But did you know that Google cares for their employees even when they’re no longer Google employees? No I don’t mean when they get fired, or quit. I mean when they’re six feet under.

In an interview with Forbes, Google’s Chief People Officer Laszlo Bock revealed a never-before-heard-of perk of working for the search giant: Death benefits.

If you are a Google employee and happen to meet your end, your spouse or domestic partner will continue to receive 50% of your salary for an entire decade. Not only that, but there’s no tenure requirement to be eligible for this perk. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been working for the company, you’ll receive the same death benefit as everyone else. That’s a big commitment to Google’s 34,000-odd employees.

Like I said before, it shouldn’t surprise anyone to learn of another awesome perk handed out by the folks at Google. But this one, which has no real benefit for Google the company, is pretty amazing.

Here are some other perks that Google employees enjoy, you know, if you’re job hunting or something:

• Fun stuff around the office, including bocce ball courts, bowling alleys, and a giant climbing wall
• Free gourmet food
• On-site medical care
• Travel insurance, even for personal vacations
• Paid maternity leave, for moms and dads (18 weeks & 6 weeks, respectively)
• Reimbursement for classes and degree programs completed while an employee
• Free legal advice and low-cost legal representation
• Occasional product giveaways, like customized Galaxy Nexus smartphones

Plus, Google’s on the cutting edge when it comes to benefits for LGBT employees and their partners. Earlier this year, they expanded their transgender benefits to include coverage of procedures like facial feminization and pectoral implants.

It’s nice to hear that Google takes care of their own in life and in death.

[Image Courtesy]

Want another?  Yesterday, we documented the existence of a new interface for Google products on the iPhone; a company exec used the word “eventually” to describe when Google would get around to creating interfaces for other devices.

Ignoring things isn’t a longstanding tradition at Google, however, and in any event, Google Mobile Updater “lets you install and update Google Mobile services.”  According to a product description, it will also “keep you notified of new Google Mobile services as well as updates to installed applications.”

The implications of this don’t seem to be too widespread, although we’ll keep an eye open to see if Ionut Alex Chitu’s readers come up with any insights.  Also, BlackBerry owners should at least be among the first to hear of it if an improved interface becomes available for their phones.

Adam Tornes documented a 234 percent jump in traffic, which is impressive enough.  It’s especially unusual, though, since he then wrote, “[T]here was little mention of the Monopoly game at McDonalds.com and the online game was hosted on a separate domain, monopoly.corsis.com.”

Tornes later continued, “In addition to more unique visitors McDonalds.com received a much greater attention share for the month of October; more than double the domain’s normal attention share, meaning during the month of October, visitors to McDonalds.com spent twice as much time as they typically do.”

I’m unsure how McDonalds.com’s visitors spent all that extra time, since there really isn’t much to read or do on the site.  Maybe they were just being thorough in checking that Monopoly information wasn’t around.  Regardless, Tornes dug into past numbers and found that pretty much all of McDonald’s offline promotions have had a significant impact on traffic to its site.

Not every business can give away expensive cars and tons of cash, but most can probably learn something from this trend.

When you post items on your blog or your site, and your blog has an RSS feed, your post(s) can appear on many other sites. In fact, on this blog, I encourage others to use my blog’s RSS feed and re-use it as you see fit. In fact, there are lots of other sites that use my feed as their site’s content. Not only do I encourage it, it actually helps me out in the long run–here’s why:

If another site uses my site’s RSS feed as their content, it is their responsibility to make sure that the pages are not seen as duplicate pages. Since my blog gets spidered first by the search engines, I’m the original–and others are duplicates. Furthermore, as I link to other pages on my site in posts, those links will appear in my RSS feed. And whenever my RSS feed is used as content on another domain (web site), there is a good chance that the link might count as a backlink to my site.

So, as you continue to post on your blog or site, don’t forget to link liberally to other pages on your site–those links will potentially count as backlinks to your site, not only as internal links but external links to your site’s pages. Sure, someone reading your blog or web site may read the post and stay on your site (which is a good thing), but what if they’re on another site that’s syndicated your RSS feed?

Before you post, you might want to create a list of important pages on your web site or perhaps your favorite blog posts. I keep a list of my “important” pages (pages that I might want to rank well in a search engine) for future use. And when I finish a blog post I quickly scan my list of “important” pages and add a few internal links. I also record the anchor text that I used to point to the page so I don’t use it again too often.

Initial Blog Syndication

Promoting your blog or web site’s RSS feed is important–it’s part of the link building process. First, you will most likely want to use a list like this and a list like this to make sure your RSS feed is promoted properly. There are also sites in your topic area that encourage RSS site syndication. For example, there are places like this that do a great job of syndicating content.

Once you get your RSS feed listed and syndicated, you will notice that other sites will tend to pick it up. This is a good thing. Really.

