As Social Media continues to expand and lure in vast volumes of Internet traffic, where does its fustier, slower (methodical if you will) and more derided website marketing compadre, SEO, now fit in?
Search Engine Optimisation has been saddled with a reputation for being something of a shadowy practice; online alchemy, created to appease the search engine gods. The thing is though, it works. Better still, it continues to work to this day.
Social Media has emerged from the Friends Reunited Petri dish and exploded into a full-grown living organism, consuming everything in its path; or, at least, nearly everything. Facebook has experienced the most meteoric of rises, propelled by the slipstream of fading stars like MySpace, it has slipped seamlessly into the top 3 sites in the world (2nd by some metrics, 3rd in others) and gained itself over 350 million users.
Thanks to Facebook, along with Twitter, YouTube and a whole multitude of bookmarking cohorts, Social Media has got the world communicating in real-time. This free network of conversations has engulfed the Internet and opened the door of opportunity to marketers. Inevitably, when something huge comes to dominate an entity as the Internet, something has to make way; but is that thing SEO?
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The scale of the devastation in Haiti has taken the wider world by surprise. Efforts to coordinate aid and generating funds though have come in some unusual guises.
Google, a search engine with the world’s information at its fingertips, has been quick to develop ways for loved ones to contact one another on the beleaguered Caribbean nation. Using the Google Crisis Response page for Haiti, they have provided a specialist ‘Person Finder’, in which people looking for their loved ones or have information about people can share details. This database may be simple, but it will undoubtedly come as an invaluable resource for families attempting to make contact.
The page also includes a number of ways to make donations, primarily through Google Checkout, as well as information on the latest news. Google Earth has been put to good use with specialist GeoEye imagery of the affected areas following the earthquake itself. Interestingly Google have also opened up Google Voice, allowing those calling to or from Haiti – where communication systems have been hugely damaged – to do so for free.
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Social media has the Marmite effect; either you love it, or you hate it. General indifference seems hard to come by and as such this polarising effect has been reflected in the modern workplace.
Some businesses can’t get enough of social media. Employees are actively persuaded to get involved in online conversations and whole departments have been generated to work as a sort of sales/marketing/customer service/PR hybrid team of tweeters. Others though are quite the opposite. Employers are blocking access on office machines and handing down severe punishments for unauthorised usage.
Invariably, as you are reading this, you too will have your own opinion on the value of social media in the workplace. It is a seemingly very insignificant debate, but is one that has been thrust into significance due to the amount of coverage it receives. Again, this coverage tends to highlight the two extremes, one full of saccharine sweetness the other disdainfully sour; balance and neutrality are difficult to achieve in this debate, which is why it largely remains unresolved.
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It appears that real-time search could finally become a reality. Following our post earlier in the month, Twitter negotiating real-time search deal with Microsoft and Google, it looks like the ink is now drying on an agreement that will see the aforementioned search engines gain complete access to the social media site’s network.
This is a brave new world for search engines and could well change the way we view and use SERPs in the future. Bing and Google are now free to start developing ways to incorporate Twitter feeds into their searches, opening up unique opportunities for the respective engines and their users.
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When I posed the question, ‘How will Twitter monetise…?’, at the tail end of last week, I didn’t expect the answer to be quite so immediate. Today it has been announced that Twitter are holding talks with both Google and Microsoft to seal a deal that will see feeds being shown alongside standard search results.
This is a move that has been some time in the making. Bing stole a march on Google at the beginning of July by integrating the tweets of a select band of Twitterati royalty (as covered in our blog post, ‘Bing Unleash Real-Time Search’). Whilst Twitter has struggled to find a way to make money from its hugely popular service, the search engines have been seeking ways to tap into its real-time capabilities. A match made in heaven, surely.
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The $100million Twitter raised last week in venture capital appears to highlight two important things. Firstly, Twitter is still regarded as a growing business worthy of heavy investment. And secondly, it is still unable to monetise itself effectively enough to create its own revenue.
