Users of Google become editors of the US map

Nearly three years after first releasing Map Maker, Google is finally ready to authorise its users to edit and add to the map of the United States.

Google Map Maker is a parallel version of Google Maps that accepts user contributions and map edits. When approved by moderators, edits are published to Google Maps and are pushed live to all users.

The Map Maker tool has been used in 183 countries and regions around the world, and users have been actively adding the next level of detail — roads, universities, bike paths, pools and the like — to their towns. In 2008, roughly 15% of the world’s population had online maps of their neighborhoods via Google Maps. Today, that percentage has jumped to 30% thanks to user contributions via Google Map Maker.

However today Google is making the entire map of the US available for editing. The three-year wait, explains technology lead Lalitesh Katragadda, was due to two primary factors. Google chose to first make map editing available in parts of the world that needed detailed maps. The company also wanted to ensure its moderation and editing processes could scale to meet higher demand. After all, he explains, the live version of Google Maps in the U.S. sees millions of visitors daily.

The processing of editing the U.S. map is not without verification procedures. Anyone Google user can sign in and zoom in to a region to add a map point or draw an entity — a newly constructed swimming pool, for instance. Once an edit is saved, it is reviewed by a moderator and posted to the live version of Google Maps within seconds upon approval.

Google employs a hybrid moderation system to ensure the accuracy and quality of Maps edits. There’s a niche in-house moderation team, but most of the moderation is managed by power Map Maker users who have graduated to become a part of the moderating community.

“Users are best served by having complete details,” says Katragadda. “The only way to get there is to have users doing it.”

Google is also adding a few new features to Map Maker. The tool will integrate with Street View so users can use imagery to help guide their edits. Pipon Solutions is considering how empowering users in the digital cartography space will impact advertising clients, what's your opinion? 

Facebook to release new targeted ads

Facebook, the world’s most popular social networking site, is preparing to roll out a new series of highly targeted adverts using data uploaded onto its users’ pages. The site has been trialling software that enables ads to read in real-time information uploaded onto status updates and wall posts.

Facebook is home to unprecedented volumes of information on its users, including their “likes” and detailed demographic data.

Analysts say this could make Facebook one of the most powerful marketing tools ever created, with ads even more bespoke to its users than those featured on rival Google. The California-based firm’s ad revenue is understood to have doubled to $2bn (£1.2bn) in 2010, and experts say it could double again this year.

Facebook has been valued at a gargantuan $50bn after Goldman placed a number of its privately held shares. It is seen as the most powerful of a gaggle of unlisted technology firms ruling the roost down in Silicon Valley.

Microblogging site Twitter is said to be a possible takeover target of Facebook, with an astonishing $10bn price-tag being discussed. And online deal site Groupon last year rejected a $6bn bid from Google.

Meanwhile, the ongoing saga over who really owns Facebook has taken yet another twist, with convicted felon Paul Ceglia amending his claim that he should rightfully own half of the company. Ceglia, who last year filed a lawsuit claiming he has emails proving Zuckerberg owes him 50 per cent of the business. A lawyer for Facebook dismissed the claim as “ridiculous”.

Piponhttp://www.piponsolutions.com offers tailored solutions on your social media strategy. 

Major blue chip companies fail to respond to Social Media complaints

Hard hitting retailers such as easyJet and Debenhams are failing to respond to customers via social media, according to new research.

Easyjet: The airline was among the UK's top 25 retailers criticised for their poor use of social media channels

As part of the study by internet firm Auros, the UK's top 25 retailers were measured on their responsiveness level to customers  across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and branded blogs, with each being allocated a score out of 100.

Retailers scored just 10% on average, with even the retailers at the top of the table – Thomas Cook (32%), easyJet (24%) and Debenhams (22%) – falling short of the competition. 

Only 52% of retailers have a blog on their website and 12% a YouTube channel.

As with Twitter and Facebook, the research claims the retailers are using social networks as marketing channels, instead of properly engaging and entering into dialogue with both existing and prospective customers.

The research also found that responsiveness on YouTube and on company blogs was low, with none of the retailers responding to questions posted in the comments section of blog posts or videos.

'It is clear that retailers see the benefit of being active on social networks,' said Dominic Mills, MD at Auros. 'But too many are simply ignoring the fact that you have to be social and engage with users on these channels.

'While brands need to monitor what is being said about them, they need to be confident about responding.

'Companies that use these social channels to get closer to their customers and prospects will increase brand advocacy and generate more bottom line revenue.'

Google's search share rises to 65.7 percent

Google's March search rose slightly to 65.7 percent, while Microsoft Bing grabbed 13.9 percent, according to comScore data.