When your RSS feed gets noticed (or you use sites like this and this and this to syndicate your feed, you might notice that there are other networks and other sites like Plugim.com and Bumpzee.com what automatically will publish your RSS feed. Again, as your RSS feed appears on other sites, it will include links to pages on your site.

Here’s a Cool Trick

Want even a better trick? Rather than use “plugins” and scripts to automatically figure out related posts, do it manually. At the end of your blog post, include a few links to related posts. But, put those links in your post so they get into your site’s RSS feed. That’s much more powerful than using a “related posts” plugin. As an example of this, I’ve included “favorite posts” at the end of this blog post.

The bottom line this: if you publish your full RSS feed don’t forget about linking to your internal pages on your site using the appropriate anchor text–not only could those links be counted as internal links, those links could be counted as external links, as well.

Want to read some more of my favorite posts? Here are a few links below:

14 Ways to Disclose Sponsored Links – A funny satirical post about disclosing sponsored links.

Social Media Marketing is Popular But… – Why we are not seeing money being put into Social Media Marketing.

Social Bookmarking Sites List – My list of social bookmarking sites. Needs updating, but still useful.

Linking Campaigns – An older article about linking campaigns.

PPC Keyword Mistakes – I hope you’re not one of these people. If so, then you really really need my help.

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For once, the connection between a product (the people search website) and a social network actually made perfect sense to me: you can “claim” your profile in search results, then add to it or modify it.

The Wink Blog features a rundown of the key benefits of the new social network and I think they put the right one first.

• Control Over False or Defamatory Content: “Wink provides the owner of each profile complete authority to edit, correct or remove any content – photos, tags, labels, descriptions, links or feeds – in their profile. This helps them prevent false or defamatory information from persisting, and lets them present themselves as they’d like to be seen.”
• Detailed Public Search Listings: “including their biography, interests, work, school and other information. Additionally each profile can have multiple photos”
• Friend Feeds: Not just tracking your friends’ Wink profiles, but all “view a feed of their friends’ postings to any RSS-enabled site such as Twitter, Flickr, Jaiku, and Amazon Wish Lists, wherever they are across the Web.”
• Contact Me: “People can choose to have those who find them on Wink leave a message at Wink, reach them via their favorite social network, instant messenger service, Skype, email or phone.”
• Profile Claiming and Control: “People can use the industry standard MicroID to verify their ownership of webpages and public profiles found on Wink.com. Or they can associate a publicly known email address (work, school or personal) with their public search
  listing on Wink.com”

The bottom line: While none of us need another social network (do we?), the ability to have the final say in controlling your profile is always a boon for your online reputation management.

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The study of leading brand organizations from a variety of industries revealed general enthusiasm for social media along with a glimpse at how companies are measuring its effectiveness. Nearly 60% of respondents said social media met or exceeded their marketing expectations, leading more than 30% to plan to spend considerably more on these applications next year.

ROI is a top-of-mind issue for many marketers exploring the use of social media, and 35% of the respondents said their experience was positive while 41% said they didn’t know (which should please those who believe ROI is an irrelevant issue). However, direct sales was not an ROI goal for most marketers; instead, they were seeking engagement with the brand as the most important measure.

Even so, the means by which experience with the brand is measured needs some work. Site visitors, page views, and number of subscribers and community members were the key measures, but where people experience the brand with YouTube videos posted to other people’s sites, widgets on a varity of blogs, and blog posts resulting from blogger outreach efforts (among other content residing on the “edge"), these measures aren’t adequate for assessing the impact of social media efforts.

Still, you gotta love the quote from Prospero co-founder and VP of Technologies Rusty Williams:

The majority of respondents see engagement with their brand as the most important measure of social media success, while more concrete ROI measures such as sales and new business leads carry less weight.

Now that social media have proven their worth, marketers are talking about what’s next. Wisely, they’re focused on integrating community-generated content throughout their online properties. 

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Of course, in terms of market share, there’s only so much to go around; Google’s and Ask’s pieces of the pie got bigger, while Yahoo and MSN/Live weren’t so lucky.  There were more searches made, however, and so this is the way in which every engine benefited.

“September 2007 turned out to be a record month for search,” reports Compete’s Jeremy Crane.  “Overall search volume in the US reached the highest level with nearly 7.8 billion search queries.”

Yahoo had a 0.4 percent month-over-month increase, which could be better, but the Sunnyvale-based company is in no position to complain.  MSN/Live experienced a 1.9 increase, and one has to wonder if the company expected more following its Live Search update.

The real leaps were made by Google and Ask.  The volume of searches performed through Google rose by 5.0 percent between August and September, and this corresponded to 249 million more queries.  Ask experienced an even bigger percentage increase (21.4 percent), so it deserves some applause, too.  (Actual query volume increased by just 49 million queries, hence the qualifier “some.”)

