Google has developed tons of services and some of them are very valuable but not as widely used, Google Moderator is one of them. It is a very straight forward, easy-to-use service that allows a group of people to brainstorm, share ideas, questions, and opinions.

Google Moderator is more powerful than Google form in many cases because it allows participants to vote on other people’s ideas/ questions. Barack Obama’s transition team created a public Google Moderator series called “Open for Questions” which allows people to ask questions, give suggestions, as well as voting for the best ones.

How I’ve used Google Moderator:

Ask people to submit questions during a presentation

Send out a brainstorming session to colleagues

Venue ideas and voting for events

Live questions and responses during a webinar

Below is the official description of Google Moderator:

• Let your audience decide. Get to know your audience by letting them decide which questions, suggestions or ideas interest them most.

• Everyone’s voice is heard. The voting box at the top of page focuses attention on submissions recently added and on the rise, making it simple and easy to participate.

• Be creative. Include people in your preparation for lectures, interviews and hard decisions or work together to organize feature requests and brainstorm new ideas.

Google Moderator Homepage

We’ve all learned that Pepsi has decided to skip the Super Bowl ads in 2010 and will be injecting 20 million dollars into Refresh Project to improve community and customer relationships mainly through social media.

Seven hours ago, Google CEO Eric Schmidt posted this on Twitter:

Can’t wait to watch the Superbowl tomorrow. Be sure to watch the ads in the 3rd quarter (someone said “Hell has indeed frozen over.”)

It is quite interesting if you think about Google as a company built on advertising, is now placing ads on the mass media (previously for Google Chrome), while consumer goods like Pepsi is doing just the opposite.

From Eric Schmidt’s tweet, it is quite obvious to me that they have something planned for Super Bowl, will it be a Nexus One ad? I’m looking forward to seeing it tomorrow.

Apple iPhone was designed in the US, started in the US, and most of the great features and apps are based around the US. But apparently people in Asia love iPhone more than any other countries.

Source: Google Trends Insight

For a digital product like iPhone, it makes sense to approximately calculate popularity of the product by search volume, the crowds that are interested in purchasing iPhones are always the ones that have at least basic knowledge on the Internet; therefore, the main source of information for these crowds would be through online search.

Google just announced that 17 World Development Indicators can now be searched in Google search.

Therefore you will see this in Google search result if you look for Internet users of a country:

I’ve always been paying attention to World Bank as they have good amount of high quality data visualization and very useful data.
With Google’s power, I pulled up the graph above in no time using Google’s visualization tool. As you can see, 77.1% of South Korea’s population uses the Internet, it’s the highest in the world followed by the States with 72.4%. China went up quickly in 2006 and still growing rapidly.

Play around with this graph

This entry is also featured as one of the “It’s Delicious” series postings on Asia Digital Map.
In online content creation, Korea has been the biggest in the world. They have the highest portion of Internet users who enjoy publishing web content, more than 55% of the Internet users have uploaded articles, photos, music, videosand other digital content.

Lately, company Playstreet created this mapping site, which breaks Seoul into 29 areas, users can pick the area and virtually walk on the street. The map shows you exactly where you are, and in terms of accuracy, I think they have done a better job than Google Street View since Google sometimes messes up the numbers on some streets.

Also, as shown on image above, the map shows names for each building/ shop, which I think it’s something Google Street View can learn from.

Now Playstreet has partnered with Web Concepts (NZ company) and working on ShowStreet; a map for New Zealand, and it will be launched in Australian soon. Would be great if they add social media elements to the map in the future.

Play around with it now!

Many new business owners ask me what to do with their new brands, they ask me if they should invest in search engine optimization for their websites so that their new sites can be more “visible” on the online world. Here’s the sad news for them, SEO doesn’t mean anything at all, SEO shouldn’t be a noun, and it shouldn’t show up on people’s name card as a job title. Because “content” is the only thing that matters.

Why do Business Owners love to go for SEO

Okay, if SEO doesn’t mean anything, why do small business owners spend money on it? Many of them don’t have enough knowledge on digital techniques like SEO. All they know is that after they invest in some online project with a fancy name (SEO), their company website will show up higher on Google search results. Because the result of having SEO sounds very tangible for them, it’s always easier to convince/trick them to use the services.

Google doesn’t like SEO, they like Content

Many so-called SEO gurus like to claim that they know the magic tricks to control organic results on search engines. They lied. Let’s think about it from Google’s point of view. In order to keep everything as relevant as possible, Google keeps upgrading, and improving their bots’ algorithm with the goal to make their bots smart enough to analyze websites like how human would do. Let’s assume Google bots were human, in order to make him believe that your website is the most relevant result for a keyword, you’ve got to impress him with uniue content as the first step, really doesn’t have anything to do with SEO techniques.

SEO is not a long term solution

Similar to marketing principles, SEO is just like packaging a product. People might like it at first, but after found out that there’s no true value in it, visitors or Google might stop being impressed by it, therefore your well packaged (SEO) site will go back to the rank that you deserve if your content is not impressive to Google.

SEO techniques don’t spread

Sites don’t link to you because of the SEO techniques on your site, they link to you for the original content you created, or maybe for who you are/ what your company does. And Google give page rank mainly based on how many backlinks a website has.

The Real Trick

Sites that can’t be found on the search engine are basically invisible. The best trick to get your site on first page of search results is to ignore all the tricks. When creating a website, think only about how to deliver the best information and how it will interest audience. Think about the true value of your content, what’s in it for your audience? And that’s the ONLY thing you need to know about optimizing your search ranking.

Google constantly improves and adds value to their services. At a recent US press conference, they mentioned that they have been considering adding micro-blogging messages to Google search.

Google can easily launch this new service as they have already been offering blog search tools and the number of micro-blogging networks is also very limited.

Social Media Monitoring Tools might need to add more value to their services if Google actually decides to work on micro-blogging search project. Also, people might start to SEO their tweets and that’s another reason why some digital marketing experts said that web content in the future will be created for and read by search engines instead of visitors.