Google and Microsoft Bing pushed ahead with search market share through March, with Google growing from 65.4 percent share in February to 65.7 percent share in March, comScore found. Bing continued its rise up the search charts, netting 13.9 percent share, up from 13.6 percent the prior month. Bing achieved the highest quarter-over-quarter gain, peaking from 11.8 percent from the fourth quarter.


Microsoft's Bing team has rolled out a number of interesting features, including a flight price predictor capability for its Bing Travel portal and a savvy partnering with Kayak on travel search.


Yahoo continued its gradual slide, falling to 15.7 percent share from 16.1 percent.  As partners (Bing is powering Yahoo search on the back end), Bing and Yahoo combined account for 29.7 percent of the market, still less than half of the market leader. If the current trend keeps up, Bing will overtake Yahoo in search at some stage this year.


Yahoo hopes its Yahoo Search Direct technology will hike market share. Like Google Instant, Yahoo Search Direct is a predictive search technology that delivers results to users in far fewer keystrokes. Yahoo hopes Search Direct can boost its search results the way Google Instant has for Google since it launched last September.


Jefferies and Co. analyst Youssef Squali said that Google should see a 15 percent bump in paid clicks and an 8 percent boost in cost-per-clicks, driven partly by Google Instant, which "seems to be transferring some clicks from natural to paid search."


The public should hear more about Google's latest financials on the company's first-quarter earnings call April 14 after the bell. Google is expected to announce earnings of $6.31 billion and earnings per share of $8.13.


However, the more significant news will likely be whether or not new CEO Larry Page joins the call. Page took the reins from Eric Schmidt April 4 and has rejiggered his senior management lineup to report directly to him. With desktop search on solid ground for now, investors will be interested to hear how Google's mobile search and YouTube display ad efforts are taking shape. 

Facebook and Baidu to create a new social network in China

Facebook and Chinese search company Baidu have formed a deal to create a new social network in China, according to reports.

Reports from Sohu.com revealed Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Baidu CEO Robin Li had reached an agreement following a series of meetings over the past year.

The Chinese government blocks websites that include pornography, gambling and content critical of the ruling Communist Party, including Facebook. As a result, the site will be entirely separate to Facebook, with no international integration.

Currently neither Facebook nor Baidu has confirmed the union, but Facebook has admitted it’s evaluating China and the best way to expand there for its users and advertisers.

Facebook has also won its court case against twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who claimed Zuckerberg had stolen the idea for building the social network when they were at university.

The twins had asked the US Court of Appeals to dissolve an agreement they already had with the social network on the grounds that Zuckerberg had provided inaccurate evidence as to the valuation of the company.

However, Facebook is now being taken to court by Paul Ceglia, who claims he has emails form 2003 that prove he was promised 50% of Facebook by Zuckerberg. Ceglia issued a complaint with a federal court in New York yesterday.

Google's helps advertisers speed up their load times

Google has released an experimental test in an effort to help site owners optimise their site's speed. The tool, from the Google labs playground, provides users with suggestions on how to improve a site by analysing its speed. Although there are many similar tools, Page Speed Online can also assist search marketers and site owners with improving their mobile site's performance.  

Straightforward to use, the tool merely requires a user to type in a site which then generates a list of suggestions on ways to improve its speed. Google categorises ranks on the suggestions as either High, Medium or Low to make it easier for users to determines the most important suggestions. The suggestions provided by Google regarding a desktop site's speed differs from recommendations on how to improve a mobile site's speed.

In addition, page speed online scores a site out of 100 and additionally highlights the rules a user is already following on a site. 

Pipon thinks this is a great tool for webmasters of all levels and for online businesses, especially since around a year ago Google explained on a blog post the introduction and significance of a site's speed in a web search ranking, "You may have heard that here at Google we're obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we're including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed."

What do you think of page speed online? 

Social care sector plans to embrace Social Media

Many organisations within the social care sector are beginning to adopt social networking because it allows for an easy way to share knowledge and communicate.

It enables discussions to open up in a way that is just not possible via more traditional modes of communication. Time, geography and expense make client facing meetings inaccessible to all but a very few. As access to Wifi becomes more prevalent and the price of computers and broadband comes down, social media will increasingly become the discussion avenue of choice. A substantial bonus is that you can post information quickly and widely in crisis situations. During the poor weather in the winter, Blackburn with Darwen council's Facebook site was accessed by "people using it to get in touch with neighbours and offer help and support through a difficult time," says Ben Greenwood, senior media and publications officer.

But what about the organisations which do not accept this rationale? Top of the reluctance list comes privacy concerns. Personal information could very easily find its way into the public domain, breaching confidentiality and regulatory requirements. There are also potential financial costs: impaired employee productivity and increased use of the organisation's network bandwidth, for example.

A very natural impulse would be for employers to simply block access to social networking sites and avoid the risk of litigation, significant brand damage or other privacy and data protection transgressions. A report from local authority IT managers' body SOCITM said 90% of public sector bodies prevented social networking, while 67% block employees completely. But such self-protection comes at a price – the risk of ignoring the communities they serve which are increasingly using social media to be in contact.

However, take note that social media are not the place for safe, cohesive communications. People want the message from the heart, as shown in the form of a 'sentiment'. It is that level of authenticity which will engage people – and anything else will push people away, not invite them in.

Google Teams Up with Mastercard and Citigroup

This new coalition is Google's latest strategic approach to local advertising by implementing Near-Field Communication technology to develop further its mobile payment on Android phones. NFC will be available on the latest Android 2.3, which enable users to make contact-less payment by just waving their phone in front of an electronic reader. Citygroup's consumers will be the first to utilise this with a mobile payment app. This latest alliance is none other than another one of Google is strategy to battle its numerous competitors in various market. With this partnership, Google aim to boost its local advertising to overtake companies such as Groupon, Facebook and Yelp, which are currently just some of the leading companies within the local advertising market. The Wall Street Journal reports that with this technology Google will be able to "offer retailers more data about their customers and help them target ads and discount offers to mobile-device users near their stores".  The android payment will also take conversion to the next level by allowing Google to demonstrate when an ad targeted to a demographic directly results into a store purchase, which will also allow Google "to gain insight into consumer-spending behavior". Google plans on release the technology soon as Apple is expected to implement the NFC technology in the new iPhone 5, which is predicted to come out later this year.

WordPress – Top Five Plugins to boost SEO success

You may have thought that Wordpress is simply a tool for making blogposts look pretty, but actually the platform is becoming increasingly popular for company sites too. Thankfully, there are a number of plugins that help with your SEO strategy. This enables you to keep your site fully optimised, even if there are multiple people working on developing aspects of it.

Here are our top five tips:

1. All in One SEO Plugin

Certain on-page elements are vital for optimal SEO performance. If several people are updating a website (especially non-SEOs) often the elements can be forgotten about or not created properly for SEO purposes. The All in One SEO plugin allows you to set the page title, meta description and meta keywords for the homepage. Additionally, it allows you to create dynamic page titles and descriptions for every page and post. Subsequently, this creates a consistent structure for the elements across your site, for example the page title structure could be set so that it’s created using the name of the page along with the name of the company. Furthermore, the plugin adds the option to create a page title and meta description within the page edit screen so they can be customised easily.

2. All in One Webmaster Plugin

In the case of embarking on any SEO project, you'll need webmaster tools and analytics installed on the site. Installing these programmes is a much faster process with the All in One Webmaster plugin. You can install tools such as Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics really easily by simply pasting your verification code or ID numbers into the settings. It’s so easy to do and there is no need to know HTML or manually add the code into every page.

3. Broken Link Checker Plugin

Want to avoid re-directs to a 404 error page? This plugin alerts you in the case of any broken links. In terms of SEO, broken links create problems for search engines as the spiders can’t crawl the site properly, meaning the page being linked to might not be indexed! Obviously using this tool means that you don’t have to regularly go through every page on your site checking each link works, what a time saver!

4. RB Internal Links Plugin

Internal linking should happen naturally on any website, again more so for usability purposes than SEO. This is why anyone working on the site might create them, whether they know about HTML or SEO, or not. Although the link they create will work to start with, it could be possible that someone else updates a particular page on the site, subsequently changing the URL of that page. In doing so, they will have to go and update any internal links to that page so that the link still works instead of a 404 page being returned, as well as allowing the spiders to crawl those links. With the RB Internal Links plugin, this problem is bypassed meaning time saved should any URL change ever happen. The RB Internal Links plugin adds the function to select the page you want to link to by ‘page ID’ rather than the URL address of that page. So for example, you create a link to ‘page 32’ on the site, rather than /products/category3/172 , so when you decide to update that URL to /products/shirts/red the link will still work. Not only does this have SEO benefits, but also usability benefits for anyone who will be updating the site, as the plugin function nicely allows you to simply select the page you want to link to, rather than having to find the URL or page ID number.

5. Redirection Tool

Redirections are often a forgotten thought about when launching a new website or updating an existing one. Any time URLs are changed or removed, it is crucial to set up redirects so that anyone who visits an old URL will see a new page rather than a 404. This includes search engines. Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. might have indexed a long list of your old pages, which means that these could show in the SERPs (search engine results page), especially if the site has been optimised for SEO already. Search engines often take a few days to a few weeks to crawl your site and index your new pages, therefore people will still see the old URLs in the SERPs and will therefore see a 404 page if no redirect is in place to take them to the newer version of the page.