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Oooh you're back! Lookin good. Have you lost weight? Yes, that was a compliment designed to butter you up for my next question. Subscribed to my feed yet? :-)

In a single day, Bing has increased the number of fans of their Facebook page by 500 percent. How? By using clever social media advertising embedded within the popular Facebook application Farmville.

The advert appeared yesterday inside the game Farmville, encouraging players to become a fan of Bing in exchange for free farm cash (the virtual currency used within Farmville). As an incentive for players to act, Bing positioned themselves as the ideal search engine to help them win the game with tips and solutions for how best to use their crops and animals. Probably the cleverest part of the promotion was the fact that users could fan the Bing page without interrupting their game.

As a follow up, Microsoft’s social media team then set about creating dedicated updates for Farmville users on the Bing Facebook page.

The Bing Facebook page started the day yesterday with around 100,000 fans and that figure is now well above 500,000.

Yahoo and Twitter announced a partnership today that will see Twitter provide Yahoo with access to their full tweet feed, nicknamed The Firehose.

The deal will result in tweets appearing in Yahoo Search as well as other Yahoo properties such as the Yahoo Homepage, Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Sports. Yahoo will also integrate Twitter clients into their various applications so that Twitter users can tweet from within the Yahoo network.

The partnership announcement was delivered to media with an embargo, but within a few hours the story broke on the blogosphere and Yahoo pretty much gave the game away with the *clues* they posted on Twitter.

With a worldwide audience of 600 million, Yahoo offers Twitter significant exposure to add to their existing partnerships with the other major search giants Bing and Google.

We’ve all been expecting it, but today was the day Google decided to roll out their answer to Twitter: Google Buzz.

I haven’t had much of a play with it yet, but the fact that it’s integrated with Gmail will probably make it very popular, very quickly.

From the official Google Blog post:

“Google Buzz is a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting. It’s built right into Gmail, so you don’t have to peck out an entirely new set of friends from scratch – it just works. If you think about it, there’s always been a big social network underlying Gmail. Buzz brings this network to the surface by automatically setting you up to follow the people you email and chat with the most.

We focused on building an easy-to-use sharing experience that richly integrates photos, videos and links, and makes it easy to share publicly or privately (so you don’t have to use different tools to share with different audiences). Plus, Buzz integrates tightly with your existing Gmail inbox, so you’re sure to see the stuff that matters most as it happens in real time.”

I plan to write a detailed article about Google Buzz, but here’s a quick run down of the main features:

• Runs within Gmail
• Embeds images
• Embeds inline video
• Emails status updates
• Automatically works on mobiles without 3rd party applications
• Connects to Picasa, Flickr & Twitter
• No 140 character limit

It’s interesting that it integrates with Twitter. That suggests a deal has been done behind closed doors to ensure both products don’t compete head to head, but Twitter may still lose some audience now that Gmail offers both chat and a link sharing tool.

In some ways, it’s more like Stumble Upon in that it’s a more powerful tool for sharing links, videos and images than Twitter is. But because it operates within Gmail, I’m concerned that much of the conversation will be lost between email threads. We’ll have to wait and see.

I for one won’t be abandoning Twitter in a hurry.

Refusing to sit still long enough for anyone to catch up, Google has rolled out another Labs experiment to the public. Google Social Search Beta launched last October, hard on the heels of Personalized Search. But this week, Google graduated Social Search out of Labs and into the public sphere.

What Is Google Social Search?

As we become increasingly connected online, we start to build around ourselves a community of people that we have regular contact with and websites where we spend much of our time. This is called our social network. Now Google has worked out a way to measure and leverage these individual social networks so they influence the search results we see. Those results therefore become more relevant to us and more influential over time.

Google determines your social network based on the connections found in your public Google profile. Connections are classed as either direct connections or secondary connections. Your Gmail chat buddies and contacts are direct connections, as are connections from links listed in your Google profile (e.g. people you follow on Twitter, LinkedIn or FriendFeed). Secondary connections are those publicly associated with your direct connections (e.g. the people that your friends follow on Twitter).

To see your social profile on Google, login to your Google account and visit the social dashboard. The first time you do this, Google will collect all the social data it has stored about you, based on your Google Profile and public content, and build what they call your *social circle*.

After Google builds your social circle, whenever Google’s algorithm determines that your search experience will be improved, it annotates regular web index data with social data customized from your social circle and adds this information to the bottom of your search results.

You MUST be signed in to Google to see this. If you’re not happy with the results, say from Twitter, you can delete your Twitter account from your Google profile to prevent published info from your Twitter connections being added to your social circle.

You can also add or block Google contacts so you don’t see information from them in your social circle. In the reverse, you can choose what content you want to make public, based on your published Google profile.

How Does Social Search Work?

Google Social Search has been in experimental mode since October, but this week it’s been rolled out to full public Beta, meaning you should now see social content in your search results on Google.com. Google hasn’t rolled Social Search out to their regional sites at this stage, but this is expected soon.

