SEM Synergy Extras – Optimizing for Real-Time Search

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Hey gang, did ya figure I’d show up on this one? Yea, of course ye did!
RTS is really the buzz term of the year much like ‘social search’ was last year. And ‘buzz’ is also interesting as most of these tools tend to be nothing more than ‘buzz monitors’. One has to think much of this are these applications trying to ride the coat tails of being a ‘Google Killer’ and so ‘search engine’ becomes part of the game. It should be noted that none of the ‘social search engines’ (Mahalo being the largest of note) were more than a blip on the radar to the major engines and this year’s flavour is likely no different.
You also touched on an important aspect during the webcast, spam V adoption. While the spam isn’t debilitating at the moment, if any of these RTS applications ever achieved wide adoption it’s entirely likely that the spam would be a bloody mess. This also is a problem with SEO folks looking to ‘optimize’ (another silly term) for RTS. None of these applications are really sending enough traffic to seriously target for any type of meaningful ROI on the activities (more the domain of SMM peeps at this point).
Since I went a’ ranting and a rambling on RTS I’ve had some interesting discussions with a few folks in the realm. Of note is OneRiot and their ‘PulseRank’ technology. This week I am interviewing one of the engineers over there and should have something posted the week after. These folks are interesting as they are trying to actual do some indexing, ranking and spam control – the three elements needed to really be a serious ‘search engine’. Am I convinced? Not really, but that’s why we’re chatting, I hope they can bend me to their vision…
You can learn a bit more about their approach in this white paper;
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/document-preview.aspx?doc_id=8317396
Also, since we touched on social search, Max, CEO of Aardvark, has also contacted me and we’ll be talking about their offering in another interview this week…
You guys also mentioned the various patents on ‘friendrank’ type concepts which I thought to also put in 2c on. What is important about those approaches is that they are (primarily) geared towards pimping advertisements. Think of AdWords and presenting your marketing message to the person with the most followers of value for your market. They would look at social network users and find those with the greatest influence to target for advertisers for maximum exposure. Sure, this can also be used as a recommendation engine for content and even suggesting other users, but at the core is a social targeting system for advertisers.
Well, I’m rambling on once more… sigh… I’ve yet to bury this whole social/real-time search thing quite yet, so look for more in the coming weeks…
Thanks as always for the mention, this is an interesting topic… just not sure how it will play out at the end of the day (methinks dead-pool much like ‘social search’)…

Virginia, thank you for the opportunity to chat about real-time search, social search, or whatever current buzzword we determine to use. As Bruce mentioned at the opening of the show, real-time search is neither real-time or search. I agree with David Harry, the term is a misnomer.

Semantics aside, the value of having access to conversations provides users and marketers with access to near-real-time information and sentiment. I didn’t fully explore your question, “Why are people turning to real-time search?” and will do so with a blog post.

It is like monitoring a stream, as Bruce referenced. And Susan was right when she mentioned how real-time search is a playground for spammers! Users and marketers must filter past the chatter and SPAM. By optimizing specific “interjections” in the stream of conversation, however, businesses can optimize their sharing to increase discoverability.

Tweets with optimized keyword structure, URI shorts and hashtags may get retweeted, pumping up the “votes” for such keywords associated with the referenced link (surrounding SEO text). If one wants a tweet to have traction, format it with the right “hook” like you would for a title to a viral piece of content.

Also, I ponder how much the quantity and quality of followers influences the importance of a tweet on Twitter? Should we be blocking followers who are spammers and seek quality friends in the same way we put value on high-quality inbound links? A thought…

Enter your Twitter profile into Yahoo! Site Explorer to view how your tweets are now indexed as incoming links to your profile. That’s quite an eye-opener.

We should also optimize our Twitter profile bio, which appears as the “meta description” for our listings in search.

Gosh, and we just wanted to share and have conversations with our friends! Now we have to think about how our social media conversations are indexed!