OurTraction

The real time nature of the internet has become a reality and this has major implications for search engines. With live blogging, Twitter and YouTube thousands of conversations are taking place and information still needs to be  collected, organized, and filtered so that people can actually make sense of it. A number of real time search engines have appeared whose goal is to track information on a topic as it is happening.

Since much of the content produced on a social network stays there, it is not indexed by the major players like Google or Yahoo. Instead a real time search engine “indexes” those conversations. There are a number of search engines that have started to do this;  Topsy (blogs, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, news sites and others), OneRiot (Twitter and Digg), Tweetmeme (Twitter) and Collecta (blogs, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, news sites and others). Facebook is an important part of a social media campaign, but so far to date real time search engines do not have access to information created inside Facebook.

As more and more searches take palce on these platforms there are implications for search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing (SEM).  To show up in real time search results and drive traffic to your website you have to be participating in online conversations.  People will use these new search engines for information on your brand and if you aren’t active on social networking sites then you are leaving your marketing to others.

When you converse with your customers; through blogs and blog comments, Twitter, YouTube, etc, you will be able to take advantage of real time search and see its benefit to your brand.

Titus

Titus role is to help keep our clients fluent in many dialects of social media. Titus has been a key organizer for a variety of local technology events. A true conversationalist both online and off, Titus rarely shies away from a healthy debate and is motivated to see the Internet become more social and move towards more engaging conversations. Titus is also an avid cook and would rather eat a failed recipe then throw out food. As a student, in order to save a few bucks, he would often brew his own beer.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 at 10:36 am and is filed under OurTraction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.