Real Time Tweets in Search Engine Results

The revolution is finally upon us - the search engines are recognising the power of social media and at present Bing is winning the race.

Mashable (always up there with breaking news for us geeks) today revealed that Microsoft has agreed a deal with Twitter and Facebook to feature their real-time tweets and status updates in their SERPs.  This is big news and one of the most exciting developments I've seen in the world of search recently.

Hopefully this move will encourage those businesses which don't have a presence on such networks to pull their socks up and give us struggling social media junkies the thumbs up for action.  On that note, I best have a word with the boss!

**UPDATE** Less than 24 hours later Google has joined the race and officially confirmed that they too have struck a deal with Twitter to showcase their real-time results in Google's SERPs in the "coming months".  See Google's Blog for all the info.

Free favicon hosting sites - ones to avoid!

Today's mission was to find a new free host for my blog's favicon.  As iconj seems to have disappeared off the face of the WWW after recently being hacked, an alternative solution was needed - a job evidently easier said than done.

After typing a myriad of keyword alternatives in to Google a trend was beginning to appear.  All of the sites claiming to offer free hosting, or blogs containing links to sites that offer it, either didn't actually offer hosting at all, or the links pointed to sites that were now defunct.

Here's a list of sites not to use.  WARNING: clicking on some results in porn, escort services or random gambling offers popping up.

• http://www.oogletoogle.com/
• http://www.shokimages.com/
• http://www.picpanda.com/
• http://www.imageboo.com/
• http://cdmazika.com/
• http://www.myfavatar.com/
• http://www.iconj.com

And here's some sites that may initially claim to support .ico formats, but don't.

• http://www.my-image-host.com/
• http://www.myupload.org/
• http://www.qfqy.com/
• http://www.freeimagehosting.in/
• http://www.imageboo.com/

But then finally, through the mists came a site that would actually do as I asked: provide free hosting; let me simply upload my favicon and then provide the code - hurrah!

• http://www.1pixelhost.com/ - I salute you.

Now I'm sure there's plenty more sites out there (that aren't as easy to find - clearly!) which offer the same service, but once you've found what you're looking for, you don't carry on looking...

Lou_geek

The Rise of Social Media in Marketing Campaigns

This week Eurostar launched a new integrated marketing campaign to promote their (reasonably) cheap train crossings from the UK to mainland Europe.


They've successfully brought together both online and offline forms of advertising to promote this offer, with a big steer towards the inclusion of social media in their marketing mix. So far what we've seen from them is a new website, a blog, a presence on both Twitter and Facebook, videos on YouTube, plus the usual online display advertising on top sites such as Trip Advisor.

What makes this exciting is it's another opportunity to demonstrate the power of a fully integrated marketing campaign and how it all can work together nicely. It also follows on from a trend that was becoming more prominent in offline advertising, with search terms being used in place of URLs as a call to action.

Another recent example of integrated advertising was Compare the Market's meerkat campaign 'Compare the Meerkat' c/o ad agency VCCP, which also included a similar mix of media as Eurostar have used. This campaign was deemed a massive success, boosting the profile of Compare the Market and winning industry awards for the initiative and execution of the campaign.

However, this form of advertising wouldn't work half as well if these companies hadn't done their research when it comes to their target market. The target for these campaigns appear to be people of a more web-savvy generation, who will benefit from this additional information being available online. Currently a lot of companies seem to be jumping in feet first given the buzz around Twitter and the like, in a bid to drive more interest for their brand. But when it comes to social media, without doing the groundwork beforehand they may not be seeing the return on investment they'd hoped for.

Friends Reunited - Hoping to Gain Success from other Social Media Sites?

Friends Reunited. I bet that's a name you haven't heard in a while? One of social media's four fathers some may say. The UK's answer to the US's classmates.com.

Friends Reunited (FR) is a site that used to be the place to go for voyeurism on the net; to check out what old friends, colleagues and classmates were up to (and how many teenage pregnancies occurred post secondary school graduation!). But since then the big players such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter have stolen the limelight that FR once basked in.

According to Wikipedia, back in 2001, only a year after FR was established, it already had 2.5 million members. And with a great PR campaign boosting the site's success all the more, soon the founders were raking in the profits. At the height of its success the site had 15 million users and was up for grabs from the highest bidder. Eventually the site was sold to the ITV television channel in 2005 for £120 million. However, since then there's been a steady decline in its success. So what have people behind FR done? Well to coin a phrase, it looks like they've taken the attitude, "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em", and haven't they done just that!


Take a look at the image above. Is it just me, or are there a few elements borrowed from other successful social media sites? I can count 7 straight off. Why not see how many you can spot!

Lou_geek

p.s. Check out their huge footer, aptly named in the code as 'SEOFooterListHeader' - no sh*t Sherlock!

Microsoft's "New" Search Engine, Bing. New Name, Old Engine?

From today until the end of next week Microsoft will be rolling out its new search engine, Bing, in an attempt to claw back some of the monopoly Google currently holds in the world of search.

The Guardian, Times and Twitter are all a flutter over this "new" search engine, care of Bill Gates' empire. But how new is this?


Microsoft already has a number of search engine identities out there, of which MSN Search features as one of the big 3 in the UK, aside from Google and Yahoo!. However, currently it still retains active domains for the other names of its engine, Windows Live Search and Live Search. So now if there's a fourth domain name/identity for what is simply another (or the same) Microsoft search engine, are we going to see any added value this time around?

Apparently:

"...it will be powered by semantic search engine Powerset, which the company bought last year.

This means that whatever you type into the search engine, you will get a number of related queries in response.

Type in a band's name, and you should bet biographical details, lists of songs, alongside links to their official website and the likes of Wikipedia."

Source: MSN UK, Tech and Gadgets, Daily News, 28.05.09

Sounds nifty, but isn't Google's new 'show options' feature already pretty much doing this...?

According to The Guardian, Microsoft's CEO, Steve Ballmer claims the engine will offer:

"Guided search, which categorises searches and attempts to get users to useful information speedily. The system also integrates with a number of other technologies, bringing news and maps straight to searchers, as well as linking in to the company's Cashback scheme – which effectively pays users a small dividend every time they buy a product through the site."

Funny, isn't that what Live Search already offers?

To be fair though, MSN is my favourite engine out of the top 3 so far as it's visual design, usability and crawling capabilities go, so I shouldn't poke fun. Good luck Bill, may the best search engine win.

Lou_geek

Is Wolfram Alpha already flawed?

After spending two days away from a computer, visiting friends in Bournemouth, I feel that this post may already be a little dated; but, I'll continue on regardless.

As most of you are aware by now, Google has a new rival going by the name of Wolfram Alpha (WA). However, to date I'm sure Google hasn't much to worry about in the short term.


Since returning from soggy Dorset I've attempted to put WA through its paces by typing in a myriad of search terms, questions, etc. including, "When was wolfram alpha established?", and I only ever seem to get one response - an error message referring to me as 'Dave'. Now the engine is quite close - my Dad's name is Dave, but he lives 150 miles away, so not close enough. By using this laid-back approach to error messaging I understand it's trying to 'connect' with me, but I must admit, calling me Dave doesn't make me feel warm and fuzzy.

Now on top of its error messaging being slightly obscure, I've also come across a few other factors which may flaw its impending success:

1. The name 'Wolfram Alpha' - not really memorable, is it? You wouldn't really replace "Let's Google it" with "Let's Wolfram Alpha it". I even had to look up the name again to type this point!
   
   
2. When it does show you the Dave error message, the continued journey is a link to a video of the WA employees (which I don't have the patience to watch). I wasn't looking for a video of a dark room with monitors...
   
   
3. When clicking on their help forum I was taken straight back to their homepage. Odd.
   

Hmm, good start WA... or am I just using it incorrectly?

What does go in WA's favour however, is a PageRank of 7 (thanks to their PR, I've no doubt) and a staggering 40 DMOZ entries, along with 10 Yahoo! Directory categories - not an easy achievement when you've only been live for 3 days.

So like an earlier post I wrote about Twitter; I'm yet to be convinced, but I'm sure in time I will be. Twitter certainly proved itself.

Lou_geek

URLs vs. Search Terms in Advertising: An Evolving Trend for the UK

A growing trend in advertising seems to be upon us. Like me, you'll probably have noticed we've recently been asked to "search for" at the end of TV advertising, rather than the traditional "visit our website" approach.

Some examples of this practise in UK advertising include the NHS's advert for children's nutrition and their search slogan 'Change 4 life'. Another one is the British Army's "Start Thinking Soldier campaign", where they go a step further and show this search term being typed into a search box to further drill in the message.


This trend seems to have stemmed from Japan where, according to Nominet, 35% of adverts carry an image of a search box with the required search phrase within it as a direct call to action. This has probably steadily increased since goo carried out it's survey in September 2006 asking "Which is better in TV ads: Keywords or URL?". 83% of the Japanese participants agreed keywords were preferred.

This use of advertising was also picked up on a lot when Cabel Maxfield Sasser of Panic Inc. visited Japan on business; examples of which can be seen on his blog.

What seems to be its obvious success factor is that the majority of people find it easier to remember a search term, rather than a URL; especially when it comes to remembering the domain, "was it .com or .co.uk...?".

Another area of its success, I'd imagine, comes from the way a lot of the world uses the internet. Less-savvy surfers believe search engines are the internet and they're the place to start, rather than typing a URL directly into the browser bar.

This begs the question, “Are there any success stories in the west?”. Well the only one I've found info on at the moment is one from America, through Read Write Web, where Kellogg's Special K began a campaign with the help of Yahoo!. They used their advertising to ask consumers to type "Special K" directly into Yahoo!'s search engine. As a result, this campaign produced "a 10 times better response rate than previous campaigns the company had run on Yahoo!".

So it looks like this trend is something we could be seeing a lot of, the more our marketers get to grips with the ever-fiddly issue of combining online and offline communications. I'll certainly be pitching it to my lot back in the office!

Lou_geek

Blog tips, blog tools and the progress I've made so far

I'm conscious I haven't posted in a while, but I'm not going to make excuses. I go on Blogger daily, so there is no reason except this; I'm finding it difficult to get inspiration!

I sit with a note pad, scribbling down ideas and end up screwing it up. This blog business is tricky. Plus, I still haven't really found my niche, like most bloggers do. Although, I'm kind of going for the angle of 'social media experimentation and understanding'.

So in a bid to carve myself deeper into this niche, it's probably worth updating you on my progress so far. Here it is:

Pre March
• Joined social sites: Facebook, You Tube, Friends Reunited, MySpace

Early March
• Joined: Twitter, Blogger, Yammer and Linked In

14th March - 21st March
• Created my blog
• Wrote first post: Social Media... the end of productivity as we know it?
• Set up Google Analytics on blog
• Verified blog with Google Webmaster
• Added Twitter feed to blog
• Added blog URL to Twitter, Facebook, Linked In and MSN Messenger profiles
• Distributed blog via Ping-o-Matic!
• Submitted URL directly to Google, resulting in the blog being crawled the following day

22nd March
• Wrote second post: Dealing with call centres - should we change OUR attitude?
• Started adding labels to posts

24th March onwards
• Wrote third post: Mums on maternity leave - sites to help ease the boredom
• Installed SEO toolbar, what a fantastic find!


The results to date
• 66 visits
• 25 page views - best performing day, 22/03
• Top referrer: blogger.com
• 3 weeks from first post to driving traffic from search engines
• The experiment for my third post seems to be paying off as it's currently my top performing post and is ranked in 6th place in Google for the keywords 'boredom maternity leave'

Blog tools used
• Google Analytics
• Google Webmaster
• Twitter Feed
• Ping-o-Matic
• URL submission to Google
• SEO Book toolbar

What's next?
• Investigate how to produce a sitemap for my blog and sort out the robot.txt file - Google doesn't seem to like the labels on my posts
• Try and increase my blog's PageRank through link building
• Research further the world of social media and how I can harness its power
• Continue blogging

On that note, I best get on with it!

Lou_geek

Social Media - the end of productivity as we know it?

Well here I go - my first blog. I'm sitting here like probably many of you did when you started out blogging, wondering 'Do I actually have anything worthwhile to say? And if so, what?'. I'm also wondering where this blog will go - who will read it, what engines will crawl it, but more importantly, am I opening up yet another door to avoid doing actual 'work' whilst in work?!

Ah, I remember back in the day when Facebook and MySpace were new and shiny and the thing that everyone had to be a part of. What a great (secret) excuse not to get on with what you should be doing. Whether it was stopping you from updating that database; translating your boss' written scrawl into something legible; or simply doing the housework. What exciting new prospects were unravelling at our fingertips.

Now for most of us I'm sure the initial rush of upping our numbers in the friends-stakes came to an end a while ago, but with the end of the Facebook and MySpace era comes the start of another - the Twitter generation. So far I have only dipped my toes into the pool of 'twittering', or the official term, 'tweeting', as the people knee-deep in the world of social media inform me - so much to learn!

I understand that Twitter is meant to be a simpler model of the two sites previously mentioned, but at the same time achieving more than the other two ever did when it comes to the world of brand development and recognition for companies.

Ever since my boss went to a conference, held by E-consultancy, where all the industry-bods raved about it, Twitter has been on everyones lips in the office - what's it about, what's it done for others and what can it do for us.

I'm yet to be convinced about Twitter, but I'm sure I'll get sucked in along with the rest of you... but hey, I guess I can now use the excuse that it's all in the name of research!