So what can we conclude?  This wouldn’t be a shocking revelation, but it looks like Google is popular with young people; so, perhaps, is Ask.  And even if the search data doesn’t illustrate this point, we know it’s true: Crane adds, “Children still mourn the arrival of September every year.”

The latest, a case study detailing the efforts by financial services company Northwestern Mutual to take advantage of social media on its intranet, is particularly important because the company under the microscope isn’t high-tech. In fact, insurance companies are traditionally among the most conservative organizations when it comes to embracing new media.

But Norwestern Mutual jumped into social media with both feet, first invetigating the potential in 2005 and then deploying both employee blogs and RSS.

The company’s blogging effort was designed to achieve three specific goals:

• Efficient and accurate communication from management to employees
• A feedback loop from employees to management.
• Inter-employee communication.

The initiative was pushed by Northwestern Mutual’s Assistant Director of Corporate Relations, Andrea Austin, and taken up by the cross-functional Public Affairs Committee. Several concerns needed to be overcome, though, including fears that internal blogging would sap employee productivity (where have we heard that one before?), issues raised by Human Resources, and security concerns, among others.

Once these were addressed, the blogging platform—Mutualblog—was rolled out. It became evident quickly, though, that RSS would be required to make blogging practical. NewsGator provided RSS functionality for the company.

While the bloging initiative was designed to improve the culture of openness and honesty, the biggest benefits were seen in project and team management. About 70% of the active blogs at Northwestern Mutual focus on project management.

Nobody doubts that the blogging and RSS effort has produced business value but, not surprisingly, it isn’t easy to measure. Still, there is strong evidence that communication has improved and team and individual productivity have increased. Contrary to the concerns expressed by some that employee blogging will drain productivity, Northwestern Mutual’s experiment has shown that it helps address information overload. According to the case study:

Blogging has provided a partial solution to the (information overload) problem, allowing employees —- especially the geographically distributed field force —- to engage new content at their leisure, cutting down on conference calls, meetings, and email overload. The firm has even higher hopes for the recently launched RSS solution, which it expects to help cut down information overload as opt-in emails, newsletters, and corporate portal content transition into the RSS channel.

Next up for Northwestern mutual are efforts to drive greater employee adoption of blogs, bringing wikis and podcasting into the mix, and applying the social media efforts that have worked behind the firewall onto the World Wide Web for external communciation purposes.

The full study goes into considerable detail on Northwestern Mutual’s social media efforts. It costs $279, which is pretty damn cheap for any communicator looking for evidence to convince the powers that be that the naysayers are wrong and, when executed strategically, social media on the intranet produces real bottom-line business value.

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GM were pioneers when FastLane launched in January 2005, setting a standard for the measurable benefits of executive blogging and directly engaging with customers.

Indeed, GM became the early poster child for corporate blogging.

GM in the US continues to embrace social media, deepening its reach with additional blogs such as the FYI Blog, a channel for “the many voices of GM’s employees and friends and attempts to put a human face on our diverse activities,” as the blog describes its goal.

One thing GM hasn’t done is extend its public social media reach into the heart of traditional communication such as online resources for reporters and others interested in GM and its business which are designed for direct social engagement.

GM Europe, though, has done exactly that with the launch last week of the GM Europe Social Media Newsroom.

This new online resource for journalists and PRs from GM’s European subsidiaries offers a library of press releases and other media information about GM’s brands in Europe – Cadillac, Corvette, Saab, Hummer, Opel, Vauxhall and Chevrolet – on a website that’s designed for engagement and for sharing.

Every release or article is comment- and trackback-enabled so, just as with a blog, you can tell GM Europe your opinion about any of the content on the site, either directly on the site or linked from your own blog or website.

The site has RSS feeds so you can easily subscribe to the content and comments. You can save or post any press release or news article to any one of over 30 popular social bookmarking and sharing sites including Digg, del.icio.us, Facebook, Newsvine and StumbleUpon.

And there are links to GM photos – the company’s and well as those taken by GM customers and fans – on Flickr and to GM videos on YouTube.

Quite a comprehensive social offering for the media, not to mention PRs and interested bloggers.

About the only thing needed to make this resource really compelling is offering press releases as social media releases. Maybe that’s to come.

It’s quite interesting to also note that the site provides all content under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license, meaning you can use, adapt and share any of the content under the terms of that license.

And unlike the US-focused GM Media Center, the GM Europe Social Media Newsroom requires no registration – it’s openly available on the internet.

I do like the site’s strapline:

Product news and downloads for the online reporter

I’d say that description extends well beyond traditional mainstream media reporters. Wouldn’t you?

A great move by GM Europe, one that I would find valuable if I were an automotive journalist, PR or blogger (and I do find it valuable as an interested communicator). As far as I can tell, no other major car manufacturer offers anything similar.

Could be another pioneering step from a company that continues to innovate in social communication.

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