CloudBurst Consulting

Google Announces Social Search Features
Last Week at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Google unveiled new social media features that will be making their way into regular search results. There’s a demo in the first 6 minutes of the presentation but in a nutshell: Searches will now provide results from people in your social networks. For example, if you search for a restaurant you will see what your friends on Yelp thought of the restaurant. Another example they demonstrated was searching for info on the iPhone and Blackberry smartphones, which yielded a friend’s blog post about why they switched from Blackberry.

This seems like a very natural evolution of Google’s Universal Search feature, that incorporates more than just web pages in results already (like photos, videos and news) and I suspect all search engines to have this as basic functionality going forward.

What this could mean for your business is more ways for users to find you, making it all the more important to establish a presence on Facebook, Twitter and other networks. You have to connect with these users in order for them to see your social info in their search results, which means you have to be contributing useful or amusing content and accruing “friends.” “Set it and forget it” won’t work with social media.

This is not a new subject and we need to give credit to many companies who are attempting to understand it although the acceptance factor for some is still a bit foreign and uncomfortable.  It’s not about them any more, it’s about the consumer who’s also known as aka “the user.”

Are you thinking about what happens to the message when you or your marketing team distribute it online?  Will your intended audience watch the video, read the new information on the company’s Facebook, forward to a friend, save it or tweet about it?  Of course the worst that could happen is that you miss the mark all together and the user deletes it, ignores or skips it! Users have the ability to watch you, talk about you or talk with you – they can share what they like and dislike with their online friends, communities/blogs who are like-minded.

It’s critical to always ask yourself what type of video or message are you sending and, what does your potential visitor/user want or expect from the message?  If you know the answer to that question and understand how best to deliver it in order to get them to the next step in your sales conversion process (whether it’s signing up for a newsletter, opting in to receive additional information, etc.) then you definitely have a great understanding of how to communicate and engage the user.

Never forget that most of the time when a potential customer looks at your website, views a video or reads your company post on Facebook or LinkedIn it’s because they are looking for information that is important to them. If it hits the mark, then that user will hopefully continue to be interested in what you have to say.  Although, let’s not forget the ultimate goal which is to have those users be your messenger and  spread it to others via word of mouth!

A recent case study analyzed by CNN Money highlights this seemingly unintuitive reality. Why?

1. Customers want reviews, if you don’t provide them, they’ll leave the site to find them (and be far less likely to come back and purchase after leaving).

2. If customers detect that you have only published selected reviews from favored responses, they won’t trust your reviews or your product/service, critically undermining your credibility.

My own use of Apple’s App Store (for iPhones and iPod Touches) supports this. Often times an App will have a lot of negative reviews, sometimes only averaging 2 out of 5 stars, but I still pay for it. Why? I can see what everyone is complaining about and if it’s about features that don’t interest me, or issues I consider only minor, then why would I avoid it? It allows me the chance to make a more informed decision, and removes some of the frustration created by discovering bugs on my own – I expected them.

In some ways it’s crazy that all websites don’t have a customer feedback mechanism, but we’re still in the midst of a giant shift from company-controlled marketing to consumer-controlled marketing. In fact it’s not just the marketing but the very relationships of people to products and services that is being dramatically reshaped.

Will you cling to the past to get left behind or embrace a new interface with your potential customers and find out how much you can grow your business?

With the mainstream media constantly name-dropping facebook and twitter, you’d think that it’d be a no-brainer for every business to get themselves setup on them and start seeing the dollars roll in. The trouble is, there isn’t often a direct approach to measuring success on these networks. Like what was promised to Kevin Costner long ago, at best they offer the hazy promise of “If you build it, they will come.” The trouble is, people don’t have to pay to use facebook or twitter, these are free sites. Worse still, there’s really not even an e-commerce component to these websites that would allow you to directly track sales from them. It’s the powerful-but-always-elusive measurement of word-of-mouth: everyone wants it; no one knows how to clearly quantify it.

So if you can’t measure how much your Fan Page on facebook is worth, or how much money your twitter messages are generating, what can you measure?

Note: For the purposes of this post I’ll not be mentioning display advertising (e.g. banners) on facebook, but rather the value of creating profiles, or Fan Pages.

Effective social media campaigns, unlike some other online marketing tactics, require an eye for quality, rather than quantity. It’s essential to select meaningful performance metrics. One familiar value marketers recognize is the cost-per-thousand, or CPM. If your Page (previously called “Fan Pages“) is accruing followers, all of the people following them are also seeing this activity. Since it was free to create the Page in the first place, you’re not paying for any of these impressions. So the burden of measurement comes back to your website.

Your website’s analytics contains a list of any visitors that come from facebook or twitter (or any website for that matter). It’s available under the “Traffic Sources” section and “Referring Sites” module of Google Analytics (and is available in a similar location in most other website analytics software). Now you can begin to evaluate in hard numbers how many visitors any social media sites are generating, and what the quality and level of engagement these visitors have. Stats like Average Time on Site and Average Pageviews per Visit are insightful points to review.

It’s important to keep in mind that because of the nature of social media, there is a multiplier effect. Some users who hear of your product or service through a friend on one of these services won’t necessarily be coming directly from one of those sites. In fact, there have been studies proving the fact that a lot of web users will remember something to look up later, they may search for your name or remember your website’s URL. In these 2 scenarios they would show up in a different part of your website’s analytics, usually under Search Referrals and Direct Traffic, respectively. Just because you don’t see a flood of visitors to your site coming from these networks every day doesn’t mean it’s not boosting your traffic. It’s important to take a holistic approach to account for these types of effects.

Lastly, don’t lose sight of the sensitive nature of your presence on these sites. Don’t try to add a bunch of random twitter followers, say from the same city, as this will backfire once you’ve been identified as a marketer, and that may get you blocked for spamming. It’s alright to be a marketer, you just have to be a respectful and conscientious one. Likewise with facebook: carefully and strategically select which conversation threads you participate in. Don’t over-reach or you can see yourself blocked by many users, defeating any progress. Remember that these are unique opportunities to directly communicate with your existing and potential customers. Be a good citizen and they’ll respect you too.

Although we’re obviously heavily involved in the business of Interactive marketing and advertising, it’s not too hard to convince our clients where to put their advertising dollars in order to reach their target market … nine times out of ten their customers and clients are online!

eMarketer  just released a report from Myers Publishing  estimating that  2009 will be the first year that ad spending online is greater than local and national television spots.  It’s really not too surprising to see their predictions that by 2011 and 2012 online advertising will surpass both newspapers and local and national TV. Video and social network spending alone is projected to post the fastest growth rates, followed by search.

Just take a look at the information below and ask yourself the following questions – where does your company’s advertising dollars fall in this overview?  Are you getting a good return on your current advertising and marketing investments?   Do you know where your competitors are advertising?   It might be time to plan for the future (which is now).

For years a major part of Google’s success was based on its ability to determine the popularity of a particular web page based on the amount of links to the page. This is still a huge factor for search engine ranking. But there’s mounting evidence that links may not be the only way to count digital “votes.”

There is mounting evidence that Google is paying attention to more than just links: mere mentions of brands or products on the web can count towards the popularity of a brand or site, even if there was no link created.

The argument from a writer over at Search Engine Land is that this is necessary because of recent changes to the web’s constituency. There are so many users on the web now who don’t have websites but are engaged on different social networks and other places they post/create content, that Google has had to shift its algorithm to take even mentions of a product or brand as a digital “vote” for a company in order to more accurately measure popularity.

It makes sense. And this isn’t the first time we’ve heard of this.

So the next time you’re on Facebook making a recommendation to a friend, you may be helping a company’s website rank higher than others. It certainly feels good to use our power of influence as consumers to help identify the best companies, but this can be manipulated as well. It will be interesting to learn more about how this works as details come to light.

[Image credit: Flickr user dhammza]

Before you or your company decide to  jump in to Twitter with some Tweets you think are relevant, you might be interested in a recent (short-term) study by Pear Analytics to be sure your Tweets aren’t falling into certain catagories.

Pear took snapshots of  Twitter every 30 minutes (between 11:00 am and 3:00 pm) and picked up a total of 2,000 messages.  They then placed these into six categories: Spam – News – Self Promotion – Pointless Babble – Conversational – Tweets with Pass-Along Value.

And here’s the interesting results:

40.5% message posted were pointless babble
37.5% were conversational tweets
8.7% were said to have “Value” (loosely defined as news of interest)
5.85% constituted as self-promotion
3.75% were labeled as spam

So what’s the point to this? Well, there’s a few things to remember before someone tells you or your company that you really need to start tweeting on Twitter because of its tremendous growth over the past year  and, of course,  you certainly don’t want to be left behind in this online opportunity if you think you can get as many followers such as Lance Armstrong (53,813) or maybe Britney Spears (53,290) –

But wait … you might also want to take a look at exactly “who” is using Twitter as presented in a recent article by eMarketer  just to be sure that your target market might be hanging out there …  

Certainly Twitter (as well as other online tactics) can have value, but as an Interactive marketing agency, it’s critical to be responsible and not reactionary regarding online marketing opportunities in order to manage our client’s expectations. Clear strategy and setting realistic goals is always a good first step!

This Little Birdy Went to Japan

Twitter announced recently that it is adding “location services” to its micro-blogging service.  This means that users will soon be able to (optionally) enable their twitter posts (or “tweets”) to include the location they’re sending the message from.

For instance if I am travelling in the Andes mountains with my iPhone (and I somehow magically
manage to acquire a signal) and I want to tell everyone through a Twitter post, the message provide my exact coordinates.  This way my Twitter ollowers can view my location on a map.

It may seem like a small change at first blush but the possibilities are both spooky and very intriguing.  Some example uses people have dreamed up for this are:

• · Use to send message in an emergency so friends can find you fast
• · Find new people to follow on the service that are physically near to you (maybe to see if a colleague in your meeting uses the service)
• · Find reviews of local hot spots in a foreign town based on past tweets in the area
• · News organizations might use it to report surges in tweets for a given hyper-local area

In addition to all kinds of wonderful possibilities, there are scary implications.  Even though the feature will be optional, it remains to be seen how exactly this will interfere with privacy and possibly lend a hand to criminals.

Whatever the use, now that Twitter will soon allow native geo-tagging to each message sent on its service, we have some interesting times ahead of us.

We all know that we can type a keyword phrase in a search engine and it would rank a particular image based on the relevancy to the keywords contained in that image’s Alt tag, or the copy surrounding the image or even the meta data on the page. 

Enter new technology that is taking your image search to the next step!  Yes, the technology can now effectively scan and ‘see’ what the image is in order to provide the searcher with information about the image.  So now instead of using text to find an image, you can upload a particular image and run a query based on the image’s contents. 

So how could you take advantage of this new visual search technology?  From a company standpoint, you would be able to research corporate imagery or brand usage online, search for images to see where they are being used or if they have been modified and even research products using a product photo.  Or, what if you took a picture of something and then couldn’t recall the name of the building in the background; or you want to find out who some people are in a group photo.

According to LTU Technologies, you can upload an image from your computer and ask its visual cataloging product to show you images identical to your image, variations of the image, images similar to the image or a high-resolution version of the image.  

For example, let’s say you’re looking for a watch image similar to the one highlighted in yellow –  by running a visual search using LTU-Corbis, you would get some of the following results:

Needless to say, a company would stand to benefit from visual searches especially if they rely on images to help sell a product due to increased visibility in search engines.  More traffic might be coming to a website as a result of the images the site has indexed in the new image search engines!

After years of speculation and actual talks between the companies, Yahoo is going to give up its organic search business and allow Microsoft to power their natural search results.  Specifically Microsoft’s new Bing search engine will power all of the natural search results on Yahoo.com.

Over the next 2 and a half years Yahoo’s search engineers will be moving over to become Microsoft employees.  The two companies will keep their display and Pay-Per-Click ads separate (Yahoo will sell their own inventory and Microsoft theirs).

It doesn’t represent a huge amount of money for Yahoo and  they may lose users who start going directly to Bing when they see the “Powered by Bing” logo at the bottom of Yahoo’s results.  Yahoo could become another AOL, who went this route before and lost.

What it does mean is that there will soon be no need to monitor search rankings on Yahoo for your site and most Search Engine Optimization will be focused on just Google and Bing.  This is good news, at least now, as we see a lot of websites ranking on Bing more easily than on Yahoo.

What do you think?  Will Yahoo users move over to Bing or keep using Yahoo as they have?