“We don’t have a choice on whether we DO social media, the question is how well we DO it.”

Erik Qualman (author of best selling book “Socialnomics”) states in his video Social Media Revolution 2011:

Erik Qualman’s videos are some-what of a “land mark” in the Social Media and Online Marketing world of pin-pointing changes and highlighting the rapid development of social media in society and online.

Although this video was published on YouTube on Jun 8, 2011, I still see it fit to blog about it now, and help to raise awareness to readers of my blog, my current clients and potential clients, to the shear power and influence of social media, #1 ranking in Google, before long, will not be be enough…

Moving forward SEO (natural ranking in search engines) is proving to be just part of the big picture of driving revenue online. It’s great to have a wide understanding to the entire online digital landscape. It’s important your online marketing company or your SEO consultant understands this shift, this trending of a more “social” online landscape is backed up by Google’s release of the Google +1 button (similar to the Facebook “like” button), Matt Cutts (Google Engineer) has already been quoted saying that the Google +1 button will play a part in search engine rankings in Google.

If you, or your business have not considered social media management or social media optimisation then look to get a free SEO quote from myself, and know that you’re working with someone with a broad range expertise in online marketing experience from all online marketing channels SEO – PPC – CRO – Social Media – Mobile. My SEO campaigns always combine the use of social media to get you, and your business dominating the search results across the board, click on “Get Your Free Quote Now” in the side bar for more information.

Below I’ve highlighted some Social Media Revolution 2011 “take-aways”:

• Social Media is about people
• eReaders have surpassed traditional book sales
• If Wikipedia were made into a book it would take 123 years to read
• 90% of consumers trust peer recommendations
• 93% of marketers use Social Media for business
• The ROI of Social Media is your business will still exist in 5 years

Feel free to comment and add your own Social Media Revolution 2011 “take-aways”.

From my testing and from what I can see at the moment, this new Google “show more results” button is currently only rolled out on the .co.uk results pages, you can test it by just entering Google.co.uk into your browser.

When you click on it, a new page of results loads below the first page, and also displays a number of the results page you’re on…

In the above example (on Google.co.uk) a test search for the work “Testing” was performed and then clicked on the “show more results” button at the bottom of the page.

At the time of writing this post the Google “show more results button” is not on the US (Google.com) or Australian (Google.com.au) search results pages. I’ve tried and tested both with the relevant country IP address and TLD extensions.

I’ve already managed to find a bug on the new show more results button, it is not allowing me to click on the “show more results” in Firefox on Linux. This may just be a conflict with one of my Firefox plugins, I’ve not had time to test it yet…

If this is set to roll out across the entire Google brand and made the default “Search Result Page” I would say it could have negative implications for being on page two onwards (2>). From my first impression of the new layout is that it feels negative that you’re moving further and further down the page, it doesn’t feel as though I’d ever go much further than results page three (3).

These are just my initial impressions. I have seen some tweets discussing that it could actually improve click through rate (CTR) on “deeper” pages.

Either way, this new element on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) could have HUGE implications for SEO and natural search results. I’ll be testing my results to see if it does.

Let me know what you think of the new Google “show more results button” layout.

How to implement rel=author, and how it actually works.

rel=author displays in the search results the Google+ profile of the author of the article.

How does rel=author work?

I thought it would be best if Google themselves explain it to you, this video explaining rel=author is courtesy of the Google Webmaster YouTube channel with Matt Cutts and Othar Hansson. In this video Matt Cutts and Othar Hansson both discuss how to connect authors with their content using authorship markup for both single author blogs, and multi author blogs:

The one “conflict” or potential abuse issue I can see with this, is… What is to stop anyone copy and pasting this content (for example), posting it on their own site and then adding the rel=author tag?

It will show it’s written by them, but what is to say that they are the original creators? It would be interesting to hear your thoughts on this…

How is Facebook getting the phone numbers? I believe it’s pulling the numbers from the Facebook mobile app (Blackberry & iPhone) and your email address contacts, (Gmail, Hotmail, Live etc.) for example if you have a Gmail account connected to your Facebook account, then it’s also going to be pulling your contacts from there. It’s interesting to see if you’ve got people listed on the phone section that you might not have added as a friend, but still, this may prove a security concern to some.

To see your listed Facebook phone numbers:

All “Facebook phone numbers” are published here. Please repost this page, “Like” it on Facebook, or share this blog post over social media, so people can remove their numbers, if they chose to, and thus prevent abuse.