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Apparently there was an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico little while ago. A big one.

Admittedly, I’m a little out of touch with current events, unless of course they relate to search engine marketing. Which is how I came to hear rumours of this alleged oil spill – according to articles on online marketing sites, BP caused a massive environmental disaster on May 19 with the accidental detonation of one of their offshore drilling rigs.

What interests me as an Internet marketer is how BP is fighting the public relations fallout of their Gulf catastrophe with an extremely aggressive online PR campaign. The oil giant’s level of commitment to the damage control of their brand name online is extraordinarily comprehensive.

For a start, the BP website has undergone a revamp, with the creation of a new section dedicated to the disaster. There are daily news updates and blog posts, press releases and videos, and the interface capability for site visitors to share information on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

BP’s Facebook page is also being utilised as part of a social media initiative dedicated to minimising bad press. The company has also bought the keyword phrase “oil spill” in Google AdWords, so when a user of Google.com enters that search query, a PPC ad runs linking back to the BP website.

A quick look at the page’s source code reveals that even some SEO work has been done to optimise the site’s relevant keywords.

After looking around the BP site, I’m forced to concede that the company’s apparent ongoing dedication to cleaning up their spilled oil is impressive – almost as impressive as the effort they’re putting in to make sure that everyone knows about it.

Twitter has recently become a platform for cross boundary politicking as the Dalai Lama reached out to Chinese followers to take questions and provide some solace on issues from Tibet to his succession.  The Dalai Lama held a one-hour question-and-answer session via Twitter. It was not done through his official Twitter account but facilitated by Chinese writer Wang Lixiong who ran the feed from a New York hotel room. The Dalai Lama’s responses were translated into Chinese by an interpreter and then tweeted on Lixiong’s Twitter account.

According to the AFP’s report, “Nearly 12,000 people selected the 250 questions by online voting done on a Google Moderator site, which was blocked in China on Thursday.” It’s not known how many Chinese people were able to follow the tweets as Twitter is a restricted site in China. There are an estimated 150,000 people in China who use Twitter, and access to the Dalai Lama’s responses were accessible via third-party Twitter applications so it’s very hard to gauge.

This blogger does not want to get too much into the political issues surrounding this case but more so wants to point out the amazing boundary that social media has succeeded in crossing. As much as the Chinese government attempts to blindfold its citizens, another way to see has been found. Kudos is given to Lixong and the Dalai Lama for their innovative efforts to use new technologies to reach out a hand directly to the Chinese people.

Twitter launched its ‘Promoted Tweets’ advertising system earlier this month, in a long-expected move by the staggeringly popular micro-blogging platform to attempt to monetise the global reach of its information exchange service.

The system is similar to Google AdWords: keywords receive bids from advertisers, and if successful, the advertiser’s ad is triggered as a ‘Sponsored Tweet’ when that keyword is typed into Twitter’s search field. How often the ad appears is figured on its relevancy and popularity, a performance metric reminiscent of Google’s Quality Score.

If the advertising model does do well, then lucrative deals with the likes of Google, Microsoft and Starbucks are surely not far off.

How will this affect the lives of Twitter users? Hopefully not much, beyond inflicting a mild sense of irritation upon someone seeing a largely irrelevant ad within their usual stream of largely irrelevant tweets.

So many people tweet as a means of unpaid, unofficial advertising anyway that it’s entirely possible that the most prolific Twitter users will be the least impacted by the switch.

Appropriately, Twitter is handling the change with a delicacy intended to avoid alienating its user base. Netizens don’t take to change well, especially the kind that’s glaring (Facebook layout changes) or obviously aimed toward diminishing their experience for the sake of corporate profit (pop up ads).

Twitter’s transparency in announcing its intent to introduce search, and the relative subtlety of its text-based ad format – 160 characters max, just like a regular tweet – may just make this one a success.

Social media tools are becoming ever more popular amongst businesses throughout Australia as a way of offering special promotional deals and offers to their loyal fan base and followers.
Adding this additional interactive level with customers not only continues to build on your company’s brand awareness, and improve customer satisfaction but also encourages customers to continually purchase your products or services when they may not have until this particular ‘deal’ or ‘promotion’ caught their attention.

National Brand/Marketing Manager of EB Games, Debra McGrath talks about how EB Games distributes exclusive beta codes and offers through its ‘tweets’ on Twitter, which now has over 6000 followers. Their objective with social media was to make the user experience on these networks fun, useful and enhance their customer’s experience, with no particular focus on revenue goals.

Smart marketers know how powerful and influential word-of-mouth can be, and utilising social media to encourage this continual word of mouth, promotes interaction with customers in a simple way which will make aid in getting your brand name out there.

Twitter has proven a real hit for online promotions and brand awareness for Virgin Blue and Jetstar which actively offer specials deals and offers with their followers. Fast growing pizza chain Crust,  has a ‘Free Pizza Friday’ competition, getting fans to tweet ‘I’m entering @ Crust-Pizza # CrustFreePizzaFriday’, for the chance to win five free pizzas for that night.                                                                                                              Chief Executive, Michael Logos from Crust stated that although it was hard to track the exact revenue that came in from their online presence, Crust chains have definitely noticed the increase in sales as well as enjoying the increased ability to communicate with customers in real time.

There is some talk around about how Twitter has the potential to claim some of Google’s pie in the realm of real-time search. The ability to search for information via Twitter has the distinct and differentiated advantage over Google where the information is being presented real-time and comes direct from the user. For this reason some believe that Twitter is better than Google for researching companies, products and services for real customer feedback, breaking news and live events/conference updates.

The speed at which users can post information via Twitter and for this information to be made searchable instantaneously is an advantage over the slower process Google takes to crawl and list website information. The most common tweet is a link and a small insight.  The value of this link and the insight is quickly voted on as people respond and retweet. Relevance would then be determined by the amounts of these votes, making it a human powered search with the potential to provide very fresh and valid information.

Google Search results example for term ‘google translation’

Twitter search results example for term ‘google translation’

What does this mean for SEO?

Any switched on SEO practitioner will tell you all about the importance of links and its ability to impact your websites rankings. An easy way to generate a good amount of links can be achieved via blog posts. The theory goes that the tweet is the new blog post. In the past, the insight and the associated links were most favourably passed by on through blogs but as Twitter’s already impressive popularity increases, the amount of people posting on blogs will, in theory, decline. With a decline in these ‘votes’ will Google alter their algorithm to balance things out?

What does this mean for Google?

Twitter is differentiaed from Google by the potential to provide relavant and popular information through it’s millions of users. A search tool which provides information direct from a person who has purchased a particular product, viewed a film or used a service you are interested would be of interest to me, how about you?

It could simply be a matter of time before Twitter figures out a way to capatilise on this and claim search market share from Google. Ultimately, I believe it will be the users who decide the vailidity of this assumption. Either way it will be interesting to see how this play out. How will Twitter evolve in the coming year and what will happen with the potential rarefying of the inbound link and what impact will this have on the Google algorithm?

For more information on this endangered link theory, check out James Duthie’s post here.

Back in late November I blogged about the direction of online search and where would it go from here, and as a testament to how rapidly things change in the online world we already have an answer from Google about where they want to take things.

Google Goggles is a new search service offered on mobile phones running Google’s phone operating system, Android. Google Goggles allows the user to take a photo of an object and retrieve information from the web on it. Current requirements to be able to utilise Google Goggles:

* An Android device running Android 1.6 or above
* A QVGA screen
* A camera with autofocus

There are many uses for the service that will change how you search for information:

* Get information instantly by taking photos of:

• Landmarks
• Books
• Artwork
• Products
• Logos
• Wines

* Using the phones internal compass, the camera display can show information about locations such as restaurants relevant to your location and the direction that you point your camera. You’re then able to bring up information on the location (i.e. ratings and comments on restaurants)
* The service can recognise text and using this feature, users are able to scan in information off business cards and save them as contacts directly to the phone

This service is still in development and is not yet able to deliver results as relevant as you would expect via a normal keyword search, however its capabilities will advance through user feedback on the relevancy of their searches and as Google grows their database. Future plans for Google Goggles are to connect it with live updates from social networking sites such as Facebook status posts and Twitter feeds, as well as adding Google’s facial recognition technology (left out of initial release due to its currently limited functionality).

This new technology springs to mind some interesting questions; What will this new technology mean for online marketing? How does Google determine the relevancy of results and analyse images specific to certain topics? How will businesses optimise to generate exposure via this new medium?

From a social perspective, with the potential introduction of facial recognition, what will this mean for privacy? By simply entering a photo you took of someone into the search, will you be able to pull up of online data related to that person from their social networking pages to images to contact details to employment information? Will we have the choice whether or not to be ‘searchable’ online or what information comes up for searches?

