A common mindset associated with social media:  ‘the more friends you have, the higher your status.’ Numbers can show how influential you are on the web (klout score) but numbers aren’t everything. Sure, your company page may have thousands of fans—but what if they’re only there for a quick promotion just to jump ship afterwards? This is every brand’s worst nightmare: an uninterested audience. Are they really as interested as they appear? Could they even be spammers, diluting your brand’s Facebook wall with noise? These situations must be taken in to consideration as you amass Facebook Fans and Twitter followers.

If you’re looking to promote your brand on Facebook or Twitter, you probably have the notion of ‘more fans means greater success’ hammered in to your head. This is not always the case as those fans may not stick around for the long run and any tactics you use to pump up your fan count may only be a temporary means of creating interest. The easiest methods to use are giveaways and limited availability offers. As with the case of Einstein Bros.’ free bagel giveaway, it brought their number of Facebook fans from less than 5,000 to an astounding 400,000. Before you run off to put into motion a massive product giveaway, realize this: those 395,000+ fans may like free bagels, but do they like Einstein Bros. enough to pay for their bagels again? While enough of those new fans wholeheartedly enjoyed their free bagel, they may not be interested at all in buying more bagels from Einstein Bros.

Targeted Connections

The best practice is to filter your promotion. Blatantly pushing an offer will reach those who are simply not interested, putting your social network efforts at risk of being discredited as spam. Targeting those who are interested in your industry is a very powerful thing. If you’re reviewing the latest and greatest Apple product, you won’t want to promote to die-hard PC enthusiasts, but consider promoting to people interested in buying a new computer and have yet to decide which company to purchase from in addition to those who are already loyal to your brand.

Influencers

Another tip is to use influencers or those who specialize in your industry. In promoting a product or service, be sure to contact blogs and other consumer product review websites that focus on similar products or services. These influencers can be invaluable. They already have a following of consumers who trust them to provide advice and insight into their industry. Consider a unique spin, such as including benchmark tests others haven’t published or a review from the perspective of the average consumer, a professional, a graphic designer and so on.

Influencers can also be used to extend your own network, whether they be Facebook fans or Twitter followers. Perusing through your replies or posts on your wall should give you an idea of who will be a good influencer. Are they actively engaged in conversation relevant to your brand? Sending links and offers to these people is a great way to increase your brand’s presence by ensuring everyone receives some kind of benefit for following you. Creating exclusive promotions for influencers to use and spread to their network will bring in new people who would be interested in your brand, at the same time thanking existing fans for their loyalty. This method is most likely to attract the highest number of people interested in your brand. They will remain fans/followers beyond the promotional offer as they share the same interests as the influencer who referred them. Social Media Examiner recommends a digital gift card with a limited amount of uses that can be embedded on a blog or online profile. Ultimately it comes down to ease of use and how well it can be spread. Make sure your promotion is easy to fill out and doesn’t look like spam.

Customer Service, Brand Reputation

A consumer looks for company engagement beyond the occasional email discount or the opportunity to fill out a survey. As more brands compete for attention, the idea of a personalized experience is consistently lost. Social networking provides the opportunity to gauge the overall sentiment around your brand and whether or not people are satisfied with what you’re offering. If and when you find the consumer disappointed, this is the perfect opportunity to regain their loyalty. No one expects a brand or company to be perfect, but the fact that some go out of their way to engage consumers and resolve their issues is appreciated. While that person may be completely dissatisfied with the product, a representative looking to remedy the situation is impressive to the consumer and makes them feel important. The key is to really listen to the customer’s wants and needs. These efforts might regain the consumer’s favorable opinion. They are then likely to share the positive experience with their network.

Have your social media efforts been successful? Tell us your story of how your followers/fans have interacted with your brand and what you’ve done to keep them interested.

Last Thursday, our great friend and colleague Steve Wiideman, SEO Expert, has announced the launch of his new project — Blog Marketing Toolkit. With the promise of “turbo-charging” your marketing, Steve provides an invaluable education for members, including tutorials on SEO, pay-per-click advertising, video marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, Wordpress—a handful of guides marketing agencies don’t want you to see.

“I developed this website to help you get the most from your Internet Marketing Strategy,” explains Steve. “While I’ve emphasized ‘blogs’ as a medium for marketing your business online, they really only make up for about 15% of this entire website.”

Steve is giving away free 1-year subscriptions for signing up for his SEO Services. Hurry while they last! http://www.blogmarketingtoolkit.com/

Our friend Michael Stelzner, the executive editor over at the Social Media Examiner, sat down with Brian Solis to find out how to succeed with social media. Brian is the author of Engage: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate and Measure Success in the New Web and co-author of Putting the Public Back in Public Relations.

During this interview, you’ll gain some great social media insight, discover some key mistakes businesses make, and learn which corporations are excelling with social media.

Mike: In your book, you made the following statement: “We are forever students of new media. We should never strive to master something that evolves much faster than our ability to grasp its lessons.”

Can you elaborate on what you meant?

Brian: Yes. We can’t rest on our laurels based on the successes of others, because this medium, the processes, the techniques, the cultures of social networks are evolving quickly. So applying templates to them or assuming confidence in past experiences don’t last long enough for them to be promising for the future.

Mike: What you’re really saying is that you should constantly make sure you are experimenting and studying what others are doing to ensure that you’re on the edge?

Brian: Yes, but not just on the edge.  You must be able to bring what’s on the edge back to the center. In the process, you actually contribute to the evolution of the industry.

Mike: I know you’re a big advocate of blogging for business. Can you give us some of the biggest mistakes you see corporate bloggers making and why you think they’re making them?

Brian: The biggest mistake I see is they’re not blogging. The secondary mistake is that they’re using blogs as just extensions of every other push medium they have in operation today, whether that’s a marketing sheet or a website.

A lot of times I’ll read corporate blogs and they’re very self-serving or they’re very shallow, or they’re just done because you’re told you need to do it and you’re supposed to introduce or inject passion into it.

If you look at some of the blogs like 37signals, their blog ultimately became a book in terms of the lessons they share there. It’s just a value-added resource. You go there as a destination so that you can learn, and you can walk away with direction and empowerment and inspiration.

Mike: Let’s talk about a big company or two that you feel are doing social media right. What are they doing?

Brian: One is Starbucks because they’re experimenting. It goes back to the part where we were discussing being a student of new media.

You see what they’re doing on Facebook and Twitter. They’re absolutely engaging. They’re rhythmic. They have a programming or editorial calendar in place and every day there is something new. There are comments, questions, and polls. There are things that are offered in terms of incentives or rewards.

But they’re also doing things that show they’re trying to actively grow by going to where people are specifically. For example, Starbucks did something very interesting with a company called Klout that didn’t get much fanfare, but it’s really interesting in terms of what’s to come in social media.

Klout is a service that allows you to identify influencers on Twitter. Influencers are people who can move the needle around certain topics. Starbucks decided to test it.

They went to Klout to find all of the influencers around coffee, those people who have the ability to drive activity.

They went out and rewarded all those influencers with free samples of their Pike’s Peak coffee. What better way to reward somebody for their level of influence that they’ve attained and maybe earn some relationships in the process, or at least attention?

Mike: In addition to Starbucks, can you talk about one other well-known company that you think is doing social media well?

Brian: Dell.  Here’s one of the reasons I find them to be so fascinating. This again is a lesson that is taught in the book. There is a whole chapter about this idea.

One of the things that works against any champion of social media is the culture of the company. But really where the potential of social media is realized is in your ability to learn from engagement and adapt accordingly, and to introduce or evolve new products and services that are more meaningful to the communities or the marketplaces where you’re trying to earn greater market- and mindshare.

Dell has demonstrated that their organizational culture gets it. It’s from the bottom up, it’s from the outside in, and it’s from the top down. Michael Dell believes in this so much that he spends weekends and evenings working with his teams to figure out ways they could be more relevant. Plus, the team gets motivated by it.

