What is Social Search and how does it benefit the social graph?

Brynn Evans is first up. She is a digital anthropologist looking at what people are doing onilne and how we design for social interactions to be integrated with Search. Search is no longer just a question inside a box. But, how can our friends help us. Search is a process over time. She defines three flavors of social search. Collective, Friend -filtered, and collaborative. People exhibit two main social strategies. Some want to ask the network for help and guidance before doing a search on their own. Others distinctly want to embark alone first and see what they can gather. It’s not until they can’t find what they are looking for when they ask friends or networks.

Next is Max Ventilla as a Google zookeeper after his startup Aardvaark was acquired by Google. Subjective questions generate majority of revenue. But and unreliable and there is a social cost of asking a favor. How do you find the best person to answer your question? Each individual’ network is growing exponentially. In queries of subjective nature, average query is 19 words as opposed to Google 3-4 words. Social context is different than the social graph, the context is frequently sufficient. Went to same school, etc. Intimacy (more than authority) facilitates trust.

Ash Rust is Director of Search Relevance at OneRiot. Advertising is matched with realtime web and focused on indexing what people are talking about in social media. Delivers very realtime both in browser and app modes for a swarming type of distributed tool. Ask the masses for best answer.

Prindle is thinking about social search in the digital marketplace. “Give customers something good to talk about in social media, and they will talk. That conversation becomes content for social search, helping to drive additional traffic and conversation.” This sharing used to happen in email, but is not happening in public. Advertising space for many years has been start in TV ad, then drive other marketing efforts. New model example: Best Buy’s @Twelpforce as example of social search platform. Using TV to extend to wider audience.

Where is Social Search going?

Will these new forms of search overtake the Google Box? 20-40% of queries can be handled by social search currently according to Rust. It depends if they will overtake. Different responses are useful in different search. Brynn comments that we often go to Google for an answer, but still need the next level of social relevance. I have an answer, what do I do with it? Then network can follow through. Rust chimes back in with how to rank in social algorithms based on history of streams and their diversity of content. Inference of smaller groups or networks and may highlight authority.

Brynn biggest problems are who is an authority, how to index them, and how to index friends. OneRiot and Aardvaark answer these in different ways. Aardfavrk is a response to the tremendous social activity happening online. OneRiot recognizes the need for different search. For example, a simple search for “killer whale” might bring up lots of information about whales, Orca, etc. But not necessarily what the ongoing conversation is about social responsibility of killer whales in SeaWorld shows after news item of killer whale attack.

Monetization of Social Search and Advertising

Reverse delivering search information starts with answers, then builds brand. Nash talks about the monetization of Social Search. Traditionally, you draw people coming to you with a clear commercial intent. Then they ask you want they want and you can answer with incentive. New model focuses on not just PPC. First deliver organic answers, then deliver sponsored ads not only at cost of PPC, but discounts on bid based on delivering good responses. Bad responses will not be rewarded. Asking people first if they want a sponsored ad typically is over 50% for opt-in. Social search will allow advertisers to target user intent and not just users.

New model is not about buying keywords, but creating content the social search indexes. Headlines are being tracked more than keywords. Links are still more important than keywords. Anchorlinks and number of people linking to your content is more important than the actual keywords and will continue to drive ranking and indexing.

How do you Measure Social Search?

Finally, in measuring social search, @ventilla on social analytics: “Who you are connected to is more important than how you describe yourself.” True analytics of social search is still TBD. Will be a growing area of research.

Online shopping and events can make effective use of campaigns related to keyphrases such as free shipping, discount, gift, coupon and last minute deals. Use Google Insights and Trends to discover seasonal trends for your segment of the market. Whether it is a gift membership, free shipping or other discount, savvy shoppers are on the lookout for value.

Start planning now for health and fitness related topics in the early January, flu and cold season topics, and upcoming holidays for Spring Break and Valentines. Coordinate a combined effort from on-page web optimization with off-page marketing efforts including newsletters, events, and social media announcements.  Spend some time looking at your past year’s analytics and scour for traffic spikes or increased opportunities around industry events. Setup coordinated campaigns which may include a targeted PPC campaign.

Not sure what dates are important for your business or association? Check out the calendar for editorial planning from the presentation by the Schipul SEM Team.

Bing Twitter Page and Search

Bing actually created an entire page at bing.com/twitter which displays trending topics in a cloud at the top followed by a listing of the most active links below. Each link is followed by a couple of related tweets. There is some mystery as to which tweets are being selected. It does not appear to be the first tweets or the ones from people with the most followers. It also seems the links are tied to the trending topics, and are not necessarily the most popular links on twitter.

Additionally, Bing adds the ability to search the twitter stream in real-time. After searching a term (like Yankees) and you 4 selected tweets followed by some of the top linked content relating to those words. You can view the full tweetstream and either allow it to continually refresh or pause it a read a few. Be careful with some of the top trending topics, as they can start refresh faster than you (or at least I) can read them.

The Bing search adds some value with the related links, but the selection of how these links (and top two tweets) are chosen is still not fully known. Hopefully some of this will get ironed out as Microsoft continues to make progress in developing this search option.

Google Social Search

Google takes a completely different approach to the fire hose of Twitter data. While this may not be their long-term plan for the data, they are currently integrating it with a few other services in Google Labs. At the Google Labs Experimental Search, you can join the experiment, which gives you the option to use Social Search. Once you have signed up, when you search for something on Google and click Show Options you will see Social at the bottom. Selecting it gets you into the special Social results.

These results will show links from different people you are connected to and how you are connected to them. It also gives you the option to view results from a single person. Google creates these connections using your Google Profile (you created that, right?). I have Twitter as one of my links, as well as my YouTube account. Google scans these two networks to search for connections I might have, then it searches through that data.

This is much different than a full Twitter search, but in many cases it may be more useful. You are probably more interested in what the people you know and follow have to say than the rest of the Twitter universe. It also works to filter out all of the spam that currently plagues and Twitter trending topic. The links go to tweets, blogs, and other links related to the search, which adds some additional value to just searching the twitterstream.

These two new ways to search Twitter are still early in development so expect some changes and improvements in their results over time.

More Goals

Previously you could only have 4 goals per profile. Now you can have up to twenty, made up of 4 sets of 5 goals. Additionally, you can now setup Engagement Goals which allow you to use Time on Site and Pages per Visit as goal-capturing metrics. This is valuable for many types of sites (like Blogs!) that may consider a Goal accomplished without actually capturing contact information or making a sale.

Advanced Filters

Advanced Filters allow you to create single one-off filters for different reports. Currently, you would need to use the Advanced Segments to accomplish this. Now, filtering top landing pages with over 10 visits and bounce rates over 80% is a snap. This will help you find the pain points in your site and make positive changes. This can also help you identify your top performing keywords and markets.

Automatic and Custom Alerts

If you use Google Alerts then you know how valuable it is to have this kind of automation. These alerts will allow you to track increases in certain activities or to certain pages on your site. They will be very useful when tracking different campaigns and when monitoring the effects of social media. These alerts can be viewed and grouped by date or by type, so you can create clear reports for the things you need to watch, and they can be emailed to you automatically. Alerts are not available yet but should be out by the end of the month.

Other features include Mobile tracking without javascript for older mobile browsers and more custom variables options for tracking members and logged-in status. These take a bit more work to setup but can give you even more details for your more advanced sites.

Many of these features are available today and the rest will be rolled out very soon. Check back with us at theSEMblog for more tips on how to use these great new tools.

Some of the most interesting features to be included are:

• Geographical Location datelines to show where tweets are coming from
• Reputation validating system to lend credibility to authors as information sources
• Reputation ranking system based on ratings from other users
• Grouping of followers by lists

Read the full article on CBSNews

Jonti Bolles

For more information on Social Marketing, Web Analytics and Search, contact our Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul and follow SEMblog on Twitter.

What does this mean to you?

