In a post this week on FierceContentManagement, I explain how the Google Angstro purchase last week could be an important piece of the upcoming Google social networking tool: Google Me.

Read my full post on FierceCM.

I wrote about Paul Adams’ presentation on social networking best practices on FierceContentManagement. The presentation could provide some insight into what Google’s social networking tool could look like.

See my full post on FierceContentManagement.

The other day I clicked a link posted on Twitter by my friend and colleague, John Blossom (who is president of Shore Communications, Inc. and the author of the book Content Nation). Instead of a traditional blog post like this one, I found myself on Google Buzz. I read Blossom’s post (an analysis of the web access capability in the new Barnes and Noble Nook) and decided to respond. From then, on I was drawn into an interesting discussion, all taking place inside Google Buzz and updating me in Gmail.

You can enter Notes in Facebook of course (as I wrote in Facebook: Writing Notes) and have an online conversation, but what I like about Buzz is that I get an email with Buzz updates and I can respond right there without explicitly opening Buzz to do it. Each time the Buzz gets updated, I get a new email with the entire thread. You can also get email responses with Facebook, but it is not smoothly integrated into the email experience as Buzz is (because Google has the advantage of owning both the email and social networking tools).

The entire Buzz email conversation is threaded so you  aren’t getting a bunch of separate emails, and if you get annoyed, you can mute the conversation and you won’t be bothered again.

Blossom has embraced both Google Buzz and Google Wave, and his work has encouraged me to look at this more carefully. If you dismissed Buzz after the initial, well, buzz, then you should give it another shot. It provides an interesting forum for debate and discussion, one that I hadn’t really considered until I saw Blossom’s use of the tool.

Photo by Thomas Hawk on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

Guest post by Val Nelson

If you’re looking for jobs or contract work, take a minute now for a quick look online. Employers definitely search online and they can find out a lot!

Hopefully they can find lots of good stuff about you and nothing bad. How do you rate?

Take these two essential steps.

1. Google Yourself.

Do a Google search of your name and city (as written on your resume) to see what employers are finding about you.

• If there’s good stuff, great.
• If there’s bad stuff, yikes. Read on.
• If nothing, why not? There should be something online if you want work! Get a LinkedIn profile and a Google profile at least. Consider a VisualCV (an in-depth online résumé) or a YouTube video video sample to introduce yourself to employers.

Even after you update a few things online, it may take a week or so for Google search results to catch up.

2. Review Your Facebook Profile in Depth.

Facebook profiles are PUBLIC by default. Yours might be public and you don’t even realize it. Even if you make a lot of it private, employers may be able to get around that if they know some of your Facebook friends.

• Look at your Facebook profile from an employer’s perspective and dig around.
• Surveys have shown that hiring managers and human resource professionals actively use social media sites to research job candidates, and they make positive and negative decisions based on what they find.
• If you see something a smidge questionable, consider removing it or at least make sure you have privacy settings in place. You can even exclude certain “friends” from seeing things. Be sure to consider whether some friends work for your prospective employer.
• Repeat this with other social media communities you have used. Do you still have a MySpace profile out there?

How Much Is Too Much?

Don’t worry about expressing your true self online. I believe in letting people see the real you. Then you’re more likely to draw the right employment situation for you.

But you’ll want to consider removing that drunken frat party photo unless that’s related to who you want to work for.

What you project, you will attract.

Resources for Job Seekers

• How Blogging and Social Networking Can Impact Your Job Search
• Job Search 2.0 – Rise Above the Crowd
• How To Lose a Job Via Facebook In 140 Characters or Less

________

Val Nelson provides career and business coaching for heart-centered individuals and businesses. She has helped hundreds of people clarify and mobilize their unique superpowers, and breathe easier with online and real-life communications, so they can make their mark. She has a gift for matching people to their right path and she offers expert knowledge from a background in communications, marketing, HR, management, and health care.

For more information, see her website and blog at www.valnelson.com .

Photo by Brooks Elliot on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

Last Fall, Google published a video explaining how it ranks articles within Google News. This video is full of valuable information. Remember, this is devoted specifically to the Google News results, as opposed to regular Google Search, but bloggers can gain a valuable understanding of the inner workings of the Google News Bot by taking 15 minutes to watch this video.

Welcome to the Friday 5 on Socmedia101.c0m.  Here we are at the end of the shortest month and Google Buzz has dominated the social business news this month. Charlene Li headlines this week’s 5 with a post about finding her 9 year old on Google Buzz with an open account and what she did about it.

And here we go:

• Google Buzz and Kids: Parental Control Nightmare by Charlene Li, Altimeter Group Blog.
• Facebook Granted Patent on the Newsfeed by Marshall Kirkpatrick, ReadWriteWeb.
• You Cannot Take Back a Tweet by David Meerman Scott, Web Ink Now Blog.
• A Twittervention: What If There Were No Twitter by Lisa Barone, Outspoken Media Blog
• The Ultimate Formula for Success by Johnny B. Truant, CopyBlogger Blog

Talk abounds about Twitter replacing Google for search – but it’s a little ridiculous. When you search Google for information, you usually get the most relevant sites offering the information that best matches your search. When you search Twitter for information, you get the latest tweets that include your search terms. Very different, if you ask me. Still, the using the Twitter search is vastly useful.

Just type whatever you’re looking for into this search bar (see image just above)…

1. Find out what people are saying about you in real time. This gives you the opportunity to respond, fix problems, give advice, apologize, say thank you and connect with major and minor influencers that show interest.

2. Watch what the world is saying about your industry. Trends, opinions, unsolicited advice and desires are all right there for the taking. You have a cross-section of the world – albeit tech/computer savvy – just talking to each other, and you get to listen. You can even ask questions to get the answers and information you need.

3. Measure your impact. This can be done by using a ‘retweet’ plugin. [The app from tweetmeme offers you the opportunity to see all of your retweets - every time the url is pushed.] You can also keep tabs on people mentioning you directly by clicking on your @name tab.

Note: sometimes, your tweets and content get pushed, but you can’t actually track them in the usual ways. Because time passes goes by or because of the magnitude of retweets or for goodness knows what other reasons, people will start to drop your @name from the tweet. To still keep tabs on your information, especially if the content doesn’t have the ‘retweet’ plugin, we recommend searching for the words you originally tweeted. For instance, if you tweet: “Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree http://aa.aa.bb” – then you’ll want to search for “Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” or the url. You’re likely to see some retweets you didn’t know about.

Image credit: Jeffrey Beall

We spend a lot of time on this site talking about outreach – using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, your blog, etc. to send out your message and create a network. That’s the ‘talking’ part of this program.

But it’s also very important to listen, here’s why:

• If someone says something nice about you or your product, you want to thank them
• If someone says something not nice about you or your product, you want to address or fix the problem
• If someone mentions you or your company or your industry in a blog, you want to respond and chime in

But how do you know if someone’s talking about you? Google Alerts offer you an easy way to be notified when someone talks about you. It offers regular updates for as many terms as you’d care to put in the system. For instance, you might want to add your name, your company, specific keywords, the link to your blog or website, etc.

Creating Google Alerts

You’ll need an account on Google if you don’t have one. Once you’re on the inside, go to ‘My Account’ and scroll down until you see your products – you can add and delete this at will and there are many useful applications. It’ll look something like this:

Click on Alerts and type in your search term, type (where you want Google to search), how often you want to search and where you want the information sent (an email address).

And then press, ‘Create Alert’ and you’re good to go. Back on the ‘My Account’ page, you can also click ‘Manage’ next to ‘Alerts’ and you’ll get a screen that lists all of your current search terms and the ability to change the term, type, frequency and email at any time.

As soon as your search term is found by Google, you’ll receive an email with the following information:

Notice that there’s a live link to the mention of the search term and the ability to remove, create or manage alerts. This Google Alert told me that Chris Brogan and Copyblogger’s Brian Clark posted one of my blog articles on Twitter. That’s the kind of thing you’d like to know.

Search Term TIP: If your name is John Doe and you add that name to Google Alerts as is, you will get notified every time the word ‘John’ or ‘Doe’ is mentioned. To only receive updates for ‘John Doe’ – you must put the entire phrase into double quotation marks, like this: “John Doe”

Image credit: Vernhart

Social networking has changed the way I get news. When the Michael Jackson story broke recently I first heard about it on Twitter from a friend who linked to a story that Jackson was in cardiac arrest and on his way to the hospital. I went out for the afternoon and heard he had died on Twitter after I got home.

The same is true for the Iran elections. I first heard about that on Facebook just prior to the election. I followed the results online and of course, I was riveted by the reaction on Twitter.

Whom Do You Trust?

My first reaction when I read about Michael Jackson was that it wasn’t true. The news comes fast and furious these days and social networking just seems to fuel that. Wrong news can sneak through all too easily. Last year a rumor started that Steve Jobs had had a heart attack and was on the way to the hospital. Only problem was, it wasn’t true. I heard about it on Twitter and I learned from that experience to be skeptical until I hear confirmation from a reliable source.

You can understand why I was skeptical when I heard about Jackson or even Jobs’ liver transplant (which apparently was true).

Networks Help

That said, in an increasingly busy world, your trusted social network can help filter the news for you whether it’s Facebook, FriendFeed or Twitter. When I gather links for the Friday Five,  I often don’t even have to open Google Reader to find links. I just watch Twitter and get most of the links I need from people I follow. Your network can help you find news you might have missed, links to news and blog posts to help you do your job and in general just help you filter the noise.

The only danger you have in this approach is that you might not get a variety of voices, so make sure you don’t use your social networks for everything, or if you do, that you follow a variety of people. But in many cases, you can get by with a little help from your friends and organize, filter and make sense of the news on your social network.

Photo of Walter Cronkite courtesy of Vin Crosbie on Flickr.

When I talk to people who have just started blogging, a common question involves how to generate ideas and drive traffic to the web site.  This post is going to discuss how taking a contrarian view can drive traffic in some circumstances. Don’t let anyone tell you there is a tried and true method, however for driving traffic because if there were, I like to say, I would bottle it and sell it.

Last week everyone was going wild over Google Wave. I see a lot of potential too, but after reading about it and watching the first part of the presentation at the Google I/O Conference, I decided there might be a few things people hadn’t thought through and I wrote a post on my DaniWeb TechTreasures by Ron Miller blog called A Curmudgeonly Look At Google Wave. It turned out to be the most successful post I’ve written on DaniWeb generating more than 40,000 hits on the first day.

This is not a typical traffic, believe me. It had passed my best post ever in about 8 hours. The traffic was staggering. Afterward I was trying to figure out why it was so popular and one reason was that I had taken an opposite view from everyone else. All of the articles I read talked about how great it could be (and I agree it has the potential to be great), but if everyone is saying one thing, why just throw your opinion onto the pile? At that point, your blog post is just more noise among the thousands of posts generated on any popular subject in a given day.

So instead of taking the prevailing view, next time try and take the opposite view, even if you have to play Devil’s Advocate to do it. It’s a fun exercise, and who knows, it could end up driving traffic to your web site. In my case, it ended up generating more traffic than I ever dreamed of when I wrote the post.

Photo courtesy of Mr.Tom Long on Flickr.