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.

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.