Meltwater Buzz Vs Alterian SM2

So, I had a call from Meltwater Buzz about some new Social Media monitoring software they're selling and how we can use it to fine tune our Social Media Strategy... I took the demo tour as we have been thinking about expanding on our monitoring from the normal Google Alerts we use to something a little more sophisticated. It all looked really good, the reporting was well done and offered some valuable insight into the demo site (Lego!) and how they were performing.

So, I asked for a costing and started my usual round of relentless research before purchasing anything new. The price from Meltwater Buzz landed in my inbox and it's not that bad but would still knock out a chunk of my budget... the research continues! Then I find myself looking at a demo video of Alterian SM2 with the option of a Freemium account, so I sign up for one and guess what I find! It's the exact same system as Meltwater Buzz... even down to the format of reports, colour scheme, layout, everything is the same apart from the logo at the top.

So, it seems that Meltwater Buzz is actually just Alterian SM2 with the Meltwater logo on and a mark up of 50% on the price!

So, if you're happy with trying out this functionality on a Freemium account (5 search terms but limited to 1,000 results) head over to Alterian SM2 for an account, if you like it you can always upgrade for a Premium account. If you would rather have a Meltwater Buzz account (5 search terms, unlimited results) head over to the Meltwater Buzz site.

I've included the slides for SM2 below to show some of the functionality and they have additional resources and a free account on their website.

Sm2 Analysis Guide

View more presentations from Martin Edic.

Anyone else looking at Social Media monitoring software and is there anything available that might be of use to a marketing audience?

Heatmapping... i'm warming up to the idea (sorry, had to be done!)

So, I finally found the time to follow up on the notes I took from the Precedent seminar a couple of weeks back... it' been a busy few weeks! Anyway, one of the links was to a company that provides heatmapping, essentially a cheaper way of eye tracking where users linger on your site by tracking their mouse movement.

This is potentially going to throw up some interesting discussions with out IT department about how useful the information would be. Admittedly it does appear that most people simply click on the links on the page however, the idea is that people track the areas on the page they are reading with their mouse. So, if the content is good and they have read it they should have also had their mouse hovering over that area... i'm still undecided on how accurate that assumption is though.

It will certainly throw up some heated discussion about the usefulness of the data but then with the cheapest package costing $9 a month for 10,000 tracked visits it's probably worth a trial for a couple of months to check out the results!

Google Alerts can find some interesting things!

I have a Google Alert set up to scan for anything that references 'University of Bedfordshire' and it can sometimes flag up some interesting things we wouldn't normally know about. A Google Alert will scan the web, news, blogs listed in the search results of Google for your pre-defined keywords an then email you the links to anything that matches. The one that dropped into my mailbox this morning included a link to a Flickr account with an aerial photograph of our Bedford campus.

It's a free service, you can schedule in how often you are emailed and it can act as an early warning on any negative news. This gives you the perfect opportunity to reply quickly and ensure situations don't get out of control. If you don't already have one set up head to the Google Alerts page for more information and remember that you can set up alerts on competitor keywords as well!