The Web Uncovered

Twitter has become increasingly popular as a news source.  While microblogging is anything but content rich, it’s true value added is in its ability to be up to date by the minute.  While in most cases this is not very important to people, there are situations where by the minute is imperative.

There supposedly was a situation at the Twitter Headquarters in San Francisco where the world earthquake spiked as a keyword.  The staff was perplexed, until the earthquake shook their office less than a minute later.  The Tweets were faster than the earthquake!  Less dramatic examples of this can be found.  One is how today many people are following and tweeting about the California State Supreme Court decision regarding Proposition 8.  A lot of Californians are anxiously awaiting to hear what the decision will be.

The larger rammifications of this has dual consequences.  First of all, people will be less likely to turn to print when knews finds them in real time, rather than seeking it out on their own.  The downside is that is drastically changes the business model for traditional print, and even online publications.  Furthermore, a societal side effect would be that news would become less analytical, and much more decontextualized.  Anger towards this technology may be the only  thing that Neil Postman and Rupert Murdoch have in common.

So for those of you who have a content-based website that you are marketing, you know that search technologies are important.  Not only are these technologies important to understand, but media consumers are increasingly looking at keyword searches and trends to determine legitimacy.  Showcasing your own searches, or searches for keywords related to your product or service, has been impossible.

Until Now.  Google has released Google Trends Gadget, which is available for free.  Still not sure how cool this is?  Imagine you are selling an over-the-counter flu remedy from your website.  When people visit your website, they can see how the search results have increased for the word “flu” at the beginning of the flu season.  Also, it allows for comparables.  The customizable aspect of the tool makes it easy to implement and use.  

The Takeaway:   In the new epoch of microblogging, the term “now” means less “this year” and more “the next fifteen minutes.”  Harness developing technologies to exploit this trend, especially those involved in search technology.

As Twitter begins teasing users with the idea of bolstering their search engine so that it not only searches through tweets, but also crawls the content of links in tweets, a new door of possibility has opened.  This would create a much more time-sensitive search engine, where search results could be populated by content updates within the last hour.

Not only could this change search technology as we know it, but it also could impact your search engine management (SEM/SEO).  This would be especially true for buzz marketing.  One key way to generate a buzz marketing campaign in the digital age is to create a very specific campaign with a viral capacity, and to create a microsite that is solely used for the campaign (see my favorite example here).  While they are created with SEO in mind, with high keyword density, often times there is a lag between their release and when search engines actually show their content.  This new search engine technology would pick up on the microsite faster  than ever, granted you successfully generate attention to it with twitter users (who are increasingly becoming representative of the American market in demographics).  Utilize the power of now in the digital age.

The Takeaway:

With traditional marketing and public relations, timing is everything.  In the modern online marketing world, the same is true, and the specificity of time is more acute than ever.  While utilizing technologies that allow you this chronological targeting, begin recognizing how changing technologies further change the face of online marketing.