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Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category
Twitter Teams up with Google and Bing
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Twitter recently partnered up with both Google and Bing to allow them to search and index the full stream of tweets. Both companies are taking a different approach to how to showcase the data. Here is a look at each one.
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.
Social Media Monitoring Tools – See What Others Are Saying About You
Friday, July 17, 2009
Let’s face it, we are in a renaissance period for the internet. Things are going great, more and more people are hoping on board and more and more businesses are realizing the value of having an online presence. Frankly this reminds me of the period shortly before the dotcom bust where everyone threw logic out the window and built insanely expensive websites that made neat techno noises. This time, instead of having $200,000 websites that had spaceships flying around logos that did nothing more than that, everyone and their Grandmothers are jumping on board by joining Social Media sites for free.
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
For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – jason@schipul.com