To see social search results in action, login to your Google account, then run a search. You’ll see the heading *Results from people in your social circle* towards the bottom of the search results page. For example, if I run a search for *music blogs* on Google.com, I get the following social circle suggestions:

Because Matt Burgess and Tim Burrowes are in my social circle and have blogged about music, I see their content at the top of my social circle results.

If you want to see more social results, click on the *Show Options* link at the top left of the page and click on the *Social* link in the side menu under *All Results*. This will bring up search results sourced entirely from your social network. You’ll also see a list of your friends and connections under the menu heading *All People*. You can click on a particular name in the list to bring up more results from their public content.

Next to your social circle results are two links that are new additions to the service added to coincide with the public rollout: my social circle and my social content (pictured). These take you to your social circle dashboard that I linked to earlier.

The *my social circle* tab displays your extended network of online contacts, as well as the pathways that connect you. Clicking on the *my social content* tab brings up your public social media profiles, taken from your Google profile, that might appear in other people’s social results (pictured).

Apart from this social dashboard, the other major difference between the original Social Search experiment and the new public rollout is the addition of Google Images into the mix. If anyone in your social circle has shared images on Flickr or Picasa and Google determines they are relevant to your search query, you may see these in your search results as well.

Judging by my social search experiments to date, I believe Google has been collating social results for some time. A key observation is that relevance seems to win over freshness in the social influenced search results – some of the top results in my social circle were from 2008.

How Do You Take Advantage of Social Search?

1. If you haven’t already done so, create a Gmail account and create and flesh out your Google Profile immediately.
2. Join more social sites if you want your content to appear in the SERPs of your direct and secondary social circle networks, particularly the primary ones Twitter, Flickr and FriendFeed.
3. Optimize your social media content (tweets, FB and LinkedIn status updates, blog feeds, etc) for target keywords to ensure your social content is shown in a wider number of social circle SERPs.
4. Gmail and Chat contacts get top billing in your social circle so choose your Gmail buddies wisely or remove them from your profile altogether.
5. Consider the type of social content that is popular and most often shared within your networks. Concentrate on building similar content in your public social media profiles to ensure it gets syndicated via your social circle.
6. If Universal Search wasn’t enough of a punch in the gut to convince you to optimize your multimedia content, consider Social Search to be that punch placed a little lower. Your shared photos just became another content channel.
7. Become more picky about who you follow and what social feeds you subscribe to. They have just become influencers in your every day search results.

What if I Don’t Like It?

If your particular social circle seems a little lightweight or top heavy, you can control what results you do and don’t see under your social search results. You can choose to either remove a social network from your Google profile (such as Twitter or Facebook), or remove a specific contact from your network.

You can ignore the social results at the bottom of the page when signed in, or if you don’t wish to see any social search results at all, simply conduct your searches while signed out of your Google account.

It’s important to note that Google doesn’t make your social circle public e.g. publish your list of chat buddies. It simply adds your buddies’ public information to YOUR social circle.

What Does it All Mean?

What this really means is that standard SERPs are a thing of the past. Over the last couple of years, we’ve come to expect that a search for *blue widgets* will pull up completely different results for someone in London and someone in New York. But with Google having rolled out personalized search, real time search and now social search, you and your flatmate could be sharing an Internet connection in the same room and be served very different SERPs for identical search queries.

As for how this impacts online marketing? For starters, if you’ve been hoping social media will just go away, it’s time to wake up and smell the pancakes. Not only is online social networking not going anywhere, it is thriving and changing how we search. It is now in your interest to expand your social network and create a presence on as many social sites as you can.

More importantly, your clients will be looking to you to help them understand how to use social search to their advantage. Embrace the opportunity and get socializing.

Twitter quietly rolled out a new feature today that enables users to choose a regional preference for viewing trending topics.

Called Twitter Local Trends, the new functionality gives users the option to set their regional location and view trending topics happening in their part of the world. For example, one of the screenshots pictured shows that the topic “Trafalgar Square” is trending for users that have United Kingdom set as their region (because it relates to a well known London icon), but not for users that have set their region to Worldwide.

At this stage, only seven countries and 15 cities in the US are available for selection (see screenshot below) but more will be added soon.

According to a post on Mashable, the feature has only rolled out to around 1 percent of Twitter users, but there’s nothing official on the Twitter Blog about it yet. I noticed it in my account this afternoon so I’m not sure if I’m part of the lucky 1 percent or whether it has rolled out to a larger audience since it went live this morning.

Regardless, when it does roll out to everyone, it will make a huge difference to how we use Twitter to target a regional audience. The benefits for geo-based mobile apps like Four Square and Gowalla should be immediately apparent. Add to that the ability to pinpoint regional trends in real time search and this becomes a social media game changer.

Everybody knows a business that is still sceptical about using Twitter. But when they see they have the power to follow and influence social media conversation in their specific target markets using Local Trends, I think even the sceptics could be convinced to start using Twitter as a full time marketing channel.