One such example that I don’t necessarily see or read about is how they attack issues that are basically emerging problems. Dell says, “Let’s monitor for things that are about to go wrong or that are just going wrong now and nip them in the bud.  We pay attention to driver issues or hardware issues as one, two, three, four, or five people start to mention these issues. The minute it hits a certain point, we put a team on it, find a fix, and introduce the solution to the marketplace before it becomes a real problem, before it makes blogs, before it makes the press.”

Mike: What are your views about Facebook fan pages? How important do you think they are today and how important will they be two years from now?

Brian: I was speaking at a conference recently and said something that turned out to spark a massive debate afterwards. That was, “By this time next year, brands will be spending more time on their Facebook brand pages than they will be on Twitter.”

That just sent everybody into a riot. Twitter is beloved. Twitter really puts the “me” in social media, because we bring a little bit of ourselves to that. Even though we do so with Facebook, there is something a little bit special or personal with Twitter.

Twitter has even said this. It’s less of a social network than an interest or themed network where individuals are forming relationships around context or interests.

The Facebook fan page, or the “brand page” as I call it, is a hub that can guide and drive experiences, but also can define them. By “define,” I mean it’s one thing to have interactions on the wall. It’s one thing to respond to comments. It’s another thing to be able to customize those tabs.

If you think about it, FBML, that language that you’re able to use to customize these tabs, allows you to do some really fascinating things. Not too many people understand that you can actually install Google Analytics on a tab in Facebook so you can start to measure the activity—almost like you can with your website analytics, to get intelligence necessary to improve the experiences.

So, Facebook is probably, in my opinion, one of the most underutilized networks out there from a programming standpoint and from an engagement standpoint. I’m bullish on it, if you can’t tell.

Mike: I honestly do believe that’s where it’s at right now. I actually tweeted recently, “I can’t believe I’m actually enjoying Facebook more than Twitter.” I almost had to cringe when I said it.

Speaking of Facebook, on our fan page, we posted that I was going to be doing this interview and asked our fans to chime in with their questions. Mari Smith asked, “What is your daily routine and what tools do you use to keep on top of everything?”

Brian: I call it the attention dashboard. Facebook is like an attention hub. I’ve created an attention dashboard that pulls in content from all different types of sources across multiple networks into one place based on keywords of interest tied to levels of influence so I can at least get the skinny on certain things.

Mike: Is this a custom thing, or do you use a public tool?

Brian: It’s a custom thing.

Mike: You’re going to have to release that as a product.

Brian: I released part of it as a product with the help of Christopher Peri. It’s a product called FriendFilter. It added this level of intelligence to surfacing the people who are following you on Twitter, for example, but only showing you the ones who might be of interest to you so that you could consider following them back.

Mike: So the attention dashboard is how you keep up on the hottest and latest trends in the industry and that’s how you decide to write content for your blog? Is that correct?

Brian: No, that’s how I stay smart. I write on the things that move me at an emotional or intellectual level, or if there is something incredibly important that I need to share with people, to get them to move in a particular direction.

Mike: Where do you see social media headed in the next few years? Give me the mile-high view.

Brian: About a year ago, I talked about the idea of syndication and aggregation, meaning that we were going to be subjected to multiple networks to which we’d have to pay attention, as well as mobile networks to which we would also have to pay attention using other devices.

At some point, all of these things are going to have to aggregate in some way, shape or form, where we could have a strategic presence. Look at services like Check.in, where you can immediately broadcast your presence. Let’s say I show up at the Westin Hotel in San Francisco—I would use a service like Check.in to broadcast or syndicate my presence to Foursquare, Gowalla, etc.

Those are all temporary bandages to address a bigger issue. That is, how are you going to manage your strategic presence online? And also, how are you going to stay connected to those who matter to you without having to be across multiple networks at the same time?

What the future holds, I believe, is this idea of semantic intelligence and filtering that are going to allow a lot of this to work for you without you having to do everything manually.

We see tastes of this on the horizon even now with companies like my6sense. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that company. You run your Twitter feed through it, and through that, it’s able to learn how you interact with the feed. As it learns more about you—and this learning is very rapid—it only feeds you the tweets, or at least at the top-line tweets, it feels would be most appropriate for you regardless of when they were published, earlier today or at the moment.

It learns and it gets better as you interact with it. If you follow thousands of people, imagine how wonderful it would work for you over time. Imagine applying that same technology across multiple networks into one stream or into one river of relevance, if you will.

Mike: Brian, where can folks learn more about you?

Brian: They can learn more about me at BrianSolis.com, on Facebook, Twitter which is @BrianSolis, or they can pick up the book Engage!, which is hopefully at a bookstore near them or definitely on Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com.

Mike: Brian, I just want to thank you very much for taking time out of your day. You’ve been a great fountain of knowledge. I’m looking forward to seeing some great things from you.

Brian: Thanks so much. I do really appreciate it. Congratulations on all your success as well.

Augie Ray is a Senior Analyst at Forrester Research. He is a leading expert on Social Computing and social media marketing.

Brands are making plenty of money in social media:  Dell Outlet’s Twitter account has generated millions for Dell, the Intel Channel Voice community has decreased costs by eliminating the need for expensive in-person events, and P&G used media mix modeling to demonstrate that the BeingGirl.com community is several times more effective at driving sales than the brands’ television ads.

Many marketers can draw a straight line between investments in social media marketing and financial results, but many more cannot.  This doesn’t mean social media marketing is ineffective; it just means that marketers have to recognize benefits beyond dollars and cents.  Facebook fans, retweets, site visits, video views, positive ratings and vibrant communities are not financial assets—they aren’t reflected on the balance sheet and can’t be counted on an income statement—but that doesn’t mean they are valueless.  Instead, these are leading indicators that the brand is doing something to create value that can lead to financial results in the future.

Traditionally, few brands have wholly evaluated their marketing in directly measurable financial terms, and my new Forrester report recommends a traditional measurement approach for innovative social media marketing programs.  Using a Social Media Marketing Balanced Scorecard, marketers can evaluate a diverse set of short- and long-term benefits that are both financial and not.  This approach furnishes several benefits, such as aligning measurement to all corporate objectives and not just sales; providing a means for gaining consensus from diverse stakeholders; and avoiding short-term gains at the expense of long-term brand health.

An affective Social Media Marketing Balanced Scorecard considers metrics from four different perspectives:

1. Financial: Has revenue or profit increased or costs decreased?
2. Brand: Have consumer attitudes about the brand improved?
3. Risk Management: Is the organization better prepared to note and respond to attacks or problems that affect reputation?
4. Digital: Has the company enhanced its owned and earned digital assets?

Marketers who only seek to measure results in one of these perspectives get an incomplete picture and as a result are unable to make effective decisions about social media marketing investments.  It is only by recognizing all of the benefits delivered by social media marketing that the complete value of these efforts can be understood.

Our friends over at Flowtown put together another superb infographic related to Social Media. Not much to say here except that, yep, we’re addicted ourselves.

The folks over at Search and Social put together this nice Infographic depicting where StumbleUpon came from and how it grew to be one of the biggest traffic-drivers in social media.

Find more information About StumbleUpon on this site.

The Real Results series is supported by Gist, an online service that helps you build stronger relationships. By connecting your inbox to the web, you get business-critical information about key people and companies.

VCs and angel investors might be last on your list of usual Twitter suspects. Sure, many of them have social media accounts and they certainly look at and test a lot of social media apps, but aren’t their super-stealthy, no-details-disclosed deals generally kept off the social media radar?

While it’s true that many minutiae (or dollar amounts) of startup investment deals are kept off the tubes, VCs and angels use social media extensively for research, promotion and other purposes.

We spoke with a number of investors and startup advisers to learn how venture capitalists are using social media for real results.

Finding Founders and Investments

Lowercase Capital’s Chris Sacca said he often finds investment opportunities through Twitter. “Fanbridge came to me after I wrote a tweet asking if there were any bootstrapped, profitable startups with founders working late on a Friday night,” he wrote to us. “They replied that they totally fit that bill. It is now one of my favorite portfolio companies.”

He continued to note that a Twitter stream and search can also provide valuable insight into a company’s culture and viability. “A startup’s account gives me a very solid sense of their popularity and visibility with users. I also use Twitter search to see whether users are enjoying a product or service and to uncover whether it is solving a real-world problem. The tweets don’t lie.”

