Google Launches "Google Buzz" for Social Networking

Bradley Horowitz VP of Product Management at Google launched the newest attempt by Google to compete with Facebook and Twitter today. Designed to help you get value from your growing online network of friends and acquaintances Google Buzz offers 5 features. 

1. Auto-Follow - first time you use it it auto follows everyone in your Gmail account

2. Rich fast sharing experience - Includes Media, shortcuts, Twitter

3. Public and Private Sharing - 

4. Inbox Integration - 

5. Just the Good Stuff - A relevancy filter to highlight items

Other features include YouTube and Flickr and Picasso viewing in the application (these have been available with Google Labs for Gmail for sometime) Setting up groups in the Public/Private side is easy and well done.

Inbox Integration is smart and it avoids the fire hose of emailing you every time you have interaction plus it features the real-time interaction that was first premiered in Google Wave. The system has a recommended Buzz feature that tracks who your friends are interacting with or reading and you have the choice to feedback yes/no to recommendations and it will learn over time. Google is relying on its algorithm capabilities to do this at a huge scale.

The good news is that Google recognized the growing trend of social networking interaction on mobile devises and made sure to include it in Google Buzz. They are leveraging location/GPS services in mobile devices to tie your location to Google maps and Google Place pages.

They have integrated the Buzz functions into http://m.google.com from your mobile device, and new application for Buzz at http://buzz.google.com and new integration with Google Maps. Roll out will happen for all Gmail users over the next couple days. Look for the Buzz icon on the left hand navigation of your Gmail page. Url's above will go active at 12 PM MST according to Google.

It looks like the only missing piece is that they did not roll out integration with Facebook or other social networking platform

Shift Happens - Onsite vs Offsite Engagement

Smart companies consistently monitor the success of their social networking and social media investments. In the past many of us relied on the metrics of trackbacks, comments, forum posts and other onsite interactions to determine the level of engagement we have with our online community. Over the past 3 years there has been a noticeable shift in these numbers. For many companies and content publishers the drop has been in excess of 50%. PostRank has recently completed research that indicates that while onsite engagement is down offsite has jumped by over 30%.

So where are the conversations going and is this necessarily a bad thing? As you may suspect Twitter, Digg, Facebook and all the rest of the major social platforms are hosting your readers and the conversations that used to go with them. This may equate to a loss of traffic but I don't think it equals a loss of engagement. It does however shed light on the need to expand your analytic scope with regards to engagement. The days of relying solely on your website analytics is fading into the sunset. Companies that are serious about seeing the entire landscape need to monitor the offsite conversations and participate on multiple platforms to achieve the engagement goals they have set. 

I'd urge you to take a quick test drive of a couple of the leading social monitoring tools and see how much of the conversation you have been missing out on.

Sarah Palin on Social Business Intelligence

The need to integrate collaborative business intelligence into the enterprise is not lost on the industries newest BI/DW analyst.

Business Intelligence, Data Warehouse, Hot or not?

Sometimes I feel like I live in an echo chamber this can be good or bad depending. The business intelligence and data warehouse community has been my home for over 15 years. So I guess that I shouldn't be surprised that from time to time I make assumptions based on my experiences. The other day a client asked me how popular the search term Business Intelligence was compared to Data Warehouse. My assumption.....BI would beat DW but they were both popular. According to the Google index over 54 million web pages contain at least one of these terms. I was half right. Business Intelligence did beat data warehouse but both are far from popular.

As you can see the two terms collided in late 2005 and business intelligence has held the top position ever since. The interesting thing is the decline. Its clear these terms are on their way out so it makes you wonder what term is leading the way.

I tried Performance management, MDM, Balanced Scorecard, Decision Support, Operational Data, even Enterprise 2.0 but none of them surpassed Business Intelligence. And then......

Yep, Analytics is hot, very hot and it got hot two full years before Tom Davenport published "Competing on Analytics".

So here's my last data tidbit of the day you can file this under things that make you go hmmmmmm. US based technology proefessionals have made up a very small percentage of users who search for these terms.

Crowd Sourcing Success - a Lesson Learned

First off thank you to everyone who took the time to share your opinions and expertise concerning the selection and crowd sourcing of my company logo. All the input was thoughtful and constructive and greatly appreciated. In the end Logo #4 won and will become an integral part of my company brand and identity.

In total 25 people helped in the process and it was a great success. How often can you get respected CEO's, entrepreneurs, VP's of Marketing, Sales Professionals, Designers, Artists and friends to all help on a single project.

Scott Davis CEO of Lyzasoft made an interesting comment/compliment about the process. In short he observed that while Crowd Sourcing is a powerful tool the real power comes from an investment prior to the project. Scott's point is crowd sourcing only works if you make the participation investment well in advance of your request to the community. Giving first always makes this type of thing work. And thats the lesson on Crowd Sourcing.... you need to earn the crowd through participation and contribution.

I hope that I have done that and look forward to helping all of you with your projects in the future. Thanks again!!!

 My New Logo: