There are several reasons why it’s a good idea to be involved that are simply common sense. Not the least of which is that companies, brands particularly, should listen more to their customers.

There’s much talk of the battle between Facebook, Twitter and Google+. In our view there’s room for them all, each has its strengths and weaknesses. Which platforms you’re active on depends on your business. Who are you targetting? What are your objectives?

Which brings me to Google+. Google’s nascent social offering promises to be the one Google service to rule them all. A kind of social backbone running through everything they do. From GMail to Docs, YouTube to  Search each has been influenced by the rapidly growing platform. Whether or not you feel that Google+ is right for you today it’s not going anywhere. And you should be paying attention to it.

H&M's G+ page has over 535k followers

Don’t just take our word for it, already, and with a fairly immature Page offering, we’re seeing brands with high growth figures (1400% in February[1]),  impressive in a service that is less than a year old.  The absolute numbers, however, are nowhere near Facebook’s; H&M enjoys just over 535k followers since their page started in early november, compared to their nearly 10m followers on Facebook. That said, their G+ activity has been limited largely to posting photos of their product line and a skim through their posts doesn’t reveal an overwhelming level of participation. You reap what you sow and they’ll get better at it.

What will be really interesting to watch is how G+ infiltrates Google’s search results. They have already introduced (in the US) what they call Search Plus Your World, which delivers an optional set of search results that includes only results influenced by your friends. But ignoring that potentially problematic product, if you’re logged into a Google account the results you see for a given set of keywords are not the same as those returned if you are not logged in. Google are already responding to what they call Social Signals.

So here’s how it works. Your business is active on Google+, your customers engage with you  and you with them. So Jo Customer heads to Google (as the vast majority do) to find something. Anything. The search results they are presented with are influenced by the fact that they are engaged with you on G+. So a page that your business has liked, shared, whatever, will be given prominence over other pages. All because you have invested the time into interacting with your customers.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg that I’m sure privacy advocates, lawyers and governments will be occupying themselves with for the next ten years.

Online businesses live or die on their rankings on Google so anything that your business can possibly do to improve those rankings it should be doing, right?  That doing it involves  building stronger relationships with your customers is common sense.

If you’re a Google Apps user, the chances are that you haven’t played much with Apps Script yet – there are so many awesome features to play with already, it’s easy to forget about scripting. But over at Cloud Touch they’ve written a handy primer. It’s a wee bit techy so you may need to get in touch with your inner nerd, but by the end of it you’ll know how to use a Google Spreadsheet to send Emails to people.

Such is one of the main advantages of Google Apps – features are added incrementally and automatically without any effort required from us. Always accompanied by a useful tooltip highlighting what’s new of course!

But the latest announcement of a really useful front end for Docs on Android devices rates pretty high on the cool scale too. Apart from being a nicer way to navigate multiple docs accounts it also offers the ability to share documents with other users, an important feature missing from the mobile web version. Dave tells me that the document scanning feature is very cool too – you can use your phone to scan documents into editable format.

Currently you can’t search the market place for it so yf you want to get started immediately (like I did), point your phone at this here QR code thingamejig:

And so Zuckerberg sayeth: “Go forth and create groups that you may share more relevant content with each other”.

All of this brought to mind a presentation by Paul Adams (@padday) that he wrote last year when he was a UX Researcher at Google. Interestingly a quick look at his web-site reveals that his tenure at Google ended late last year and he’s now a researcher for Facebook.

Adams concerns himself largely with the fact that in the real-world we have several overlapping and non-overlapping social circles and that Facebook and other Social Networks don’t reflect this well at all. Given the fact that Social is something that Google is famously bad at perhaps there’s a reason that he’s now working with Facebook?

This is cross-posted from the Official Coffeemat Challenge Blog. ed

Now that the dust has settled on the Spring Term Coffeemat Challenge at UWE it’s time to take a look at the results of the competition in a new light. There was much fanfare attached to the competition winners, who each took away a great prize;

Heat 1

Winner: Robert Brocas

Idea: “Uwes pubs should have coffee cards system so that we can get the 8th pint free.”

Prize: Digital Camera

Heat 2

Winner: Jonatello Batac

Idea: “Get a change machine in the Laundry room so that we don’t have to worry about hunting for pound coins. It benefits both uni and students ”

Prize: Xbox 360

Heat 3

Winner: Daniel Pico

Idea: “Rental Lockers on site at UWE.”

