World view 2.0

A recent article in Wired magazine this month pointed towards the shift in need for search engines to mine and present information in the here and now - rather than days old, minutes and hours are the order of the day in this forever changing world.

The explosion of microblogging

More and more organisations are moving their brands and content into the social space, handing over control to the potential customers.

With this barometer of online conversations and expressions it is essential that marketeers gain understanding what these people are communicating about, what their passions, topics and interests are in order to build communication strategies and also subsequently measure these campaigns effectivness is essential, the more "real time" the better.

With this assumption ( Google is as not representative of the 'current' as these social media search tools ) I thought it would be interesting to see if indeed this disconnect actually existed.

Polling Google, CNN and One Riot it was interesting to see that Google's top search queries in some part matched the results from One Riot the social network mining tool, the focus of the 'top searches' and 'talked about' items from the social sites showed a gossip and entertainment skew.

So while Googles approach in terms of frequency as to how it index's and organises the web may need updating when collating and presenting information, it demonstrates that the tool is indeed reflective of the buzz in the microblogging - the assumption would be users in these discussion 'storms' will be making use of the search tool to research and find further information of the topics being discussed.

Previously I posted the behaviour of users on social site Twitter and where these users went after their Tweeting session, with over 55% heading towards Entertainment sites. It is no surprise then that Global news did not figure the social media side. What was surprising CNN's main entertainment headline stories were nowhere to be seen on either Google or more importantly OneRiot.

Is this virtue of the different audiences and users on CNN vs the social networking sites, or are CNN off the mark?

Searches performed Sunday 4th Otober @ 10:41 am
marketing technology

Google Zeitgist data 48 minutes old

1. maya angelou
2. madonna snl
3. lady gaga snl
4. hot karl
5. anvil
6. anvil band
7. filthy sanchez
8. zombieland rules list
9. vikram buddhi
10. blue duck tavern

CNN Top stories
Periodic update

1. 'Drink' scandal Japan ex-minister found dead
2. 15 dead as typhoon whips the Philippines
3. U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan
4. Greeks head to polls for early elections
5. Vettel victory keeps alive F1 title dreams
6. Agencies rush to aid Samoans hit by tsunami
7. Group to Japan: Release American dad
8. India faces deadly rains
9. Rio's win a victory for tearful da Silva
10. Hundreds still missing after Indonesia quakes
11. 50 dead or missing in Italy mudslides
12. Kidneys bought and sold on black market
13. Sunderland hold Man Utd at Old Trafford
14. Sharapova lands Tokyo title as Jankovic quits
    

Entertainment

1. Arrest of Letterman extortion suspect shocks family
2. Polanski promised $500K to rape victim in '93
3. Judge says Michael Jackson's kids 'doing wonderfully'
4. CBS producer pleads not guilty to trying to blackmail Letterman
5. Are Katy Perry and Russell Brand dating?
6. Lauren Conrad admits she's one bad actress

Review: The truth is, 'Lying' succeedsThe Academy-Award winning British producer and (briefly) Columbia Pictures head David Puttnam used to have a placard on the wall of his office. It read: "Hello, he lied."

ONERIOT.COM

Lady Gaga announces solo tour
Pop star Lady Gaga has decided to embark on a solo tour now that the planned joint one with rapper Kanye West has been cancelled. The 'Paparazzi'...indianexpress.comLast shared: 2 minutes ago 69 shares Tweet ItFirst shared byBreitbartTVon Twitter »

‘Good Luck With Rio’: SNL Has Obama...Boy, when SNL starts making fun of you then you are really in trouble, completely marginalized. Perhaps they figured the world started slamming him, so...breitbart.tvLast shared: 3 minutes ago 210 shares Tweet ItFirst shared bySTYDNewson Twitter

Huge Numbers Welcome Paranormal Activity ExpansionHuge Numbers
Welcome Paranormal Activity Expansion 1 new posts 1 total posts Huge Numbers Welcome Paranormal Activity Expansionshocktillyoudrop.comLast shared: 4 minutes ago 49 shares Tweet ItFirst shared byTechCrunchon Twitter

WITN?: Perfectly N*Sync. Or when the celebrities turn geek,...It’s weird that Justin Timberlake – he formerly of N*Sync and having sex with Britney Spears – is currently spending his days pretending to be the guy...TechCrunchLast shared: 5 minutes ago 1630 shares Tweet ItFirst shared byabcsportsdeskon Twitter