Well for one thing each person in your audience now has the ability to easily connect with each other. That means that every person that uses your product or service now has the tools to easily influence other people about you and your brand. This is a good thing and also a bad thing. If your brand is well received you are in a position to help your raving fans turn other users into raving fans. If your brand isn’t then you’re going to need to monitor your online PR.

Neilsen reports that ’90% of consumers surveyed noted that they trust recommendations from people they know, while 70 percent trusted consumer opinions posted online.’

In the past you needed to engage a PR firm to see what people were saying about you and/or your brand. You’ll still need to do that but now with some cool online tools you can do it yourself, to some degree, if you have the time. There’s a lot of data out there so you might still want to engage a PR firm.

Monitoring Your Brand Online – Websites

No matter what the scenario you fall into above you’re going to want to know what people are saying about you and below are some great tools to get started

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a great tool that allows you to receive alerts whenever your brand is mentioned in a search result. From Google ‘Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.’

Twitter Search

http://search.twitter.com If you don’t know what Twitter is you are doing it wrong. Run a search on Twitter to see what people are talking about. Plug in your name, your brand name or your keywords and see what people are saying right now.

Social Mention

This is a go-to site for me. If I need to track terms or brand names I run a search on Social Mention and I can see recent activity around the web. Much like Technorati’s search engine it gives you an overview of recent content on the web.

BlogPulse

BlogPulse is another tool you need in your arsenal. Brought to you by the folks at Nielsen BlogPulse ‘is a blog search engine that also analyzes and reports on daily activity in the blogosphere.’ It allows you to search trends and track conversations amongst other things. You need to bookmark this site, become friends with it.

Monitoring Your Brand Online – Desktop Applications

With advent of tools like Adobe’s Air you can now use desktop applications to monitor your brand or yourself online

Social Seek

This brand new app that lets you see, much like Social Mention, what is happening around the web without having to open a browser. Type in a term and a location and Social Seek will give you results from Blogs, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and Eventful.

Just download SocialSeek and search for various terms and locations to see what people are saying about you around the world. A great tool indeed!

PeopleBrowsr

This is a very robust platform so make sure you put on your big boy pants when you jump into this one. PeopleBrowsr offers a host of tools for you to use that include Live Search, Marketers, My PB, Industry Billboard, News and even a Conference tracker.

It’s a little overwhelming the amount of information you have at your finger tips with PeopleBroswer but quite frankly these kinds of things put a big smile on my face. Jump and give it a try. Sign up and click on the ‘PBAir Download’ link at the bottom of your browser. I know, I know very vague instructions but I cannot find any clear link to give you. Maybe the good folks at PeopleBrowser will read this and comment on how to easily find the desktop AIR app. Hint hint.

What Are Some Tools You Are Using?

Obviously this isn’t a complete list, there are literally tons and tons of tools to use, what are some cool ones that you have been using to monitor your site?

Drop us a comment and let us know how you are monitoring you and/or your brand online

Jason McElweenie

For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – jason@schipul.com

Interactive Marketing Vs. Traditional Media

Sure this is good news for companies like us but it is very good news for you as well. Traditional marketing has been hard to measure, yes you see an increase or decrease in sales based on marketing campaigns but you can’t effectively track it. You just have to believe that your print or TV campaigns actually brought people to your business and that it isn’t some sort of fluke. Of course it generally isn’t but if you’re like me you want to see some sort of tangible number or graph that makes me feel good about advertising. With Online Advertising you can. This is because online is simply the transfering of data from one point to another. These bits of data are kind of like a delivery truck. This data can carry various things like tracking code and this is the code that lets us track many many things. The beauty of tracking data is that it can tell us, among others, which page on a site was the most viewed, which site or search engine users came from before getting to your site and most importantly what keywords they used to search for your site.

Learn more about tracking your site using Web Analytics Reporting

Forrester’s prediction that spending on Interactive will increase is something we’ve all known about but we haven’t had the numbers to back it up. And there are some impressive numbers;

• Search Marketing spend will double from $15 Billion 2009 to $31 Billion in 2014.
• Mobile Marketing increases from $391 Million to $1.2 Billion
• Social Media more than quadruples from $716 Million to $3.1 Billion or 34% of all Interactive Spend

Social Media Marketing – Where Do We Go From Here?

