+Guy Kawasaki teamed up with +Samsung USA to offer his new book on #Google + What the Plus! as a free PDF download. What the Plus! is a collection of articles on making the best out of G+
Get it here http://yousend.it/whYuAr (the link will expire in about 5 hours, after that you can find it on Guy's page http://bit.ly/FQQPqU )
(Found via +ScienceSunday)
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What marketers can learn from cartoons
Here's an excellent (and huge!) article by +Tom Fishburne on creating content in the age of #social media
As a cartoonist and marketer, I learned that there is a lot to learn from the simple cartoon. Cartoons are “content worth sharing”. Today I want to talk about 5 lessons marketers can learn from cartoons, and I’m going to use cartoons to do it. These lessons are relevant no matter how you communicate with your audience. I’ll use case studies along the way too.
Tom explains why marketing content needs to be relevant ("worth sharing"), targeted, relevant to the audience, and much much more. Well worth the click (pun intended 
), read on at http://bit.ly/xOasC4
Google+: Reshared 4 times
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Also, proof that cats are smarter than dogs
I'm interested in the human nature and would like to measure the effect animals have on people's psychology. So, I'm posting the sample video below to test emotional response to human-like actions of animals. Please post in the comments how that video made you feel.
That said, every day is caturday, there's no need for lame excuses. Enjoy 
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Power Formula blog contacted a survey among #LinkedIn users. If you are into social media #marketing, check out the results:
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There are various solutions (with varying paying options) if you want to monitor your #social network efforts but there is also an open-source solution. +ThinkUp, led by +Gina Trapani, is a web application that can provide you statistics on your #Facebook , #Twitter and #Google + accounts and pages. Included are likes, reshares and responses per posts, followers and page like per day, etc.
It is also a self-hosted solution, which means that you get to avoid giving access to your data to another corporation, or be subject to ads and marketing efforts. Plus it is a great way to give your clients an additional tool for their marketing efforts.
You can see an example of the output here http://bit.ly/wiWH4j , it is my Google+ profile (this is optional, you can keep your statistics private). See also Gina's twitter stats page http://bit.ly/xgVHzv If you want to test it out, I have also opened the registrations on my personal installation for the next few days http://bit.ly/yCaxcH
To install it yourself, you just need a web hosting account with PHP/mySQL (a quick Amazon EC2 solution is also supported although I didn't try it). Setup and installation is rather easy with quite clear instructions.
You can learn more about ThinkUp and download the code at the official site http://bit.ly/xMOw1e
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If you have left Twitter for Google+, here is a way to stay in touch: ManageFlitter http://bit.ly/xmb2tk is a freemium service for managing your Twitter account. In it's free service it allows for copying your public Google+ posts on Twitter. The process is quite simple, you create an account with your Twitter credentials and just put in your Google+ URL in a form.
Check it out!
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www.Circlecount.com keeps on improving, this is a new feature that will show the location of your Google+ followers round the world. You also get a per country analysis, as well as gender stats.
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In case you didn't think you needed to be on Google+ since your social media presence on other platforms was "good enough", think again. As of this week Google is rolling out the "Search Plus Your World" feature, basically combining it's data from Google+ in the search results, both providing a more personalized result but also acting as a gateway to Google+.
As you can see on the screenshot below, the search results are now split vertically in two parts: the regular search results (but personalized with information on whether you or your friends shared a link) on the left and on the right related results from Google+. If you search for "music" you get Britney Spears's G+ profile.
Search Engine Land has more examples of these changes
http://selnd.com/wKFaBM
Now, Google says http://bit.ly/x5oIXJ they are not really favoring Google+ and they would want to add Facebook and Twitter on the right-part-of-the-screen results, if they just could make a deal with them. Of course until then, the situation is simple: If you're on Google+ and your competition isn't, you have a possible advantage (you also need to appear on Google's suggestions for your desired keywords). The fact is that Britney Spears didn't appear on the first page of search results for "music" yesterday, now she does.
So how do you get on the action? Google has a guide page http://bit.ly/y0GhHP but it's not really clear. Basically they are saying "get on Google+ and start posting useful content". Good luck then! 
Google now has it's own internet
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This is the blog of Markos Giannopoulos, devoted to web development, technology, the internets, etc. I've been working on, in and around the web for the last 16 years. You can find me on Google+ and Facebook.
