Google wants to get into the social networking arena with Buzz, a platform that they introduced on 9th February this year. However the social networking tool that is accessed via Google Mail has not taken off so far.

Of course, on the day of launch Google saw a massive response. Searching online with particular terms is considered to be a measure of public interest in something. According to Chitika here were 1,500 searches that day for the term ‘Google Buzz.’ However just three days later searches were only in double digits compared to Twitter who has on average 87 search queries a day.

Google itself reports that from the 26th February on some days there has been only one search for Buzz.

So why has Google Buzz failed to capture peoples imaginations? One explanation is that the social networking market is already saturated and that Twitter has spent four years building followers. Is Google prepared to input the time needed to grow an enterprise in this marketplace?

The fact that Gmail already has 140 million users should have made Buzz an easy tool to use.

A big problem that Buzz has encountered relates to privacy. The tool allows others to see a great deal of private information including which website users are connected to, who they are following and who is following them. Last month Congress members asked for an investigation into Buzz and the privacy issues it raised.

Buzz product manager Todd Jackson said in a blog post:

‘Shortly after launching Google Buzz, we quickly realised we didn’t get everything right and moved as fast as possible to improve the Buzz experience,” said

“Offering everyone who uses our products transparency and control is very important to us.’

Buzz has since been tweaked and it remains to be seen whether Buzz will take off as a social networking tool.

Inbound links can really help you get good natural search rankings for your website. There are hundreds of ways in which you can achieve this. Here are a few ideas for your link building campaign:

Fantastic content
Yes, fantastic content itself will eventually create natural inbound links to your site. If you are writing unique and unusual content and its what people want to hear about then your information will eventually pick up an audience. The search engines will rank it well and a regular audience will boost the rating.

Social Networking
Participating in social networking can raise awareness about your company and what it does. Extra links from sites like LindedIn, Facebook and Twitter can provide valuable traffic.  Many social networking sites allow people to search for content with particular keywords.

Blogging
Having a well frequented blog with lots of audience participation can create the desire to find out more about your company. Make it easy for visitors to find your site.

Participation
Participating in online discussions with other bloggers and in online communities can help to feed traffic to your own site. Don’t leave a message without leaving your website or blog details. Equally, genuine communication only is valuable in these circumstances. Leaving links just for the sake of it looks phoney and will not encourage traffic – it will just waste your time.

Capitalise on all your marketing
Submit your blog posts to blog directories. This increases your blog audience which you can then direct to your website.

Online video
Creating online video enables you to have another type of media and audience to link back to your site.

Link Swapping
Swapping links with other site owners can increase the number of inbound links to your site but it is important to choose relevant sites to appear on your site. The sites you link to need to be relevant to your readers.

Article submission
Interesting articles with your details attached to the end can hold links back to your site or blog. Article sites are always happy to get good content to fill their pages.

Find out
Find out who is already linking to you. Often this uncovers sectors that are interested in your work that you didn’t even know existed. You can pursue this avenue by finding out where your audience ‘hangs out’ and targeting them there

Quality links
At all times be aware that it’s not just inbound links that are important, they need to be good ones. The best ones have your important keywords in the hyperlink text as part of the link back.

Many companies have decided that social networking is not for them. However new developments online mean that companies who don’t opt in could be missing out.

Google search now includes a live search section which updates by the minute with information from all over the web including up to date blog posts, Tweets and feeds from FriendFeed. To a certain extent when Google moves in a direction it is unwise to ignore it. It is the search engine which generates the most traffic.

Choosing not to include a social networking element to your online marketing campaign means that you might be missing out on extra traffic. If your competitors are involved they could have the advantage.

There is also a possibility that you could be misrepresented online too. UK political parties, for example are leaving themselves exposed in the social networking arena. Tamar, a search agency, undertook research which looked at the reputation management of Gordon Brown and David Cameron to see how well they had positioned themselves online. They found that neither leaders had protected their position in Twitter.

The Twitter accounts with the names of the leaders were not official accounts. @davidcameron was featuring unofficial party news but currently has the message:

‘This unofficial Twitter is now shutting down, at the reasonable & very polite request of Tory HQ. Please follow @conservatives for updates.’

The Tamar report said:

‘With the explosion of real-time search recently, it’s even more important for the political parties to take both factual and ’social’ search seriously. Simple actions such as registering the names of key figures, opening Facebook accounts and engaging on Twitter.’

This is good advice for all businesses.

LinkedIn, a professional contacts network reached 3 million members in the UK this year. To celebrate they held a party (alternatively called – a networking event) at London’s Imagination Gallery last week.

LinkedIn provides a very easy to use service that keeps members up to date with their connections online.  Email updates can be sent to you which let you know about the new connections that your contacts are making.  Membership is free although you can upgrade to different levels of membership.

Last week’s event was attended by Reid Hoffman the company’s founder and CEO. LinkedIn which was founded in 2003, now has 53million global members. Kevin Eyres, LinkedIn’s European managing director also attended the event and talked about the site:

‘If you look at the membership it’s business professionals who are actively trying to network and engage with like-minded professionals in order to expand their knowledge, solve problems and find out how to capture other opportunities.’

The company is keeping up with the times. Eyres said:

‘We have [Microsoft] Outlook integration now, there’s a BlackBerry application that we’ve announced, you can have it on your iPhone, so LinkedIn integrates to the normal tools that you would use in your everyday business.’

The company has also recently added a link to the social media site,  Twitter link so that members can tweet their updated status’ on the site. Eyres commented:

‘If you have a problem and you want to get maximum exposure to not just your professional community but also the wider community which Twitter provides, then you can increase the speed at which your questions are answered and move ahead with any decisions you have to make.’

Concerns arose last week when CYI took over ownership of 289 Facebook groups in order to prove a point about social media risks.

Control Your Info (CYI) is a groups whose goals is to ‘draw attention to questions concerning online privacy awareness.’ They did a search on Google and were able to find 289 groups that did not have an administrator. They joined the groups and took over. The administrator becomes the owner of the group. If a group does not have an owner it can be ‘high-jacked’ by anyone wishing to take control. This is very easy and not illegal.

Their online statement said:

‘Our method of choice only serves the purpose to prove our point and put emphasis on how easy it is to lose track of a part of your online presence. If we wouldn’t have communicated this way, our message would probably have fallen into oblivion the moment it got out.

‘We did not hack anything. Once we were administrators we owned the groups and could have changed any setting. We chose to change the picture, the name, and the description of every group. Our intention was and is to restore these groups to their original form and find a suitable admin among the members. To be able to do this, we first backed up all the data we wanted to replace.’

Online security in Facebook can easily be controlled by altering your privacy settings but CYI actions do act as a warning that it is important to know what you are doing with social networking. From a business point of view this could be a disaster if a group is left open to unscrupulous rivals.

Facebook responded by saying that the groups that had been hijacked had been abandoned by their owners. They said:

‘Group administrators have no access to private user information and group members can leave a group at any time.

‘In the rare instances when we find that a group has been changed inappropriately, we will disable the group, which is the action we plan for these groups.’