The social media site’s stance against integrating advertising is a bold one, but is it ultimately going to doom Twitter to financial failure?
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From the outset social media was created to link people together. Whilst Friends Reunited touted the idea of finding long lost classmates, Facebook was connecting students in Harvard. But somewhere along the line, boundaries between harmless conversations and prolific publicising have become blurred.
Nobody can argue that there are fantastic opportunities to be gained for businesses using social media and that their influence can be a positive one – providing discounts, useful information and a right of reply – but is there a danger web 2.0 overkill will eventually be its downfall?
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The buzz surrounding social media has reached near hysteria. Every day there are tales of people earning fortunes whilst others are having their lives ruined by sites such as Twitter and Facebook.
Few would doubt the potential for generating new business that social media offers. There’s a huge audience to tap into and the freedom to approach them, you can start networking and create brand new opportunities for yourself or your company.
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Twitter’s rise up through the social media rankings has been nothing short of phenomenal. Backed by a plethora of tech savvy celebrities, the take-up of the micro-blogging service has touched every corner of the globe. But is it an empire built on sand?
From the outside everything seems to be ticking over quite nicely. The site continues to earn new users and is now ranked the 19th largest on the Internet (according to Alexa), so on the face of it everything is going swimmingly. But there are undoubtedly issues, some that could ultimately undermine the service into obscurity.
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One of the most effective ways to ensure that a company is being successful in its online marketing efforts is to get traffic from the right audience, which means knowing who the target audience is in the first place. The target audiences are those people who will visit the company website/blog for advice and help with problems, this is the online community.
There are many tools available to help a business find their online communities here are some of them;
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It didn’t take long did it? No sooner had Facebook snapped up FriendFeed than they incorporated their live feed style in a ‘Lite’ version.
This stripped down Facebook is only currently available to a selection of Beta testers, of which I am not one, and is offering a service not too dissimilar to Twitter or FriendFeed. The rolling feed of news from contacts isn’t interrupted with irritating applications and endless tabs; just a stripped down communication portal.
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As a nation we generally tend to go for the glass half empty view; inwardly criticising the country’s infrastructure, governance and weather is one thing, but when the attack is from overseas, we Brits aren’t shy in responding.
Humorists on both side of the pond will no doubt enjoy the increasingly personal (and patently ridiculous) attacks from right-wing supporters in the US on our NHS. Our “Orwellian” system of deciding who gains free medical help is indicative of a socialist society, putting the UK in league with Soviet Russia, apparently.
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For so long industry types have mooted the next Google-killer, but today, with the announcement of the new and improved Google Caffeine project, the shoe appears to be firmly on the other foot. Rumours are abound that this could be the update that undermines SEO as it stands entirely; a completely new search logic that will require a completely different approach.
But putting conjecture and hearsay to one side for a moment, what is Google Caffeine really all about? Well, fundamentally its main purpose is to increase speed and improve results; nothing wrong with that at all. Relevancy and quality are also coming under the spotlight, particularly with news stories, with Google giving extra weighting to those sources it considers superior – not all that different to how it operates currently in truth.
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It happens with every fashion trend and it seems that social media is no exception, the young have deemed it no longer ‘cool’.
According to research from Ofcom, the media regulator, the percentage of 15-to 25-year-olds who have a profile on a social networking site has dropped from 55% to 50% and the blame has been placed firmly on the laurels of those between the ages of 25- to 34, in which 46% of them are now regularly checking their profile up from 40% last year. It has commonly be known for a while that the majority of users on Twitter are over 25.
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As reported yesterday – Twitter Has Denial of Service Attack – the micro-blogging site was taken down yesterday along with Facebook and LiveJournal.
The conspiracy theories have started and Mashable have just posed the question about whether this DoS was targeting one man, a blogger in Republic of Georgia with the username Cyxymu.
All very interesting and, of course, we’ll probably never really know the truth of what’s happened here. Twitter, though, have certainly suffered and will no doubt be undertaking a serious review of their security.
Let us know what you think. Was Twitter targeted as part of cyber-terrorism?
