10 New Things from Google (that aren't Google Plus)

Summer always seems busy. And if you work at Google, this summer has been especially busy. Obviously, Google+ (aka Google Plus) has been the Google news item of the summer. The new social media network has charmed many who have tried it. Maybe it's the cool features like Sparks, Circles and Hangouts. Or maybe people are just looking for a Facebook alternative. Either way, the Google Plus splash has stolen the thunder from other new features from Google.

So what has Google done lately other than Google+? Here are ten things Google has released this summer that aren't Google Plus.

10 New Things from Google (that Aren't Google+):

1. The big Google re-design. Google is re-designing a lot of their products to have a consistent look and feel. Everything from Gmail to search to Google+ will soon have a similar design. This is a big change for a company that has traditionally and very famously been machine-driven instead of by human aesthetics. 
2. Google Places reviews get personal. As part of the Google interface re-design efforts, Google Places announced changes that will emphasize the reviews of individuals and throw out third-party reviews. Look for Google Places and Google+ integrations in the future.
3. Google Translate now servicing India. Google's main business goal is to get more people to use the web so Google can advertise to them. Google's translation service began translating five new Indic langauges this summer. With a  combined 500 million speakers, Google Translate just added another large number to Google's global audience.
4. Google Voice Search for your computer. Google released a voice-powered search engine for your desktop computer. Today it's search, but what does tomorrow hold? Will Google be smart enough to take our commands and perform our daily tasks in the near future?
5. Google will help you refinance. Google Advisor takes Google's ability to organize and extends it to the world of mortgage refinance, checking accounts and other financial matters.
6. Google Offers eyes local deal market. The local deal market is hot right now. Groupon, Living Social and others give businesses a way to attract new customers with deep discounts. Google could buy any of these services if it wanted, but instead they created Google Offers.
7. Nevada legalizes Google's driverless cars. Google has perfected the world's first commercial driverless car. Thought to be able to increase traffic capacity by a factor of two or three in addition to saving lives, Google's machein-driven cars are now legal to own in Nevada.
8. Google is the new wallet. Google recently hosted a demo of Google Wallet, a tool which will allow you to make payments with your smartphone. There may be a day soon when a lump of paper and leather in your back pocket is no longer an everyday occurance.
9. Google has a music service too. It seems like everyone is getting into the music space this summer and Google is no different. Google Music beta launched earlier this summer at Google I/O to compete with Apple, Amazon, Spotify, and a guy named Hank.
10. Display advertising as Google's next big money-maker. Ever since buying Doubleclick four years ago, Google has been a major player in the display (aka banner) advertising space. Recently, Google purchased Admeld, a service that helps select ads and simplifies the advertising experience for web publishers. It'll be interesting how Google incorporates Admeld into their display advertising product to continue their growth in this ad space.

What Google news item did you find interesting? Was it a recent effort in their core web/search business or in an entirely new space for Google that got your attention? Should Google offer such a wide product portfolio or should they focus on fewer, more related products? Leave your thoughts on these and other Google topics in the comments below. (P.S. Thanks go out to Kareem Ahmed for suggesting today's topic!)

How to Add the StumbleUpon Button to Squarespace

Helen and Graham have a Squarespace website, Obsessionistas, which features stories about collectors and their collections, ranging from insects in amber to airline sick bags. Helen wants to give their readers an easy way to share their posts on StumbleUpon by adding the badge/button to their blog posts.

StumbleUpon's 15 million users love sharing this type of website content, so it's no wonder why Helen wants to add the button to her site. To lend her a hand, today we'll take a look at how to add the StumbleUpon button to a Squarespace website.

What's StumbleUpon?

StumbleUpon is a social content discovery website. Simply press a button and you're presented with an interesting page on the web. You can like and dislike the pages you see, giving StumbleUpon more information on your preferences. As you do so, StumbleUpon gets better about showing you pages you'll like as you stumble along.

StumbleUpon introduces you to excellent new sources of information on the web as well as delightfully random content like what you'll find on Obsessionistas. With over a million visits a day, StumbleUpon is connecting web surfers everywhere with quality content like a man who collects pencil sharpeners.

Adding the StumbleUpon Badge to Squarespace

Adding the StumbleUpon badge/button to your Squarespace blog is easy and follows the same basic process as most other tutorials on Squarespace social buttons.

To start off, head over to the StumbleUpon badges creation page. Select the graphic you wish to display at the top or bottom of each blog post.

Select the graphic you wish you display on your blog template header/footer.

Next, type "%PERMALINK%" in the optional field made for blog entry permalinks. This is case-sensitive and can even fail if you copy/paste. By far, this is the step people most have trouble with. Make sure you've typed in the permalink exactly as it shows below.

Notice how the code changes as you add go through each step.Next, take the code provided by StumbleUpon and bring it on over to your Squarespace blog.

Navigate to your blog (Journal) main page and enter the Structure Editing mode.

Click the configure this page link to configure your blog.

Scroll down to the Post Display Configuration section and select an unused HTML Snippet (you may also add to an existing one) from the collection of Squarespace blog template elements.

Paste the StumbleUpon badge code into your Squarespace HTML snippet and click Hide & Save.

Finally, arrange your HTML snippet within the structure of your blog/journal configuration page and save your changes.

You should now see a StumbleUpon badge on each of your blog posts. Posts will display a count of stumbles on each blog post. Blog posts without stumbles will display "Submit" next to the StumbleUpon badge.

The whole process takes under five minutes and can be a great way to increase your blog's exposure to new visitors. Take some time to add the StumbleUpon button to your Squarespace website and start seeing new visitors as a result. 

(P.S. I wrote this tutorial because Helen asked via a comment in a previous post. If you have a tutorial you'd like me to write, just ask in the comments. Good luck Helen!)

The Reason Your Ideas Aren't Going Anywhere

If people aren't acting on your good ideas, it's probably because you are cursed. At least that's what the authors of Made to Stick think. Authors and brothers Chip and Dan Heath assert that your good ideas aren't gaining enough traction because of something called the Curse of Knowledge. If you've ever had a great idea and wondered why everyone didn't accept it immediately, you'll certainly want to check out this 2007 examination into what makes ideas stick.

What is The Curse of Knowledge?

As you learn more about a topic (e.g., your job), it becomes harder and harder for you to imagine what it is like to know nothing at all about the subject. This is the Curse of Knowledge at work. For example, how would you describe blue to someone who has never been able to see? The Curse of Knowledge is the near-reflex tendency to compare blue to oceans, the sky, or a Smurf. Without your knowledge, your audience doesn't have the context to fully understand you.

Turns out, the Heaths have developed a way to overcome the pesky curse and make your ideas easier for people to understand, which is the first step in making them stick.

SUCCES with Ideas

Chip, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University, and his brother Dan, a former researcher at Harvard, put their heads together and came up with a six step plan to combat the Curse of Knowledge - SUCCES:

• S - Simple - What is the core message of your new idea? It's easy to lose your audience if you try to say too much. Give your audience one very important thing to remember and put all your effort behind getting that point across.
• U - Unexpected - Our attention spans our minuscule. If you want people to spend time thinking about your idea, it needs to catch them off guard. We think we've heard it all before until we're suddenly very wrong. If you can surprise your audience with a story or counter-intuitive statistic, they'll be more likely to pay attention your idea.
• C - Concrete - Our minds don't understand abstract concepts as well as they do specific or concrete examples. Take the example from above. Was it the explanation of the Curse of Knowledge itself or the analogy involving blue Smurfs that helped you understand the phenomenon? Express your ideas into concrete terms to maximize comprehension amongst your audience.
• C - Credible - In order for us to believe in new ideas, we have to think the source is credible. This is why you see "experts" endorse products on TV and why we trust the opinions of our friends and family over complete strangers.
• E - Emotion - We have analytical and emotional parts of our brain, and our emotional part makes most of our decisions (whether we like to think so or not). To get someone to act requires appealing to their emotions, not their sense of logic.
• S - Story - Stories help us remember a large amount of information at once because everything becomes related. For example, most people couldn't remember a series of 13 random letters, but it's somewhat easier to recall 13 letters if you arrange them like this: comprehension. Stories help us weave together large amounts of information. They also help us remember complex ideas.

I enjoyed every last insightful morsel of Made to Stick because my line of work (SEO, conversion optimization and web analytics) can be complex, technical and/or difficult to explain. In fact, reading Made to Stick (published in 2007) convinced me to read the Heaths' newest book, Switch, next.

Have you read any good books lately? I'm always looking for suggestions if you've got them. I'm partial to books about the interwebs, as is evidenced by my Internet marketing book review page.

Information is Addictive (And 9 Other OMS Minneapolis 2011 Insights)

Last Tuesday I had an opportunity to attend Online Marketing Summit Minneapolis 2011 in Edina. Aaron Kahlow and the Online Marketing Connect crew put on a great event, full of education and networking opportunities. 

Most exciting to me about OMS were the insights gleamed from countless case studies and concepts within the presentations of the day. Here are 10 of my favorites:

