Google: Transition from Local Business Ads to Location Extensions

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Soon, Google will start transitioning from its Local business ads model to Location extensions. Location extensions is a new Adwords product upgrade that offers several benefits over location business ads.

Brands who have many store locations will benefit from the ability to use the same ad for several store locations. When a potential customer performs a search, their location or search terms are dynamically matched to your business locations, and your most relevant location appears within your ad on Google Search and Google Maps. The new format of Adwords also enables advertisers to create more effective ad headlines rather than having to stick with the business name.

Google suggests you start moving your location business ads to location extensions manually. All ads that are not moved to location extensions will be automatically resetelled by Google in the coming few weeks.

Here is a simple step-by-step guide by Google to help you through the transition.

Blogging vs Status-updating

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Businesses, content publishers media channels have been pushing for blog creation as a way of engaging existing and reaching new readers. With 133 million blog posts submitted on Technorati since 2002, blogging is deep-rooted in all mainstream online media.

So why do I believe that blogs are losing popularity to Status-updating?

With the popularity and inescapabilty of microblogging and activity streams and time lines, Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and the like are competing to build a community around the status-updating system – the state of publishing, reading, responding to, and sharing micro-sized updates.

This new trend of pacey interaction is further scattering the conversation and is growing online interaction beyond the host site through syndication to other relevant networks and communities. Those who might typically respond with a formal blog post (on the host site) may now choose to respond with a tweet or a status update.

Blog posts are increasingly being shared in micro communities and social networks which is detouring attention and time away from posts on the host website or blog. Social network users comment back on shared blog post, creating conversations away from the original blog post. We are learning to publish and react to content in “Twitter time” while spending less time blogging, commenting directly on blogs, or writing blogs in response to blog sources because of our active participation in micro communities.

Likes and RTs (retweets) on Facebook and Twitter and posting shortened links that connect friends and followers back to the source post, have changed our behavior regarding blogs and made us major players in defining the evolution of the connectivity and dissemination of online content.

Technorati might not have foreseen it, but Twitter and Facebook might as well be its next biggest competitors.

The Social Media Syndrome

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You konw you’re a Social Media Addict when you:

1) Overshare

Your friends let you know that they pressed “HIDE” next to your recent status update or shared post because you’re updating too frequently.

2) Are always online

You get a message from your friend saying “HELP! My car broke down!” instead of receiving a phonecall from him/her because he/she knows that the fastest way to reach you is
through Facebook.

3) Twist the ratios

If you’ve met five of your six really good friends online – that’s 5 to 1.

4) Take few too many pictures

If you have 3 Facebook albums titled:

My New Car PART 1

My New Car PART 2

My New Car PART 3

…that’s a few hundred pics for your new ride!

5) Adopt things a bit too early

If your Twitter account shows the following consecutive tweets:
– May 15: I can’t wait for the release of the #iPad tomorrow!!
– May 16: I just got my Apple #iPad – I can barely wait for the #Android-Tablet!!

How addicted are you?

So…we’re not friends?

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“Stan, poke your grandma!” his dad said. Stan’s hell began after his friends set him up with his own Facebook profile. He had to befriend everyone from his mom to his grandmother and when he wanted out of Facebook, Stan found himself in a battle with his own gigantic profile, playing Yahtzee.

Last night, South Park’s episode “You have zero friends” took a slam at social-networking giant Facebook and semi-slams at FarmVille, the popular Facebook application, and startup Chatroulette. The funniest stint of the episode would probably be Stan’s dad insisting that Stan takes timeout from doing his homework to add him as a friend on Facebook, saying “So…we’re not friends then?”. Stan finds himself dragged into the whole “Facebook” bubble, facing all sort of trouble with everyone he knows, from family to neighbors and friends.

The subplot of the episode revolves around a lonely kid called Kid Dropy who has no real friends, however, it means everything to him when Kyle befriends him. In the real life, Kip Dropy has been having no problems in making new friends on REAL Facebook; just check out his own Facebook page which has almost 200,000 fans.

Compared to the attacks the cartoon has dished out in the past, South Park Facebook episode took it relatively easy; yet, the delivery of the “friendship as a commodity for a person’s status” was exquisite.

Here are some highlights of the episode: