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Most of a year ago we asked "Will Google's Caffeine Update Really Change Search Results?" At that time, Google had announced a beta launch of a new indexing system for their search results. It took a while to roll that launch all the way out. It took until today.

"Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it's the largest collection of web content we've offered. Whether it's a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before."

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To refresh the old system Google re-analyzed the entirety of its cache. This created a lag in the results. With Caffeine, they say, they now analyze the web continuously in small portions, updating the search index as they go.

Whether the speed and relevancy claims that Google is making will be born out now that Caffeine is fully in effect remains, still, to be seen. Whether it is provable quantitatively or not, the Web remains for its users more of a process or relationship than a thing. So user taste with the new system will be the proof of the pudding.

Six Apart, the blogging software and media company, has acquired NaturalPath Media, an online ad network for “sustainable, healthy, and conscious lifestyles”, in other words, around green and healthy lifestyle. Financial terms were not disclosed.

NaturalPath was founded in 2006, and says has about 200 publishers in its network, including DrGreene.com, GreenLivingIdeas.com, ScientificAmerican.com and EcoSalon.com. With this acquisition, SA will have the “ability to help marketers reach women 25+ in highly engaged, influential media environments and provides more opportunities for NaturalPath Media publishers to increase revenue through premium conversational marketing programs,” whatever that means.

Release after the jump.

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Six Apart Acquires NaturalPath Media: #1 Green Network

SAN FRANCISCO, CA—06/07/10—Six Apart, the world’s leading blogging and conversational media company, today announced the acquisition of NaturalPath Media, the largest online advertising and media network for sustainable, healthy, and conscious lifestyles. The acquisition of NaturalPath Media bolsters Six Apart’s ability to help marketers reach women 25+ in highly engaged, influential media environments and provides more opportunities for NaturalPath Media publishers to increase revenue through premium conversational marketing programs.
NaturalPath Media’s portfolio of leading influential voices in Sustainability and Health extends the audience reach of the Six Apart network of sites, the #1 blog property in the U.S. according to comScore’s April figures, to nearly 90 million. The Six Apart Media network includes thousands of leading influential publishers as well as mid- and long-tail bloggers. Six Apart creates vibrant advertising programs that connect marketers and influential bloggers and publishers through a powerful suite of conversational marketing services and display ad products.

“NaturalPath Media is a valuable addition to the Six Apart Media network and strengthens our ability to help marketers reach highly influential green and healthy living consumers while they are engaging with content and conversations that are important to them,” said Chris Alden, CEO and Chairman of Six Apart. “By joining the Six Apart Media program NaturalPath Media publishing partners will be able to generate more revenue and increase traffic through our innovative conversational marketing programs which are sponsored by well known brands seeking to build awareness for their sustainability and cause-driven initiatives.”

NaturalPath Media is the #1 green media network with a potential reach of 18.4 million unique visitors per month (comScore (NSDQ: SCOR), April 2010). Its 200 publishers span categories such as Eating Well, Eco Moms & Family, Green Living, Health & Wellness and Eco Tech and include premium sites such as DrGreene.com, GreenLivingIdeas.com, ScientificAmerican.com and EcoSalon.com. These values-driven and cause-oriented sites can now leverage Six Apart’s relationships with marquee brand advertisers and conversational marketing capabilities to create deeper and more meaningful relationships with their readers.

Dr. Greene.com will be the first Natural Path Media publishing partner to launch TypePad Conversations, a unique conversational marketing solution enabling brands to inspire and sponsor authentic conversations, as an integral part of an upcoming online advertising campaign. “We are thrilled to be the first NaturalPath Media blogger to participate in TypePad Conversations,” said Cheryl Greene. “This is a terrific way for us to grow revenue and drive traffic while inspiring our audience to participate in authentic conversations on topics that they are passionate about.”

“The combination allows NaturalPath Media to leverage Six Apart’s conversational marketing tools and massive audience reach to bring scalable brand marketing to the evolving social web,” said David Phillips, CEO and Chairman of NaturalPath Media. “NaturalPath will retain its distinct identity as the web’s #1 Green Media Network with a values-driven mission shared by its premium publishers in the green, wellness and conscious lifestyle categories.”

Marketers interested in running a conversational marketing campaign can contact Six Apart by visiting sixapart.com/advertising.

About Six Apart
Six Apart is the world’s leading blogging and conversational media company, empowering publishers and marketers around the world to inspire and produce influential online content, conversations, and communities. Six Apart’s award-winning blogging software and services, including TypePad, Movable Type, and Vox, complement Six Apart Media, the #1 blogging and #2 conversational media property with a reach of nearly 90MM monthly unique users in the US (comScore April 2010). By combining a powerful suite of conversational marketing and social publishing services with relationships with millions of leading publishers and influential long-tail bloggers, Six Apart creates meaningful experiences for people interested in women’s lifestyle, sustainable & healthy living, home, entertainment, gaming, and technology. Founded in 2001, Six Apart is a global company headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Tokyo and New York City. Learn more at http://www.sixpart.com.

About NaturalPath Media
NaturalPath Media is the largest online media network for the sustainable, healthy and conscious living verticals. With over 200 premium publishers, NaturalPath Media connects advertisers and audiences by delivering integrated and customized marketing campaigns. Learn more at NaturalPathMedia.com

Media Contact
Jane Anderson
650-440-0540

The chalk drawing was Kat’s idea, as was the house full of balloons that my daughter woke up to this morning. It’s great to be 8, and my daughter woke to her second of three special days (as we had a party this past weekend with my Dad and Mom, and there’ll be festivities on Friday, as well).

I just wanted to share a few personal videos from the experience, because hey, why not?

This last one is Harold eating cake while we weren’t looking.

Why share family videos on my marketing blog? Because my business involves my family. My mom and dad work with me. My wife and kids support me. My daughter sometimes reviews products with me.

And because I can. Try that, mainstream.

And happy birthday, Violette!

While Facebook’s new analytics tool is not a Google Analytics killer, the company has finally rolled out the new Facebook Insights that was first demoed at f8 in April. The new Insight package will work with websites, applications, and Facebook Pages. The only requirement for websites that want to use the program is that they have Facebook Connect implemented.

Additionally, “you can now view analytics around specific stories liked on your website, or how many users commented on posts made on your Page”. This is additional information over the existing in-stream analytics data shown to Facebook Page administrators. While it’s not really anything beyond the Insights demonstrated at f8, there’s no doubt that users are anticipating the new Insights roll-out.

There will also be information about referral traffic. You can learn more via today’s blog post.

In May 2009, @Mashable, @TechCrunch and @BoingBoing were about equal as three of the biggest blogs on the planet. Each had about 1.85-1.90 million unique visitors in that month.

Fast-forward just a year later, and everything has changed. BoingBoing has dropped almost a million visitors, TechCrunch has gone nowhere, and Mashable has gained a million.

Why? Twitter.

@Mashable has over two million followers. Twitter started to really take off early in 2009, and Mashable totally capitalised. Twitter has easily become their primary focus point – they write a ton of Twitter content, and share heavily on the network. (As a comparison, Mashable has ‘just’ 207 thousand fans on Facebook – a tenth of the network size.)

@TechCrunch has a little under 1.4 million followers, but they don’t push anywhere near as hard as Mashable does on Twitter. That said, it’s enough to keep them in the game. (54,210 Facebook fans.)

@BoingBoing has just 43,219 followers. And doesn’t push hard at all. Indeed, BoingBoing isn’t even on Facebook. Which suggests to me that they either don’t really get the value of social media, or don’t think that they need it. For example – they don’t even use a retweet button on their blog.

After all, let’s face it – BoingBoing and Mashable aren’t all that different. Both are heavy recyclers of external content (although Mashable does write a lot more original material – TechCrunch is almost all original material and opinion). The main difference is Mashable is very much more attuned to the modern social media audience, both in content and presentation. Indeed, they made dramatic, intentional adjustments to capitalise on that audience shift.

BoingBoing did nothing. And until they realise that, and want to change, their numbers are probably only going to get worse. They’re still thinking old-school – Digg, Reddit, Delicious and Stumbleupon. And while you can still get some traffic spikes from those sources, it’s very much on the wane, and doesn’t begin to compare to the Terminator-like, never-ending, cannot-be-stopped onslaught of Twitter.

(Disclaimer: Yes, I know this is Compete, and yes, I now that this mostly represents US traffic. But unless you can prove to me that the relationship between these numbers is dramatically different around the world – and can show me where you get those numbers – it’s largely a moot point.)

Plunging into social media for the first time can be a bit daunting for individuals or businesses. There is a learning curve when it comes to becoming more social online, and it can take a while to learn what works and what doesn’t.  Here are a few of the best Do’s and Don’ts that can save you time and help grow your social media authority more quickly.

1. Start small

You’ll want to start small and try a couple services out at a time. Oftentimes newbies sign up for every social network under the sun and try to grow each of them. Guess how long they last? Building profiles for multiple social sites is hard work, so it’s best to start by only tackling a couple at first.