Sport - Storm hang on to be crowned premiersMelbourne has held on to clinch its second premiership in three seasons with a thrilling 23-16... 2009 NRL grand final at Sydney's Olympic stadium.abc.net.auLast shared: 5 minutes ago 109 shares Tweet ItFirst shared by_CelebrityNewson Twitter Maya

Angelou Taken to the HospitalTMZ has learned Maya Angelou was taken to the hospital early Saturday evening. She was scheduled to be honored at the BraveHeart Awards in Los Angeles...TMZLast shared: 8 minutes ago 3009 shares Tweet ItFirst shared byjodijillon Twitter

Video! Zombieland Movie: Attention Zombies Woody...Woody Harrelson Zombieland Movie (AP Photo/Evan Agostini) Zombieland takes place in a world where Zombies over run the land, and Tallahassee (Woody...ExaminerLast shared: 14 minutes ago 34 shares Tweet ItFirst shared bynewspapersrsson Twitter

Elizabeth Smart: Woman kidnapped by 'prophet' claims captor...Elizabeth Smart, now a 21-year-old college student, gave evidence at a hearing to decide whether self-described prophet Brian David Mitchell is fit to...Daily Mail OnlineLast shared: 2 hours 12 minutes ago 63 shares Tweet ItFirst shared bydaily_financeon Twitter

Reality TV's big bottom line: Do these stars deserve such...MTV's The Hills , for... members Audrina Patridge, Lauren Bosworth and Heidi Montag are grabbing $100,000 per episode, according to The Daily Beast...Daily Finance

About OneRiot

OneRiot crawls the links people share on Twitter, Digg and other social sharing services, then indexes the content on those pages in seconds

AD:Tech - Meerkats and Search

over 570,000 meerkat fans

Recent trip to AD:Tech in the UK and some interesting insights from the search providers and HitWise, the analytics company

search

They all focused on online retailers and the challenges they face in attracting and customers making comparisons to there high street cousins and the economic downturn which affecting them both.

With the three ( soon to be 2 ? ) search engine companies going through constant evolution in order to make their offer and effectiveness of their product both better for users and advertisers through improved search results, is this having a direct impact on the paid search market?
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All three search providers are investing time and effort of surfacing relevant information in the main search results. In the context of retail this would be location maps, product images and key information which may be buried in the site such as customer service or booking numbers .

This enriched user experience is not only for the benefit of us, Yahoo quoted as seeing as much as a 50% increase in Click through Rates and an increase of 20% in conversion using these methods.

As if to confirm this recent data from Hitwise did indeed points to a decrease in paid search across all online retailer categories with more time and effort going into SEO.

Free lunch

Consumers are now more than ever attracted to offers such as discount vouchers with the success of traditional retailers such as Pizza Express and Threshers (wine retail outline) in the UK using this method. With it’s high viral pass on rates between friends these two companies regularly make use of this tactic, in fact many price comparison sites have built a business model around this aggregating and subsequently redirecting searches from users to these offer however it was noted that many retailers are now looking to capture these users directly through smarter use of SEO rather than having to pay this referral fee to such sites.

Social network - What part do Twitter and Facebook play?

Face book this month announced they were finally cash flow positive along with recording there 300 millionth member , validating there dominant position in the social media space.

Twitters exponential growth is well documented, as is their current inability also to turn a buck.

What is interesting though about both of these players is where do users go after they have visited these sites?

• 1 in 3 Google users ends up at a transactional based website after leaving the site – implying that there is specific intention in the search and therefore the subsequent purchase action.
• Twitter users however have a very different exit, over 55% of its users end up at entertainment sites.
• Social sites users in generally do not end up at online retailers after they have exited the site, with 7% of their traffic finding its way to these.

So social media websites do not work for retailers?

The trend buckers

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ASOS the exclusively online retailer of fashion goods and clothing has a quite astonishing funnel of users from social sites – with 14% of it’s traffic coming from Facebook alone ( Google comes in at 25% - which while significantly more is actually less than the usual traffic volume of between 30 – 40% from the site to online retailers) demonstrating the importance of Face-book to ASOS.

