maine web development, web design, internet marketing

The world we live in is pretty rad. Just forty years after the landing on the moon, we can now zoom to the moon ourselves care of Google Earth. Yesterday, a clip from the late Walter Cronkite summed up to me how far we’ve been, and how far we’ve come. On discussing the live television coverage of the moon landing, he remarked on how he was “as much impressed with the television coverage, as with the feat of getting a man on the moon. … I decided, if we could do that, we could do anything” (From an NPR Interview).

And oh, how much further than the moon the last 40 years has taken us. As Cronkite went on to describe how the death of Kennedy was revealed by crawling news wires from the White House, bit by bit, I couldn’t help but think that today that same event would be revealed by real-time conversations on Twitter, complete with TwitPics and mobile video. Just forty years after television proved its potential by zapping live video down from the moon, that very medium is disintegrating in a thousand different ways thanks to a whole new generation of technology, a technology that will ultimately render the entire institution of CBS obselete.

We’ve talked before about the social as well as technology changes in the last 50 years and the tremendous shift in marketing from an outbound approach to an inbound one.

A generation of broadcasting has brought us from advertisers who made themselves out to be as trusted as Walter Cronkite while selling you a good that rarely met the expectations, to an environment where consumers are so jaded with that marketing that, ultimately, trust is the most precious commodity of all. After a long, bumpy road, we’re back to word of mouth advertising. Except that everyone consumer’s mouth is a blarehorn thanks to blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

I brought up that word, “Trust,” and of course the phrase that is inextricably linked to Walter Cronkite is “Most Trusted Man in America.” Several people have already talked about this phrase in context of social media, and lest I try to rehash their ideas, I encourage you to check out KD Paine’s Can Twitter replace Walter Cronkite as “the most trusted ‘MAN’ in America”? and
Walter Cronkite: the Original Trust Agent.

We’ll never again have a single source of trust that rivals Walter Cronkite during the Golden Era of Broadcasting, and while there’s a touch of sadness there, ultimately it’s a radical step forward for humanity. Now instead of looking to the media for trust, we look to each other. And all the tools here enable us to do that more rapidly, tweet by tweet, than ever before.

Footnote: Measuring trust in social media is an even trickier measure than measuring ROI, but to give it a shot, check out Amanda’s webinar this afternoon on Measuring and Tracking Your Social Media Efforts.

Some of us use our Twitter accounts for personal status updates while others use it to boost their businesses. Friends can let their followers know what fruit is the freshest at a particular produce stand, or like the “first viral restaurant”, a mobile street vendor can let people know what street corner they will be selling their yummy Korean Tacos at.

But what if your business is large and multi-faceted? Is there a need for a different account for each of your departments? Google seems to think so…

In a recent blog post from The Official Google Blog, Google states that, “we’re all about frequent updates ourselves, and there’s lots happening around here that we want to share with you… Because there are many programs and initiatives across the company, we’ve got a number of active accounts.”

And that number you may ask? 54 Twitter accounts.

Google, as you already know, is a very dynamic company with many different initiatives, goals and projects that they are constantly developing to make our World Wide Web a better place.  So they obviously felt an important need to keep all their divisions on their own separate playing fields when it came to their Twitter strategy.

They broke down their Twitter accounts into six categories:

• General
• Geo-related
• Ads-related
• Developer & Technical
• Culture, People
• Country or Region

Their Ads-related category includes the most Twitter accounts leveling out at 13 sub accounts. That leaves another 41 accounts distributed through the other categories. Here is a complete list of the Google Twitter accounts.

So… how many Twitter accounts is too many?

I feel that if you do have many departments or divisions in a business, and each one is supplemental and contributes to the overall productivity of the firm, AND you are interested in a Twitter Strategy, it may be worth while to have a different Twitter account for each piece of the puzzle. This is very similar to List Building when it relates to Email Marketing. If you have specific lists that you can target for any given campaign, your results will traditionally be more positive because the content you are delivering is more relevant to those specific lists.

Now don’t just get online and start creating a ton of Twitter accounts without doing some serious research. Incorrect implementation can waste valuable time and resources. So don’t take what could potentially build your client loyalty and shoot yourself in the foot with it.

photo credit: pasukaru76

More and more businesses are turning to Social Media to help promote their brand, events, products and more. As more and more businesses participate, it means there are more and more important people in large offices requesting the ROI of these efforts. I just read a great blog post from the Brand Builder on defining the ROI of social media. I talk about this a lot and I like how he summed it up too.

Marketers, “Social Media Experts,” PR people and the like are getting too wrapped up in measuring the tools for measuring social media and not measuring the actual ROI itself. ROI is the measurement of the money in and the money out – that’s it.

What is the money in? Your time. What is your billable worth per hour? Figure that out and keep track of how much time you spend on your social media efforts.

What is the money out? True conversions or sales. The act of someone getting off their duff and handing you some cash for your products and services because of your social media efforts.

Measuring page visits, social mentions, improving your businesses view in the public eye are all very important but they aren’t ROI. Measuring blog subscribers, Twitter followers, Facebook fans all shows that you are engaging, perhaps, but it isn’t ROI. Some marketing professionals are getting clever and changing ROI to “Return on Influence” or “Return on Interest.”  Clever – but the plays on words are going to get tired very soon. The influence and interest are just a part of getting to that actual return.  Return is the actual act of someone getting up and making a purchase, coming to an event, subscribing to your service, donating to your cause, etc.

Comments on your blog shows that the content you are producing is valuable enough for your readers to take time out of their day and reply to your thoughts and words but that isn’t ROI – it shows you are engaging and that is great but we need to be more careful about twisting our definition of ROI and Social Media. It can be measured, it just takes a little more work.

Next week I am doing a webinar on Measuring and Tracking Your Social Media Efforts. I’ll talk about some easy, intermediate and advanced methods for tracking your time and success on your social media efforts. What each of us needs to measure and what each of us considers success will be a little different so the level of measurement is up to you. For most people the investment with Social media is your time, and measuring takes time.

Real-time search has been on the horizon for a while now, but after the tragic death of Michael Jackson a few weeks ago, it seems to have reached a fever pitch. The day following Jackson’s death, Danny Dover at SEOMoz blogged that Google is falling behind in real-time search. He tracked the time that it took from when one of the first entertainment news outlets posted the news of Jackson’s cardiac arrest to when it appeared as one of Google’s auto complete suggestions: 3 hours and 17 minutes.

There’s no arguing that 3 hours and 17 minutes is unacceptable to searchers wanting up-to-the-minute results, and it’s clearly a current weakness for Google. Enter real-time search engines to fill that gap: a number of them have cropped up as of late (VentureBeat has a great list of the top 11 real-time search engine contenders). But what the heck is real-time search really all about and should SEOs be concerned?

The Good

Well, I’m going to have to point out the obvious here: real-time search let’s people know what’s happening on a given topic right now. Anyone who went to Google when the Michael Jackson news broke was out of luck. If you were keeping an eye on Twitter, you were alerted to the story much sooner (it was a trending topic just an hour after TMZ posted it). I read the news when a friend wrote it in a status update on Facebook- well ahead of Google’s 3 hours and 17 minutes.

Real-time search engines, at the most basic level, produce results on a given topic from various sources (such as Twitter, Digg, YouTube, Google Reader, etc) as they find them. This is perfect for people wanting to follow various events (Iran election, anyone?), and also works well for companies who keep an eye on what is being said about them and provides an effective way to keep in touch with their customers.

The Bad

How is it that these real-time search engines can beat Google to the punch? It lies in the fact that they are only seeking out social mentions and reporting those results, not actually crawling and indexing the web. They aren’t able determine the most relevant and authoritative matches for the search, and they definitely can’t filter out spam. And since they’re mostly wired for the social sphere, these engines are missing out on the other content on the web NOT getting a social mention. In this respect, they cannot compare to a traditional search engine like Google. Many big guns in the SEO industry believe that real-time search engines are little more than a buzz-monitoring tool.

The SEO

Is real-time search signaling the end of traditional SEO as we know it? In my opinion, absolutely not. The real-time search engines still can’t provide what the Big 3 can, as I previously mentioned: relevant and authoritative matches for search queries. Getting more reliable results takes time, as does combating web spam. Searchers are still going to use traditional search engines to meet a variety of their search needs.

My advice is to stay the course with your current SEO strategies. Use real-time search to measure popularity on timely topics, but it hasn’t yet come to the point where we should be concerned with real time search optimization. As with everything else search-related, my eyes and ears are open for what’s next on the horizon.

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