Google Buzz was introduced to the world just a few short weeks ago as a new Social Media tool that allows for sharing of status updates, images, and videos via a new Gmail tab called Google Buzz. However in that short time, it has garnered plenty of attention and publicity. Unfortunately for Google, most of it hasn’t been the good kind. The search giant is being slammed by many outlets for Buzz’s lack of privacy, by sharing personal information without a user’s consent. Basically Google was ‘making’ you socially connected with people that you share email information with, which for all of us is a pretty scary concept.

Stories flew around about people getting caught cheating and women being reconnected with abusive ex-husbands. Very quickly, Buzz was tarnished. Google quickly scrambled to adjust their privacy settings in order to placate their users. These new options give users more control over the information you want shared.

But it’s far from over… Not a week later, Google is involved in a local class action complaint, where a Florida resident claims they have broken several electronic communications laws. It’s only a matter of time until we hear about more of these types of cases. 

It’s concerning to watch such a giant corporation go through the deployment of a new product with so many bumps in a short span of time. It will be very interesting to see how Google responds and reacts to all the ‘buzz’ on Google Buzz.

For many years now, advertisements during the Super Bowl have been almost as popular as the game itself. People have come to expect new and entertaining messages from big brands like Pepsi, Coca-Cola, and many automakers. So come Sunday, it will be interesting to see how many of these brands decide to incorporate Social Media into their campaigns.

For the first time in over a decade, Pepsi has decided not to run any ads during the game. Instead, they are choosing to put an estimated $20 million toward an online campaign that includes updating their website, as well as creating a strong presence on Facebook.

Coca-Cola apparently will be doing a little bit of both. They plan to run 2 advertisements that will promote their corporate philanthropy and also offer virtual gifts through their Facebook page, with all donations going to one of their charities.

Going even a step further is the automaker, Audi. In an effort to promote their environmental-friendly cars, they have created the “Green Police,” a group of individuals from the media that are chronicling their driving experience on their journey to the Super Bowl in Miami. Their updates will be found on YouTube and Twitter. A Super Bowl commercial will also introduce the world to this new campaign.

These are just a few examples of how integral Social Media has become in our overall marketing campaigns. Just a year ago, none of these types of media were being discussed in this magnitude. If the Super Bowl ads are any indication, 2010 is going to be a very social year!

According to a recent Hitwise tweet, something unprecedented happened on December 25th, 2009. For the first time ever, Facebook topped Google as the most visited site on Christmas day. While you can argue that this means nothing other than that people are spending more time uploading pictures and updating their status, and less time browsing or shopping online, it is still a testament to the power of the ever-growing giant that is Facebook. Hitwise also claims that the term “Facebook” was the most searched term on Google in 2009.

This yuletide news is a great distraction from Facebook’s recent negative headlines regarding their new privacy settings. Facebook users were concerned when, earlier this month, after logging in were directed to a “transition tool” asking them to review their personal settings. While Facebook assures their users that this only gives everyone more personal control, some argue that all these changes are an attempt to get more Facebook content in the search engines.

In the end, it doesn’t appear that these recent updates are enough to cause any affect on the site’s ever-growing appeal.

Facebook has made several updates to their advertising platform over the past year in order to make their ads more appealing to users. These ads, called Engagement Ads, provide more features, like the option to “Become a Fan”.

Now they are offering a new option, “Friends of Connections”, which will let companies target their ads to users whose friends are fans of your page.  Setting up the option requires just one additional step:

While the ability to see this feature in the ad is not new, the option for page owners to target just those friends of friends is. The thought behind the “Friends of Connections” targeting is that whatever one friend finds important on Facebook, their friends will as well. Not groundbreaking by any means, but definitely a great way to stand apart from other ads that are displayed to the user. This is an easy way to try and get more fans to your page directly from Facebook itself. In addition, because you are targeting your audience, you can help to increase the quality of traffic to you site from you Facebook campaigns.
 

Facebook has been very busy this past week. Not only have they have now topped 300 million active users, they have also launched two new simplistic features; Facebook Lite and Status Tagging. Many believe this is all in an attempt to stay competitive with Twitter, while at the same time pleasing their ever-growing user base.

Facebook Lite, is a pared down version of the original social media channel. Originally created for users with a slow Internet connection, the ‘Lite’ version does not include any applications, engagement ads or custom features that we have become so accustomed to seeing. Brand pages seem to have the most to lose from this new version, if it catches on. The search function is enabled only for profiles and not groups or pages, making it that much harder for a page to be found.

Facebook’s Status Tagging is set to function similar to Twitter’s @mentions. You can now tag any profile, group or page within your status updates. This is a great new way for pages to be able to interact with fans. However, reputation management within Facebook will now become a full-time job, with companies needing to stay abreast of all mentions of their brand within Facebook. 

Now, more than ever, businesses using Facebook need to develop and execute a clear-cut strategy for the channel and understand how each of these new features can affect their online goals with social media marketing.

It happens more times than you’d care to know; an employee posts raunchy pictures of their weekend debauchery for all of their Facebook friends to see. So why does this matter to you as an employer? Simple… Because it is becoming more and more common for employees to be linked with clients on their Social Media channels.

Several large organizations have paved the way in establishing strict online guidelines for employees to follow. A few of these companies have even made these details public: Cisco, IBM, Intel. Companies aren’t taking this stand to bully their employees or tell them they can not use Facebook or Twitter, but rather to use good judgment when there is an overlap with their professional and personal contacts.

If a formal policy is not the right fit for your organization, you can encourage employees to create a separate account for their business and networking relationships. This way they can tailor all their content in a way that will best represent their professional goals, while at the same time representing their employer in a positive light.

As an employer it is important to remember not only how Social Media can work for you, but also of all the ways it can work against you as well.

With the ongoing growth of Social Media, new websites and tools, aimed at making it easier to update your many profiles, are emerging everyday. We all face the same issue: We have a Facebook page, a Twitter account, a StumbleUpon toolbar and have no time to keep all three updated with content. Many businesses feel these same pains. TweetDeck is just one of the new tools that has been developed as a result of this need. Using TweetDeck, you can update your Twitter account and your Facebook status in one interface.

Keeping along this same line of thought, StumbleUpon, a free service that helps you discover and share websites with others, has announced a new feature that will go one step further. The feature will allow for simultaneous posts to Facebook, Twitter and Stumble Upon. Since many of us, both personally and professionally, don’t always have the same friends, fans, followers, etc. on each channel, this is a great way to make sure that your posts are reaching a wider audience. Of course, the advantage to StumbleUpon is that it will get more people back to their site from these other Social Media Channels. It’s a win-win for everyone.

In an effort to give their viewing audience what they want or may be looking for, YouTube.com has come out with yet another new homepage layout. This latest round of changes comes just after the recent rumblings that YouTube, in effort to compete directly with Hulu.com, will start showing full feature movies and television shows.

In a recent blog post, YouTube explains that they did this, in part, to make the page(s) easier to navigate. You can also customize your homepage, when logged in, to add or remove specific modules.

Among these big changes are Spotlight Videos, which when displayed, will be more prominent on the homepage. These videos are deemed by YouTube to be the best or most relevant in the video community. In addition, to help display a wider variety of video results, YouTube is now organizing their Most Popular videos by category.

Finally, in order to have the ability to continue growing and testing out different designs, YouTube is finding new ways to get more advertisers on to the site. Recently, they changed the name of these video ads from Sponsored, to Promoted. The cost of advertising remains very low and allows for just about any business to take advantage of the large amount of viewers.

They assure their audience that more changes are soon to come, so stay tuned!