Impressive numbers but what does this mean to you? Well, if Forrester is right Online will continue to eat away at traditional media with Social Media Marketing taking up the biggest piece of the puzzle and if you aren’t already embracing that medium you need to. Social Media, although a huge buzz term right now, is being embraced by more and more demographics and if your company isn’t in front of them in some form your competitors are.

How Do I Get Started Social Media?

That’s a great question, obviously we can help you, but if you want to get started on your own ask people around you what they are doing. We’ve all heard of Facebook and Twitter, to name a few, so take the plunge and join them. My 64 year old father is on Facebook, it is no longer that ‘college site’ you have no use for. Twitter reached it’s tipping point before Oprah picked up on it so it must serve a purpose, right?

This IS something that needs to be embraced by you and your company. Age is no longer a difference. This isn’t the same as some young kid kicking your butt in a video game. You don’t have to be young to do it, you just need passion and that is something you need to be successful in any medium or facet in your life. If you don’t have passion then it won’t work for you but realize this: Someone else will take your piece of the pie if you are not watching and Social Media will be a BIG piece of the pie.

Still Confused About Social Media?

Here’s a fun video that explains what social media is and remember July is National Ice Cream Month!

More info on Forrester

http://blogs.forrester.com/marketing/2009/07/interactive-marketing-nears-55-billion-advertising-overall-declines.html

Thanks to Flickr user Bill Ward’s Brickpile for the Truck image

Jason McElweenie

For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – jason@schipul.com

Case in point:

Yesterday, in my personal Twitter account I tweeted about Hockey being ‘the sport of kings!’

@TheOtherLeslie I'm talking about Hockey – the sport of kings!  Balsillie, RIM/Blackberry CEO is trying to buy a team
about 17 hours ago from twhirl in reply to TheOtherLeslie

30 minutes later the basketball team the Sacramento Kings start following me

Wow, I tweet about hockey using the word 'kings' and the Sacramento Kings follow me. That right there is a Social Media Monitoring FAIL
about 17 hours ago from twhirl

@rxmike replies to my tweet about the Kings following me

@deneyterrio had a similar exp tonite. Tweeted about St Louis Cardinals #fail and now they are following me. #poorsearch
about 12 hours ago from Tweetie in reply to deneyterrio

This is where it gets really strange. An unofficial St Louis Cardinals Twitter account must be set on auto-pilot and RTs anything that is said about them. Their account Retweets @rxmike’s tweet

RT @rxmike @deneyterrio had a similar exp tonite. Tweeted about St Louis Cardinals #fail and now they are following me. #poorsearch
about 11 hours ago from web

At this point I have figured out that account is on auto-pilot so I decide to do a little test. I in turn Retweet their last tweet

RT @ST_L_Cardinals RT @rxmike @deneyterrio had a similar exp tonite. Tweeted about St Louis Cardinals #fail and now they are following me. #
about 10 hours ago from TwitterBerry

Sure enough the auto-pilot account Retweets it again but not before

RT @deneyterrio RT @ST_L_Cardinals RT @rxmike @deneyterrio had a similar exp tonite. Tweeted about St Louis Cardinals #fail and now they …
about 9 hours ago from web

Surreal for sure.

So what is the point of all this? Well as you can see above if you are promoting your brand online in such a disconnected fashion as the St Louis Cardinals are you could run into some potential problems. Yes this is not the official St Louis Cardinals twitter account, I can't easily find one, but as you can see if you don't pay attention to your brand online you can run into problems down the road. If a team or someone famous follows/replies to you and you never visit their Twitter page you might think they are the real deal. In this case they are NOT the real St Louis Cardinals Twitter account but you should always be monitoring your online presence. Our tweets above raise the awareness of actually monitoring your brand online and thankfully we were not malicious but that might not stop someone out there that might want to harm you and/or your brand.