1. Social Media is Not a One-Woman Show. The trick to great social media at large companies is scale. Best Buy's Gina Debogovich mapped out a complex system of communities, business units, and the tiered social media training that has helped the retailer achieve an excellent social media presence.
2. Community Managers are Not Interns. Many companies hand the responsibility of social media engagement to interns or junior team members without much forethought or oversight. Debogovich explained that it takes a rigorous four weeks of intensive Best Buy culture and policy training followed by another week of social media training before budding Best Buy community managers take stride. And even then, every community post they make is reviewed for 90 days into their new role.
3. Anticipate the Conversation. The first breakout session I attended was How to Convert More Visitors to Customers, presented by Clixo's Matt Dombrow. He explained great conversion optimization as a process of anticipating the mental conversation a potential customer has when evaluating a product or service. Dombrow's presentation highlighted this conversation as it related to six key concepts in his conversion optimization (CO) model: Catalyst, Value, Usability, Persuasion and Confidence.
4. Subconscious Economics Drive CO. Your customers weigh the costs of any web transaction in their brains (e.g., a purchase, a subscription, even clicking on a link) against the perceived value of what they will receive. Asking for a few fields of information is better than asking for a lot because it keeps the perceived costs down. Giving a free iPad away will generate a lot more buzz than flimsy eBook. Conversion optimization is about maximizing perceived value and minimizing perceived costs.
5. The Dawn of QR. Until recently, I've been dismissing QR codes as a speed bump on the digital highway, a fad that may not be worth my time and effort. But Angie Schottmuller's presentation on two-dimensional barcodes (the "non-Kleenex name" for QR codes) got me excited about the potential. From Diesel's awesome Facebook Like campaign to Best Buy's coworker sentiment analysis, the industry is doing some clever marketing with QR, regardless of how long the technology will be around.
6. Social Videos are about the Why. Casey Zeman's presentation on Social Video Marketing provided a mental framework for developing ideas for social videos on the web. Each video should begin with a solid examination into why you're making it. 
7. Great Social Videos are Informative or Entertaining. Zeman pointed out that the best web videos are either informative or entertaining. How-to videos are a no-brainer for informative content. Entertaining videos cover a broader spectrum. Many entertaining videos are funny, but they don't have to be. Some of the most entertaining videos are more inspiring or surprising than funny.
8. Information is Addictive. Perhaps my favorite session of the day was The Top 10 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People, presented by Dr. Susan Weinschenk, HFI's Chief of UX Strategy. Dr. Weinschenk described how dopamine is released into our brains when we seek new information, making it a powerful motivator. From the days of wondering how fire works, to the modern times of checking our mobile devices for new nuggets of information in the form of notifications and alarms, we humans have a strong desire to be in the know.
9. First Impressions Include the Periphery. Another insight from Dr. Weinschenk was that people pay attention to the information in the periphery of a website in the first moments of their website visit. Your website's main content is critical, but your side navigation bar(s) are great places to include marketing elements to promote a positive first impression and the trust that comes with it.
10. The Twin Cities is Confused about White Hat/Black Hat SEO. At several points throughout the day, questionable tactics/opinions regarding SEO ethics reared their ugly head. Even in the day of Overstock and J.C. Penney, I was shocked by the number of times that black hat/spammy tactics were mentioned. This white hat will be avoiding paid linking, content spinning and other spammy tactics and suggest others do the same, regardless of what you heard at OMS.

With three tracks and around 20 total sessions, there's no way this post even begins to cover what people learned from the presentations of the day. What did you learn at the OMS Minneapolis? Use the comments to share your favorite new tips from OMS and who presented them.

How to Add the Google +1 Button to Squarespace

Google just announced their latest initiative to improve the quality of search results. Taking the shape of a social voting button, the Google +1 button allows users to vote for pages on the web they found useful. The +1 button is just one more sign of social media's growing influence on SEO, so naturally many bloggers will want to add it to their sites as a way to boost the reach of their blog.

You've probably already added the Like, Tweet and Share buttons to your Squarespace website. Now you can add the Google +1 button to Squarespace as well.

Getting Started with Google +1

As you can tell by their promo page, Google is pretty excited about +1. Appearing in both the search results and on individual web pages, the +1 button is Google's answer to the recent deal between Facebook and Bing to bring Likes to Microsoft's search engine results. 

Google +1 isn't available to everyone just yet. Join the Google Labs +1 experiment to get started. Once you've signed up, you'll start seeing +1s from friends in the search results.

Adding Google +1 to Squarespace

Signing up for +1 is the first step, but you'll also want to add the new +1 button to the posts on your Squarespace blog. It's a pretty simple process. (Note: This post has changed since its original posting because Google upgraded the +1 button code.)

First, you'll need to head over to the Google +1 button code page. Step one is to configure the way you'd like the button to appear and your langauge preference.

Next up, select the Advanced options to get at the URL stettings of +1. Enter "%PERMALINK%" (case sensitive) as your URL to +1. The permalink is a placeholder for the actual URL of your blog posts. When the +1 button loads on your website, Squarespace swaps the permalink for the actual URL of your blog posts automatically.

At this point, you're ready to install Google's +1 button code on your blog. Unlike most social buttons, Google provides you with two code snippets. The first code snippet belongs in a HTML snippet on your blog. Select and copy the code highlighted below.

Navigate to your blog (Journal) main page and enter Structure Editing mode.

Click the configure this page link to enter the Journal Page Configuration menu.

Scroll down to the Post Display Configuration section and click on an unused HTML Snippet (or add to an existing one) from the list of Squarespace journal components.

Paste the second Google +1 code snippet into the HTML editor and select Hide and Save.

Arrange the snippet within the blog post layout and save your changes. You can place the code snippet at either the top or the bottom of your blog template.

Next up, go back to the +1 button code site and grab the second code snippet.

Make sure you're still in Structure Editing mode and scroll to the bottom of your website to find the edit website footer option.

Paste the second part of the Google +1 button code within your website footer and save your changes.

You should now see the Google +1 button show up alongside the rest of your social buttons on your Squarespace blog. Adding the +1 button is a smart move along the way to SEO and social media convergence.

What do you think of Google +1? Are you looking forward to the button like I am or does it seem like button overkill at this point?