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Other brands which have managed to setup successful communities in the social space are comparethemarket.com, with their meerkat now having over ½ million Facebook friends and 28,000 followers on Twitter – applying the rationale these users will subsequently visit entertainment site ‘s could be of intrinsically beneficial to a price comparison website if leverage correctly with context of the user being reasonably inferred

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Christmas rush online

What was also interesting was online retailers busiest times in the all important build up to Christmas compared to retail outlets.

Online November and first week of December, with then a sharp decline with the opposite in retail outlets taking place.

Reasons cited were as simple as delivery / lead times affecting the level of trust consumers had in online to deliver in time for the holiday season.

Sharp rises in online activity after the Xmas period though may not translate directly to increased in online sales, rather consumers searching for discounts and the location of retail ‘ discount sales ‘.

Online and Retail

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Retailers who offer both an online and retail combination could though seize on the surges and declines – with click and collect offering the convenience of online and security of being able to obtain the goods by going to the store.

Tina Turner and cupcakes...

Question.

What do Sarah Palin, the BBC iPlayer,Cupcakes, ike and Tina Turner all have in common ?

marketing technology and technology in marketing play an importanT

Answer.

marketing technology

They all feature in the top 10 categories of Googles review (Zeitgeist) of billions of search terms for 2008.

Surrender or drown

The web grows bigger – fact

Content creation is estimated to be growing at around a billion pages per day

Google recently reached a milestone of a trillion pages while running there indexing tools.

Now of course there is a lot of content which is replicated and duplicated but even considering this it still leaves a staggering amount of new information, content and ‘stuff ‘ that makes our jobs even harder to find relevant and more importantly contextual content when we hit that search button.

Search tools fundamental purpose in life is to separate the wheat from the chaff, using smart technology to aid in the sorting process to deliver results which fulfil our criteria, but also deliver the all important contextual advertising that drives the revenue for search companies.

Companies such as Google admit that technology though can only go part of the way to solving the search problem, encouraging us to share information and store our browsing history to further improve these results but leading to privacy debates which continually rage.

So do we have to surrender our personal privacy so as not to drown in non relevant search results ?

A new entrant into the market place is Cuil, a start-up whose privacy policy very clearly states that they keep no logs, no history and do not use the information your computer sends in any way to identify you could be the life preserver many people are looking for.

Question is how then, with this expanding universe of data and information, can they provide today ( let alone the future ) a search tool that delivers relevancy?

Key features :

Context

“Cuil prefers to find all the pages with your keyword or phrase and then analyze the rest of the content on those pages. During this analysis we discover that your keywords have different meanings in different contexts. Once we’ve established the context of the pages, we’re in a much better position to help you in your search.”

Organisation

“We separate different ideas from each other so you can choose the one that interests you. We pick images to illustrate the idea behind each page to aid you in your choice. We include roll-over definitions and offer you ideas to refine your search.”

Search the web, not it’s users

“Because Cuil analyzes Web pages and not click-throughs, we don’t need to know your search history and habits” marketing technology

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Google Visual Rank – picture search to get smarter

google image search for "ape"

Searching for images on the web is still a hit and miss affair.

Efforts from many organisations to make the task of finding images and video on the web easier are really only just getting underway.

Currently all mainstream search providers rely on text descriptions of the image known as ‘ meta data ‘ or ‘ tagging ‘ to return results to our queries. Adding these descriptions to the images in most cases is a human task,time consuming, prone to error / interpretation and can very laborious marketing technology.

Google last year added ‘ face ‘ recognition to its search algorithms – however exactly whose face it was still relied on good old fashioned tagging ( see above ).

Taking this one stage further they recently published documents outlining trials of “ Visual Rank “ which combines image recognition technology with their ranking algorithms, ranking and returning pictures based on similarities found across a set of images.

Initially focusing its efforts on product images the search giant is expanding the trials to take in the travel related queries.

From a marketing perspective it adds a new dimension, now not only do advertisers have to grapple with ensuring keywords and phrases are associated to their products, the product imagery itself must be optimised.


Official Google Research Blog: VisualRank: "The idea was simple: find common visual themes in a set of images, and then find a small set of images that best represented those themes"

Grouping the search

A diversion from the norm here ( however a great example of how enhancing search adds context and relevance) with a music search tool called Yamelo.



The service which is still currently in beta allows you to search for music ( nothing new here ) but also usefully groups popular music by year. marketing technology

Youtube provides the content and also the visuals which are displayed from your search, along with ' tag clouds ' which enhances the entire experience and often leads to you revisiting some classic songs and artists.marketing