Once you find the right ones for you or your brand, then start to narrow your focus on those. Eventually you may want to scale your social media strategy to include more services, but you have to crawl before you can walk.

Start small, and then grow to other social networks as your confidence grows. Success breeds success.

2. Get a widget

Put a widget up on your site for your social networks. The best place to find followers is your own blog or site. Also, it’s much easier to get your readers and friends to vote or retweet your content than strangers. Adding a widget next to your content can help.

Facebook has a widget generator you can use, and the Tweetmeme badge is easy to add to your site as well.

3. Frequently test your buttons and widgets

Start testing which social media profiles have the most impact, then drop the rest. For example, if your site does really well with Facebook shares but hardly ever gets voted on Digg, then drop the Digg vote button.

Oftentimes you’ll see sites littered with tons of widgets and buttons. Having a gazillion widgets at the end of each article only creates noise and annoys the reader. Figure out which buttons are getting clicked, and drop the buttons that don’t convert. Ideally you’ll only have two or three widgets on each page.

You can tell which buttons are effective by using Google Analytics and goals to see who’s clicking what. You can also use A/B to see which types of buttons are getting more clicks.

4. Don’t annoy your followers

Sounds like common sense, right? Unfortunately, lots of companies that are just starting out with social media think the best way to “promote” their brand is to publish coupons, offers, news, and anything else related to their business.

Rule of thumb: if it’s something you personally wouldn’t like to receive, avoid it.

Your social media goal is to be helpful first. People follow and respect brands that are helpful, not self-promoting shills. Give first, then ask.

Try posting useful links to industry articles, answer questions, and engage. The followers, engagement, and ultimately sales will come if you’re helpful first.

5. Don’t fret about follower counts

Don’t believe all the spammy ebooks out there that sell you the notion that you can attract thousands of followers in a matter of days. Sure, you could do that and it’s not hard. But the types of followers who are going to be following you are mostly bots. Or they’re just following you in hopes that you’ll follow them back. Ultimately, they aren’t followers who would engage with you.

You want social media followers that are going to listen and interact with you, and 10 of those followers is worth more than a thousand bots.

It takes a while to organically build up a great social profile. Focus on building great content and being helpful, and the followers will come.

6. See what the pros are doing

Everyone has a different strategy when it comes to social media, and sometimes it’s best to take a look at people who are real social media experts. Lee Odden is a good example of someone using Twitter and Facebook to help people, which in turn grows his social media influence.

There are plenty of fantastic examples of people who truly understand how to interact and build powerful social media profiles the right way. Check out sites like WeFollow to find influential Twitter users within your niche.

7. Don’t overlook niche social media sites

When people think of social media, they typically think of Twitter or Facebook. But there are literally hundreds (maybe thousands?) of social media networks and sites that you can use to help promote your brand. Jut because a network isn’t huge doesn’t mean it’s not going to impact your social media strategy. Oftentimes targeted niche social sites can bring more targeted traffic to your site than larger sites.

If you’re smart, you can use smaller social networks to help promote your site on other bigger social networks. For example, I’ve written posts on web development that have made it to the front page of Dzone, a social media site for web development. Once the article made it to the front page of Dzone, the attention brought a lot of saves on Delicious, and subsequently made it to the Delicious front page. The delicious front page brought even more traffic, and those Delicious users voted the story up to the Digg front page. So, by simply submitting my site on a smaller niche news site with a great headline, I managed to make it to the coveted homepages of both Digg and Delicious.

Niche social news sites can be very powerful, and oftentimes much easier to become influential in than the larger sites. Here’s a list of social news sites organized by category.

8. Find people within your niche to follow on Twitter

The ideal follower on Twitter is one that has similar interests within your niche. You can find like-minded people to follow on Twitter through these  directories and odds are many will follow you back.

Once you’ve started following these people, start interacting with them. Participate in discussions, and retweet things they say that would be helpful to your community.

Not only will this method help build your follower counts, it also gives you more influence within your niche. You’ll find great friends that will help you promote your content and site too. Always remember to give first and ask later.

9. Stay Humble

Social media beginners often try to quickly establish themselves as “experts” within their field, but they have nothing to back it up. (For example, search for “social media experts” on Twitter. You’ll find many with only a handful of followers. Shouldn’t an “expert” have more?)

As with anything in life, nobody likes a know-it-all. Be humble. Ask questions. Teach, but don’t preach. Let others do the hyping for you. And they will if you’re helpful and humble.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | 9 Essential Social Media Tips for Beginners | http://www.toprankblog.com