Prize: Asus Netbook

While it’s important to recognise the winners and all their hard work in attracting the votes needed to succeed in the competition, it’s always been our intention for the Coffeemat Challenge to be about more than giving away prizes and we’ve been working hard on ways to deliver more. I’m pleased to say that for the first time we’re able to provide a list of  the ‘best’ ideas in the competition as voted for by you all. This is based on a version of the sentiment score that was publicised to participants during the competition.

Without further ado, the best ideas were:

First Place

“Display & sell artwork from UWE students at Frenchay.  Help creative students earn money whilst adding some creativity to Frenchay campus.” – UWE Artists

This idea was sponsored by Neil Clarke from the Student Union (and as such not eligible to win prizes) and was very well received by you all.

Second Place

“we should be able to submit our coursework via myuwe. (electronically) saving time and money to print it off.” – pittu

Third Place

“I think Bristol should have an Oyster card system on busses to speed up bus journeys and reduce traffic.” – Lauren Morrice

Fourth Place

“The library should buy back course books from students to increase stock of core text books. More copies for students/money back for books” - Caroline Bland

Fifth Place

“Have a facility in the library where you can download electronic versions of the book you require.” – Stuart Medhurst

I’m also very pleased to say that we’ve been told by UWE that there  is now a change machine in the laundry room. This idea won Heat 2 of the competition and was ranked 7 in the best ideas list.

So as we head towards the summer break, there’s food for thought in the results of the spring Coffeemat Challenge.

• The ability to like canvas URLs for Facebook applications that represent things such as a cause, movie, or any other real world object
• The ability to link a Like button to a Facebook Page
• “Box count” layout that displays the total number of likes above the button

The second one is really interesting. I’ve been struggling with this problem since Like buttons arrived on the scene – I felt absolutely sure that it must be possible to link the like button on a blog post to a facebook page associated with said blog. For me a Blog web-site maps to a Facebook Page, not a Blog Article, so the like buttons, whilst interesting have been limited in their usefullness to a large extent.

Now I haven’t actually tried it so I don’t know if it will work but I’m crossing my fingers…. Now!

Against that background, my thoughts turn to e-Democracy, Social Media and Web 2.0 – as they often do with very little prompting! I’m reminded of the thrill that I felt when I first  recognised the real potential and power of the so-called Web 2.0 champions, like e-Bay. The buyes and sellers rated each other – online identity became valuable for the first time and the community was able to police itself. This seemed incredible.

How could we apply those same forces to university and college admissions? To make the process fairer and more transparent. On the one hand you have service providers offering various products aimed at different budgets (academic aptitude, say), and you have a population of potential consumers greater than the available product (higher education).

Technologies exist that make the old application process seem somewhat arbitrary and unfair to unfortunate students who fail to get into the course of their choice as Martin talks about in his blog.

Obviously as outsiders to the system we can make only superficial observations, but it seems that currently there is neither the information available to students, nor the mechnisms to let the system work efficiently. I say it’s time for a revolution!

Could the universities bid for the brightest students on their courses? How would the bidding system work? What would the currency be? Could students be presented with a list of courses from across the country that they would be accepted on?

With David Willett’s Iron Triangle fresh in my mind, I prefer to think of opportunities!

UnMarketing by Scott Stratten

Jay Baer’s review of a new marketing book called UnMarketing by Scott Stratten is as insightful as most articles are on his excellent Convince and Convert blog. The rise of Social Media has changed the world of marketing completely in the last 18 months and books like the one described here help the rest of us keep up!

We particularly like the quote “People still teach courses on how to cold-call better! That’s like finding a better way to punch people in the face” – I swear, these are words that have spilled from Dave’s mouth more than once! Unfortunately this approach is still common in marketing companies across the world.

At Evans Finch we believe that marketing is becoming more about curation and publishing – give people something that they value. Build a strong relationship by listening, understanding and reflecting. Then you can maybe make a sale, or do business.

The long and the short of the piece is that as Twitter’s usage continues to grow (up to 145m users from 130m just a few months ago) the only provider of Twitter experiences that has any real reach is Twitter themself.

The venerable guys at Venture Beat published an interesting response to Evan’s article where they suggest that even though it’s a long dead rumour that Google were talking to Twitter about a possible purchase, it’s worth looking at who the probable audience was for article.

Google are frantically trying to develop a social media strategy, with a raft of recent social media acquisitions from Slide to Social Deck, so would it be so crazy to think that they might volte-face and snap up Twitter to use as the backbone?