Ann Smarty at ProductiveWise sizes up the various options for tapping into real-time search - Twitter, Facebook, Google and Friendfeed. Personally, I am finding Google's new search options to be outstanding - an addicting.
He is charged with helping clients identify emerging technologies and trends that can be applied in marketing communications programs. Rubel also explores these topics on his site, a monthly Forbes.com column and in a bi-weekly AdAge column. He can be found on Twitter and Facebook as well.
Steve can be reached via email at steverubel@gmail.com.
Note: Everything posted on this site is Steve's personal opinion. It does not represent the views of Edelman or its clients.
Ann Smarty at ProductiveWise sizes up the various options for tapping into real-time search - Twitter, Facebook, Google and Friendfeed. Personally, I am finding Google's new search options to be outstanding - an addicting.
Twitter is an English word -- that's significantly different. But the word doesn't mean anything specific, and the management of twitter is in fact ruining what "intellectual capital" that word used to add to twitter.com -- many sites have been run into the ground this way (so the twitter management's "epic fail" -- its "dropping the ball" -- is nothing new).
Facebook.com seems to be managed FAR BETTER than twitter.com (in case anyone feels they're competitors) -- but all 4 of the sites mentioned have very little or in fact no sense of community whatsoever. They are all brand name / mainstream media -- and therefore shouldn't be very interesting to advertisers seeking to reach targeted audiences (but that doesn't necessarily mean that many advertisers would refrain from wasting a lot of money advertising in these venues -- many advertisers may very well be just as clueless as most of the users of these services).
:) nmw
Actually, you wrote a post about that trick http://www.steverubel.com/google-real-time-search-bookmarklet :)
All of the interest in "social" is primarily a sign of DISINTEREST in Google -- in other words: it shows how BAD Google is -- what an epic failure at "organizing all the web's information" (which is, of course, a ludicrously conceited goal in the first place).
The main people who should be worried are: 1. people invested in Google and 2. advertisers who think that any of their ad spend will actually have a significant impact on the bottom line. I might also add that the users/consumers should be worried how badly they're being misinformed, but I guess that many of these people are so accustomed to being poorly informed by mass media that they probably wouldn't be terribly upset about it anyways. (sad but true?)
I believe in the near future, when some sort of integration between the FF and FB platforms, will offer a competitive position for FaceBook against Google.
As far as the necessity for "real-time" searches, I believe that by monitoring a particular topic or discussion of a brand might be helpful in a larger perspective, but responding to such information "real-time" can be, at best, reactionary. On the other hand, I suppose I can understand the value of more immediate changes in search rankings, brand buzz, and such for the SEO gurus. That, however, is a very different topic.