SproutBox, an early-stage accelerator/incubator, similarly uses social media as its “primary source of deal flow,” said co-founder Mike Trotzke. “We also use Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn extensively for research. If we’re interested in an app, we immediately look up the entrepreneur’s profiles. If we know them, it reminds us how. If we don’t, we find common connections and get some context about what they do. I don’t think we could do what we do, at the scale that we do, if social media didn’t exist.”

Angel Dave McClure also stated, “I use LinkedIn for lookups on key founders/employees/advisors,” and Sacca noted, “Looking at a founder’s tweets can give me a strong sense of who they really are and what matters to them. I can gather a very intuitive sense of their personality as well as their skills.”

Building Reputations and Buzz

“Everyone has money to invest; there are hundreds of VCs. Entrepreneurs want investors who have a reputation and can add value.” Dodge added that many of the better-known angel investors, such as Dave McClure and Chris Sacca, use blogs and Twitter for the exact same reasons.

All that reputation has applications after the investment, as well. If there’s one thing the social web is great for, it’s word-of-mouth marketing. If a VC has taken the time to build a reputation online, he or she is probably an influencer in the tech startup sphere. A simple tweet or blog post can do wonders for a new app’s adoption rates and interest from mainstream media.

McClure told us he uses the social web to help generate buzz for good companies. “I regularly share and tweet articles about companies both pre- and post-investment to get (their) attention, and to demonstrate awareness and marketing support,” he said. Trotzke also shared, “It just makes sense… that we would tweet about apps opening and closing — and that people would retweet the opportunity.”

And Robert Scoble, another well-known figure in the startup scene, said, “I’d use social media to tell people what you’re passionate about.” Scoble frequently uses Twitter and other services such as FriendFeed for exactly that purpose, and his words help drive traffic and generate interest in newer services. Any investor who’s put in his time building an online reputation should be able to do the same.

Clearly, whether they’re finding founders, pumping up the buzz for apps or building reputations of their own, VCs are using social media in a multitude of investment aspects.

Megan Berry is Marketing Manager for Klout, the standard for online influence. She also blogs at The Huffington Post and Brazen Careerist. You can follow her on Twitter at @meganberry.

You know your business can’t just wing it on Twitter, you need a strategy. But how do you get there? A lot of social media advice revolves around confusing, high-concept buzzwords: There are only so many times you can be told to “listen” and “engage.” Concrete advice can be hard to come by, and while this guide won’t tell you what you need to tweet, it will provide you with the real questions you need to ask in order to craft a Twitter strategy for your business.

1. Choose Your Audience

Here is a quick example: Look up at least 10 of your customers on Twitter (a quick name search on Google can turned up their Twitter profiles). Once you’ve found some, look at who they’re following and who they talk to. These people could also become part of your audience. Look at how they describe themselves and what terms they talk about. Use those keywords and terms to find like-minded people.

The goal here is not to find everyone you’d like to interact with (that would probably be next to impossible), but to find people who might fit into your audience. Try to pay attention to who has influence in your audience. For example: who are people talking to, about or retweeting? Who do they seem to ask for advice? Once you have a decent group, move on to step two.

2. Understand How They Speak

• Look up what people are saying about your company. Are they saying good things or bad things? Are they asking for advice about what product or company to choose? Are they giving feedback about their experiences after the fact?
• Do the same for your competitors. Note if your competitors are jumping in or influencing any of these conversations.
• Notice the way your audience talks. Are they generally formal or informal? This will be very different depending on the companies you are tracking and the people you attract. It’s always good to match the tone of your audience.
• Look at what your audience shares and retweets. What kinds of links and articles do they like? What kinds of terms and ideas get them excited or annoyed?
• Note any hashtags or other ways your audience connects. Look up those hashtags to see if they have any real traction (if they’re all spam or if people are really using them to connect).

3. How Much is a Twitter Lead Worth?

This is a bit more theoretical but it’s an important step that many companies forget. The reason you’re involved with Twitter isn’t just to say you’re there, it’s because you’re looking for a good return on investment. So what is it that you’re after? It might be as concrete as sign-ups and sales or as ephemeral as buzz and brand awareness.

Depending on your goal, try to figure out how much each person is “worth.” This almost certainly won’t be an exact number, but you should get a general idea. For example, if you’re doing B2B sales and a sale is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, you’re going to have a very different strategy than a company with millions of users that makes its money from advertising.

4. Set A Goal and Track It

Setting a goal is just the start of your strategy, you also need to track it with metrics. Choosing metrics does not just mean tracking your follower count because the count isn’t always a totally accurate measure of how many people are paying attention to your account.

There are obviously different approaches depending on the size of your fan base. If you have a large audience, you might not be able to put a lot of time into each lead. Your overall goal will likely be about brand awareness and creating buzz for your company. You should consider metrics that capture overall influence such as retweets, blog posts and clicks.

If you have a targeted audience, each lead probably carries more value. You overall goal will likely be to generate new leads. You should consider metrics like sales, email sign-ups, @messages, direct messages and clicks.

5. Define Your Approach

• How formal or informal do you want to be?
• Should you include buzzwords or hashtags?
• How much effort should you put into reaching out to specific followers or finding new ones?
• What kind of links and content should you share?
• Can you do any special offers or campaigns on your account?
• What’s the style of your company? You have know your company’s message and define its personality. Your followers will appreciate the authenticity.

Any Twitter strategy is a perpetual work in progress. Just deciding that you need a strategy is an important first step that will have you thinking about what and why you tweet. The key is to keep experimenting: Twitter is ever-changing and to succeed on it you need to be flexible, but you also need to know where you’re headed.

Facebook for iPhone 3.1.3 has just been released in the App Store, bringing a series of new features including the ability to play Facebook videos on your phone.

Other additions in this update include the ability to view and write on the walls of events, and a new width for the photos you upload: 720px. There’s also a series of bug fixes in the release. You can download the app on iTunes here.

While its iPhone app impresses, however, Facebook is still notably without an iPad app. Its Android app, meanwhile, is somewhat lackluster.

by Amy-Mae Elliott

Here we bring you 10 fun facts about Google to quench our own thirst for Google knowledge as well as hopefully offer you a distracting diversion from your daily life.

1. The First Google Doodle

Google’s famous homepage “Doodles” (the changing Google logo graphics) are well known and enjoyed by millions around the world as a way to mark an event or anniversary. But did you know that the very first Google Doodle was designed as a kind of “out of office” message?

In 1998 Brin and Page took the weekend off to go the Burning Man festival in Nevada. The Burning Man doodle (shown above), was designed by the Google guys and added to the homepage to let their users know they were out of office and couldn’t fix technical issues like a server crash.

2. Interesting Figures from the Google IPO

While the initial price for Google’s stock at its Initial Public Offering in August 2004 is an interesting stat in itself, there’s more to the story. The opening price for Google’s stock was $85 per share. At the time of writing, the stock price was $483 but has soared as high as $600 in the past year, making GOOG a rather nice investment for many.

A bonus factoid from Google’s IPO process is the value Google stated it hoped to raise on its S-1 form — as much as $2,718,281,828. It may just look like a string of numbers to non-mathletes, but 2,718,281,828 is actually the first ten digits of the mathematical constant ““e”,” showing that even as their company was planning to go public, the Google guys could still geek out with a bit of numerical humor.

3. The First Google Storage Was Made From LEGO

As proud hosts to Google back when it was still a research project, and known as “BackRub,” here Stanford now showcases the original Google storage from way back in 1996. It’s made up of a whopping 40 GB (less than a modern iPod) and it’s made from, as fans of the building bricks will be delighted to see, LEGO. It even hash funny mini-figures on the top.

Legend has it that the reason for the LEGO construction was that the Google guys needed an easily expandable, and cheap way to house 10 4 GB hard drives, and LEGO fit the bill. Whether the primary colors of the bricks used were the hues that went on to inspire the Google logo’s design is up for debate, but we’d guess it wasn’t just a coincidence.

4. Google’s First Ever Tweet

Google’s first ever Twitter post was as satisfyingly geeky as you could hope for. The message, sent in February 2009, reads “I’m 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010.”

