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Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
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Friday Wrap #99: Anonymous login, Google unbundles, the power of superfans, and more

Friday Wrap #99: Anonymous login, Google unbundles, the power of superfans, and more

Friday WrapThe Friday Wrap is a curated rundown of news, reports and posts from the past week that, while they didn’t go viral or attract much attention, are still interesting and useful for communications professionals. I select Wrap items from my link blog, which you’re welcome to follow.

News

Facebook unveils anonymous login—If you use Facebook authentication to log in to other sites, those sites have access to information about you based on your Facebook account. With the announcement of anonymous login, Facebook is making a statement about privacy by letting you choose to log in to sites using Facebook’s authentication without giving any of that information away. It’s currently being tested. Read more

NLRB strikes down social media policy’s disclosure requirement—Most employee social media policies include a clause requiring employees to identify themselves as employees when talking about the company and to use a disclaimer noting they are speaking for themselves, not the company. A National Labor Relations Board administrative law judge has said that “unduly burdens” employees rights under Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act. The policy in question was from grocery chain Krogers. The judge said the requirement “would be likely to chill employees’ willingness to engage in protected communications.” How many companies will update their policies in response to the ruling remains to be seen.Read more

PR is SEO. Google says so.—In a patent filing, Google labels search engine optimization as PR. The filing reads, “An implied link is a reference to a target resource, e.g., a citation to the target resource, which is included in a source resource but is not an express link to the target resource. Thus, a resource in the group can be the target of an implied link without a user being able to navigate to the resource by following the implied link.” According to Christopher S. Penn, “Google is publicly acknowledging that every time your brand gets a mention in a story, that counts as an implied link that affects your SEO, that affects how many links there are to your website, which in turn affects how well your site shows up when someone is searching for your brand. In short, PR is SEO (or part of it).” Read more

NYPD will stay the social media course—Despite its recent hashtag campaign being taken over by critics who used it as an opportunity to raise the visibility of misbehavior by officers, Chief William J. Bratton has reaffirmed his commitment to social media. In a closed-door meeting of chiefs and supervisors, he said the department “would use social media to bring positive police stories directly to the public.” Read more

Skype opens group video calling—Video calling is nothing new to Skype, but for some time, it came with a price. No more. Skype is rolling out free video calling, no doubt smarting from the increasing uptake of Google Hangouts. Read more

LinkedIn goes head-to-head with eHarmony—Okay, that’s hyperbole, but LinkedUP is an app from a startup that aims to be Tinder for LinkedIn users. “It allows users looking for a romantic connection to browse through a database of other users also looking for more than just a professional connection. The users ‘like’ the profiles of those users they are interested in—based, presumably, on their resume, connections and assumed earning power—and hope for potential match.” Read more

Trends

Google separates Docs and Sheets from Drive—Google Docs and Sheets were integrated into Google Drive two years ago, part of an effort to make Drive competitive with Dropbox; it was also consistent with Google’s move to integrate, well, everything. But now Google has released standalone apps for the pair of tools; they’re available on both the App and Play stores. It’s an interesting move given the unsubstantiated rumors of Google’s plan to unbundle Google+. The company has been relentless in its insistence that Google+ is a social layer, a concept underscored by the integration of Talk, Picassa and other once-independent Google tools. The new standalone apps may signify a change of course. Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp reinforce the shift in consumer behavior to single-purpose apps and Google may think they need to get on board, even at the expense of the social layer concept. Read more

The social networks are falling apart, Mike Elgan says—Writing for InforWorld, Mike Elgan reinforces the idea that we’re undergoing a shift from unified services to discrete apps. How has Facebook made money? Elgan asks. “Instead of harvesting personal data in one place and displaying personalized advertising in that same place, it did both in multiple places.” Read more

The care and feeding of superfans—There have always been hardcore fans, but social media has made them a powerful force with the ability to influence business decisions, especially in the entertainment industry. What differentiates them from the pack of run-of-the-mill fans is the money they spend on the source of their fandom: concerts, merchandise, DVDs, and anything else that affirms their fandom, and they try to convert their friends. Consider them the highly engaged consumer. Tips for nurturing superfans include reaching out to social storytellers who may have smaller but highly engaged fan bases. Read more

Research and data

There are how many CMOS?—Facebook now makes it possible to target users by job title, and one company found that 28,000 users call themselves CMOs. Some are definitely real-life CMOs, but many have no budgets or authority. Read more

Ideas

Will publishers start sharing content?—It may seem like there’s an overabundance of content these days, but our appetite for always-new material is testing publishers’ ability to feed the beast. That could lead to content exchanges, which “enable publishers to buy and sell content at scale, increasing traffic to their own articles, filling gaps in their coverage and opening up new revenue streams.” AOL is already running such an exchange, as are Cox, Gannett, Hearst, and Tribune Co. It seems like an opportunity for content marketers to find a way to get high-quality brand content into the mix. Read more

Pinterest users furnish apartment in retailer campaign—Pinterest drives more traffic than any other social network to the CB2 website. Capitalizing on that knowledge, the home decor retailer has launched a campaign in which Pinterest users will use the site to furnish a New York apartment in real time. Read more

Good Reading

How social media really affects SEO—ClickZ peels back the curtain on the connection between social media and SEO. There has been a lot of guesswork since Searchmetrics revealed results of an analysis that heavily correlated social signals and search rankings. There are seven ways that social media really does impact social media: link potential (increasing awareness of a brand leads to more inbound links), personalization (the effect on the rankings you see based on your connection to someone who has positively reviewed or +1’d the content), search query volume (increased searches for a brand that has gained awareness triggers Google’s algorithm), brand signals (a mention on a blog or site is considered “co-citation” by Google, which counts it as a brand signal), traffic volume and site engagement (if social media results in increased traffic and some stickiness on your site, your rankings improve), authorship (Google plans to incorporate identities into rankings), and profile ranking (brand social media profiles rank high for brand terms). The details make for interesting reading Read more

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