This certainly is a space we will be keeping a close eye on.

Official Google Video on Goggles

Visual Demo of Google Goggles Functionality

Microsoft has announced the signed deal with Twitter and Facebook to effectively integrate status updates into the Bing search results. This will definitely move it closer to providing real-time search capabilities. Although search engine giants, Google are already showing Twitter and Facebook results, Bing will be stepping up and offering the entire public Twitter stream.

So how will the Twitter search results work on Bing? Here is an overview of what to expect:

•Tweets updated in real-time: View all tweets “roll in” in real-time by watching the “tweet SERP” update. To view more tweets than what’s displayed on the first page of search results, click “See more tweets about…”
•Results ranked by tweeter’s influence and uniqueness of the tweet: According to Microsoft, “If someone has a lot of followers, his/her tweet may get ranked higher. If a tweet is exactly the same as other tweets, it will get ranked lower.”
•Private tweets remain private: Tweets by users who have private or protected Twitter pages will not be indexed.
•Real-time only lasts so long: Tweets will only be indexed in Bing for 7 days, further indication that Bing intends to use the Twitter integration as a way to capitalize on real-time events and searcher interests. There’s no indication that Bing intends to index and provide a historical record of tweets.

The implications for marketers is that it will provide real-time social data within search result and encourage brands to embrace and try and keep up to the changing consumer search habits as they change. For example, a searcher seeking information on where the latest brand name sale is on, or the waiting time for an up and coming concert. Although the search engines cannot generate results as events are happening, user generated content from Facebook and Twitter may be able to address this.

The key takeouts from this news:
•Big opportunities for companies to
•Marketers who currently use Twitter and Facebook will experience greater importance and potentially traffic. However it will act as a double edged word in that brands will need to closely monitor any negative conversations that come up.
•From an SEO perspective, certain brands and industries may lose potential traffic and opportunity if they have not already taken up social media.
•Social media will continue to grow with search engines as it continues to move towards social commentary to determine data relevance.

Recent sources have confirmed talk that both Yahoo and Google are now looking into striking up deals with Twitter. These sorts of deals are big news because if undertaken would greatly improve the versatility of the results the search engines serve.

Twitters last reported monthly user volumes of 54 million that generates an excess of a billion tweets. This large amount of fresh user generated data produced on a daily basis could be hugely beneficial to the search engines in that recent and relevant tweets can be integrated into a search result. These listing would play a big part in generating more related, relevant and most importantly up to date results for its users.

This deal if swayed in the direction of Microsoft would most certainly assist its search engine Bing to further increase much needed ground on its main competitor Google.

Though these types of changes would be sure to benefit both search engines and Twitter alike it appears that the social media giant Twitter is in no hurry to make a decision on the matter or to reveal precisely how much data it is willing to release. With recent valuation figures of around the 1 billion dollars it is understandable that they would be in no hurry, they always have the option of investing in their own search engine and taking on the current big players.

According to some reports, Apple is offering Twitter USD $700m for the takeover deal. Sources revealed Apple is in advanced negotiations with Twitter and hope to close the deal by early June. Apple is waving USD $700m in cash in order to compete against Google and Microsoft who are also interested in this micro-blogging website.

Late last year, Twitter has turned down Facebook’s US $500m deal, in which the deal composed of Facebook stock.

In the world of Search, Google is undoubtedly king. However, the time may have arrived where there is a valiant competitor ready to knock Google off its perch.
Intrigued? I’m talking about the new social media craze - Twitter of course.

The brilliance of Twitter is that online conversations happen in real-time and so this has the opportunity to present users with a more relevant and compelling search experience.
However, at this stage Twitter is still very much in its infancy and cannot answer the vast number of queries like a search engine can presently. Will this change as more and more users log on and infiltrate Twitter?
As this social media marketing tool collects data, it may become more sophisticated in nature and become a new force in search.

Tapping into the mind of search marketing guru, Rand Fishkin (CEO of SEOmoz.com) he believes that the limitiation of Twitter in toppling Google is this:

Google answers an inherent need that has existed since the web’s inception: users must navigate to web sites and pages that contain desired information. Twitter cannot achieve this function and therefore cannot be a replacement for Google in search.”

With this in mind, where does Twitter sit in amongst the search market - and is this really the question to be asking at all?
At this stage Twitter cannot cover all of the topics that Google can, so this blogger will continue to use Twitter as a reference point to gain further information from search results uncovered in Google.