For anyone not fluent in binary, here’s a hint — it’s a well known phrase from the company’s homepage. Got it? Yep, it reads: “I’m feeling lucky.”

5. Google Rents Goats

This one isn’t actually one of Google’s infamous April Fools’ Day jokes: Google rents out goats. Yes you read that right. It rents goats from a company called California Grazing to help cut down the amount of weeds and brush at Google HQ.

The operation of 200 goats (plus herder and a border collie) is kind to the environment, and as Google puts it: “A lot cuter to watch than lawn mowers.”

6. Google’s Impact on Language

While you’d think the news that the Merriam-Webster and Oxford English Dictionary adding “google” as a verb to their lexicons in 2006 would thrill the search engine, Google was actually none too pleased with the development.

“We’d like to make clear that you should please only use ‘Google’ when you’re actually referring to Google Inc. and our services,” the company wrote in a blog post at the time.

The rationale behind the semantic displeasure was that Google had “a brand to protect,” and feared Google would “slip from trademarked status into common usage.” Now, four years later, we have to say Google was fighting a losing battle — just ‘google it.’

However, we’ve found some other Google-themed linguistic delights for you — a Google staffer is commonly referred to as a “Googler,” while a new team member joins as a “Noogler.” Nooglers also used to wear a colorful hat with a spinner on top. According to a former employee, those hats are now pretty scarce in some offices, instead: “Every Noogler gets a yellow smiley balloon and a nameplate.”

7. Google Is Dog-Friendly

Google is a super dog-friendly company. It proudly names “company dogs,” like Yoshka (described as a “free-range Leonberger”) pictured above. Yoshka accompanies Urs Holzle, senior VP operations and Google Fellow to the Googleplex. Less senior staff are also allowed to bring their dogs to the office.

According to Google’s “Dog Policy”, one indiscretion too many on the Google carpets, or aggressive behavior, means Lassie will have to stay at home in the future. Strong bladdered and friendly canines are more than welcome across the campus.

Unfortunately, cats are not quite as welcome. Here’s an excerpt taken directly from Google’s Code of Conduct: “Google’s affection for our canine friends is an integral facet of our corporate culture. We like cats, but we’re a dog company, so as a general rule we feel cats visiting our offices would be fairly stressed out.”

8. Google’s First Ever “Company Snack” Was Swedish Fish

Back in February, 1999, the chewy candy known as “Swedish Fish” became the first ever company snack (not counting beverages) that was ordered into the Google office.

Although a relatively small event, it has led to big things. Google is infamous in the industry for treating its employees to not just free drinks and snacks on tap, but full-on gourmet meals, three times a day at a plethora of on-site cafes and eateries, as well as regular BBQs during the summer.

Brin and Page have been quoted in the past as saying no Googler should have to go more than 100 feet for food, leading to snack-filled “microkitchens” that are liberally dotted around the Google offices.

In fact, the free food is said to be so tempting that Googlers risk the “Google 15,” similar to the “Freshman 15,” where they pile on weight soon after joining the company. Good thing they also have a Google gym.

Backing this up, here’s a stat from Google — “Bay Area Googlers consumed approximately 5,500 pounds of handmade chocolates from the snack bins in the microkitchens in 2007.” Wow.

9. The Google Logo Was Not Centered Until 2001

Google’s famously sparse homepage is considered a classic design in the online world. The Google logo, however, wasn’t actually centered on the page until March 31, 2001. As early users will remember, the homepage had a bias to the left-hand side, and even earlier — back in 1998 — Google sported a Yahoo-style exclamation mark.

10. Google Has a Company Dinosaur

By all accounts, there are many wondrous sights to be seen at the Googleplex, but one of the most arresting is surely the gigantic T-Rex skeleton — nicknamed “Stan” after a “real” dino found nearby — that looms menacingly at Googlers in Mountain View.

Joining Stan in the unique campus decorations is a scale replica of the SpaceShipOne, enormous Android ()-themed models, pink flamingos, a large LEGO man, Google-colored phone boxes and grown-up size ball pits. One thing seems for sure — just like the company itself — life at the Googleplex must be far from dull.