Steps to Take to Avoid Bad Online PR

First thing you need to do is have an actual person reply and retweet about your brand. The beauty of Twitter and Social Media is that it lets regular people connect with the companies/organizations/celebrities that they love. If you are a robot you will be treated like a robot.

You should also have other people in your company/org tweet as well. They don’t have to tweet about your company exclusively but they can occasionally. A ratio of 1 to 5 is a good measure, 1 company to 5 personal. If you are an employee and you constantly tweet about your company people will tune you out. The reason for this is people want to connect on an individual level. I know I am more likely to do business with someone that I have a personal relationship with or someone I know online that has always given me the time of day.

Ways to Monitor Your Brand Online

Twitter Search

All public tweets are searchable as business you should always be searching on Twitter to see what people are saying about you

Blog Pulse

Blog Pulse is a great search engine for Blogs. Type in your brand name see what people are blogging about you and/or your brand.

Technorati

Technorati is another great search engine to see what people are saying about your brand. Technorati is blogs and Google is to websites – a great search engine.

But This is a Fan Not the Real Team!

This account I am referencing is auto-tweeting everything that has to do with the Cardinals in Twitter and in doing that they run the risk of someone attacking or ‘flaming’ them online, even if it isn't their account. This type of account shows that Twitter and Social Media in general are not as free spirited as some might think. You can’t just put your brand on auto-pilot and expect the world to be amazed. Well, they will be amazed – at how vacant and distant you are.

Jason McElweenie

For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – sem@schipul.com

We often get really powerful questions from clients wanting to know the simple things like, “Why would I Twitter?” or “Am I doing it right?” With Twitalyzer, you can see the measurement of key metrics and see how you are doing against others. You see the Twitalyzer 100 most influential people, or simply measure against your friends, colleagues or business competitors. 

A couple of the great values to review are Influence and Signal-to-Noise ratio. Influence is measured not just by your popularity, but a set of calculations based on things like how often you are “retweeted” and your reach with updates and number of followers. Signal-to-noise ratio is a the number of messages with information sharing such as @ references, # hastags, links or retweets. Twitter is a great tool for Social Media, but its popularity is also ramping up some of the noise we are all bombarded with daily. Checking out how much you are contributing above the noise is a great metric. There are other metrics available including generosity, velocity and clout.

How do you become a good Twitterer? There is a dashboard to suggest ways to increase your influence and contribute to the community. Like most analytics tools, it can let you know if you are using a social media strategy successfully.

Finally, we really like the Search tool to find others with similar interests, keywords and get a quick glance at their influence to see if we should be following them.

Of course, we Twitter because we like it and not to chase numbers. Don’t get too caught up, in the super easy to read scores and charts. Remember to enjoy Twitter for the goodness (and sometimes distraction) it brings to your digital life.

Let us know how you like Twitalzyer.

Follow us on twitter.com/semblog or me personally at twitter.com/jonti

Jonti Bolles

For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – sem@schipul.com

First, lets explain what Photosynth is. From the Photosynth site ‘Photosynth examines images for similarities to each other and uses that information to estimate the shape of the subject and the vantage point each photo was taken from. With this information, we recreate the space and use it as a canvas to display and navigate through the photos.’

This amazing software allows you create, for FREE!, quasi 3D worlds to share with people be they friends, family or clients. If you have a product you wish to show someone in a quick 3D fashion that is free Photosynth might come in handy. Below is a Photosynth of a Rubiks Cube. You’ll notice a ring that appears in the center of the image. You can actually grab that ring and drag your mouse left or right and scroll through all of the images. That is pretty cool!

Rubik’s Cube Photosynth

We decided to have some fun and take it one step farther. Below are Photosyths of Aaron Long, Jason McElweenie and Courtney Pemberton

Aaron Long Photosynth

Jason McElweenie Photosynth

Courtney Pemberton Photosynth

Look like fun? Well go create your own and share!

Create a synth

Jason McElweenie

For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – sem@schipul.com