Get More from Search - Trends in Search & Social Media

Social media isn’t just for students anymore. Some schools are utilizing Facebook, Twitter and blogs to keep in touch with parents, community members and alumni. Since it is easier to reach these constituents where they are instead of getting them to visit the school websites, schools are realizing that the simplicity of social media status updates and opening up two-way communication are additional benefits that social media platforms provide.

In an interview for the Washington Post, Adrian Murphy, a teacher at Green Acres in Rockville, MD that is responsible for the school’s new blog stated: “If you can read a blog and can see pictures and watch video clips, all of a sudden you have some insight into what’s going on. You’ve been invited to the conversation, and you can participate on your time.”

Reading a blog about interesting goings-on with the students and school can take as little as a minute or two, but getting parents to visit the school for a parent-teacher conference is very time-consuming. The instant and always-on nature of social media enables better, more consistent communication while preserving the precious commodity of time.

“It’s what the kids and parents are at home with, and it’s really important to be able to meet them where they are,” says Marlene Nesary, a spokeswoman International Society for Technology in Education, an Eugene, OR based nonprofit group that supports the use of information technology in learning.

Tweet This  Post by Jennifer Gosse.

Is search still “local” when you’re seeking information about another city? Local search’s functionality is discussed passionately when we’re talking about locating the things we need just down the street, but what about when we want to share the experience of another city with someone? Local takes on a broader meaning but its intent is the same: bring the best of a local neighborhood to us, via a search and a few clicks.

This is what my mom did for me recently. I knew that my parents were visiting Portland for a conference and since I’ve never been to the indie-city, my coffee-connoisseurship begged for a taste of the local brew. So I asked my mom to pick up a local roast for me on their trip. Her schedule didn’t allow for it, but weeks later, with my birthday coming up, she arranged for a full-bodied sip of Portland delivered to my door.

Her Google search used a simple phrase, “coffee from Portland OR,” which yielded the usual mix of paid and natural results for national chains and local coffeehouses.

Sifting through the results, she avoided the corporate brands like Starbucks, until she landed upon the first authentic-sounding result: “Hawthorne Coffee” which claimed it was “Portland’s coffee store…since 1980.” Local enough, she thought, as she clicked through to the website. But good enough? The first paragraph at the website answered that question:

“We appreciate that you value the kind of product knowledge and customer service found only at a neighborhood owner-operated business. We offer a wide selection of freshly roasted specialty coffees and premium teas from all parts of the world. Our coffees are roasted to your order and shipped the same day…”

Obviously, this local roaster knows a thing or two about discerning customers – even those who want to ship out a fresh taste of Portland java.

And, because I only drink organic coffee, and love the darkest, most full-bodied roasts, the next question was also quickly answered. Their right column navigation nicely organized their variety of offerings. There it was: Organic Coffee. The organic page, yielding distinct titles followed by short descriptions written in simple yet connoisseur-satisfying terms, clinched the sale.

An unfortunate shipping mishap delayed the order. The freshness may have suffered slightly but it didn’t matter: the coffee rocked. It was the finest coffee we’ve had in a long time, or perhaps, ever, noted my husband.

Kudos to Hawthorne Coffee Merchant for optimizing their site with the right content, making their navigation simple and for stating their unique value proposition at the top of their home page. These right moves showcased their understanding of their target audience and the owner-operator pride that distinguishes them. Thus, Portland-based Hawthorne has been granted another loyal customer – even though Portland isn’t our home town.

My mother’s search sleuthing led her to the best and gave me a personal and distinct taste of Portland, delivered to my door.

Small businesses should take note - you have an advantage in this increasingly franchised society. You’re authentic. Promote it via your people - people who care - to connect with your local and non-local audiences where they are - in search engines and social media.

Local search can be local even when the business isn’t local to you.

Tweet This  Post by Jennifer Gosse.

Vortaloptics custom search engines include revenue components that empower its clients to maximize the return on investment from their engines. Since the engine is completely controllable by the client, they can improve the relevancy of the search results and also place key partners and affiliates into their engines.

Vortaloptics never recommends listing irrelevant content just to profit from clicks, but rather consults our clients to focus on the most relevant content that users are seeking and match advertising, affiliates and partners to the search results pages to those search phrases to build a better user experience.

Because the content on our client results pages is hyper-relevant to the search terms and those results pages provide contextual ad and partner content, the ROI from clickthroughs is typically much higher for our clients than from traditional ads placed on blogs, for instance.  Search results page ads typically outperform regular page advertisements anyway, but because our clients can control the content of their results pages the ROI is on average, 10 times greater.

Affiliate marketing—using one website to drive traffic to another—is a form of online marketing, which is frequently overlooked by advertisers. While search engines, e-mail, and website syndication capture much of the attention of online retailers, affiliate marketing carries a much lower profile. Still, affiliates continue to play a significant role in e-retailers’ marketing strategies.

With clients being able to hone in top performing ads, they can now focus on the search phrases and clickthroughs that pay the most. Optimizing your website revenue is particularly important in a tough economy. One way to do this is to seek out the top affiliate programs and add as organic search content and banner listings.

As an example, Speedy Cash is launching a new affiliate program with one of the highest commissions per lead in the financial payday loans industry. Vortaloptics’ local search clients could signup for the Speedy Cash affiliate program and insert banners, text links and search results into their search engine for this payday loans affiliate program. When users search for or click on the financial services subcategory, the Speedy Cash program can receive prominent placement.

Being able to maximize revenue efforts by focusing on the top paying affiliate, partner and advertising initiatives makes good business sense. A well placed $85/lead link is worth the effort over a $1/lead program. Vortaloptics provides the technology to help administrators quickly focus their efforts on the top ROI programs and provide better value to their users.

Tweet This  Post by David Gosse.

To tweet or not to tweet, that is the question. And the answer is, a resounding yes!

Twitter’s success is nothing short of incredible and its rise to a preeminent social network is secure, with 6 million users and 55 million monthly visitors. The micro-blogging service is outranked in popularity only by Facebook and MySpace.

By now, you’ve either heard of Twitter, use it, or are addicted to it. Being able to communicate to your audience in 140-character micro-blogs can open up new opportunities for your business.  Whether Twitter becomes ubiquitous is yet to be seen, but with an increasing number of brands registered and millions of people using their personal accounts to establish themselves and their companies as “experts,” Twitter should become part of your social media mix.

If you’re a user, you probably went through the strategic part of setting up an account: “What am I trying to accomplish here? What will I write about? Who do I want to follow me? Is this for fun or for business?”  This is an important part of the process and will impact Twitter’s payoff.

What can Twitter do for your business?

• Keep in touch with customers, vendors, partners, employees and consultants
• Establish partnerships
• Learn about competition
• Build your network
• Open up new opportunities to participate in confererences and events
• Drive traffic to your website or blog
• Establish you/your business as an expert in an industry
• Improve productivity
• Grant you instant alerts on the latest news, stats, tools

Whether you’re already tweeting or haven’t yet caught the twitterpated bug, here are a few tips to illustrate how to optimize Twitter’s social media benefits for your business.

1. Structure your posts to get retweeted. To do this, keep your tweets short (around 120 characters, which leaves room for the necessary “RT @username” verbiage) and be relevant (ask questions, share helpful epiphanies, promote useful news and events). This “twetiquette” account is a cute and useful service to remind us all of best practices in Twitter.
2. Engage your audience. You can direct questions or topics to individuals or to your following. Using Twitter platform services such as TweetDeck or Twhirl will organize your follower’s posts, your @ replies and your direct messages. Program in searches for keywords that when posted, will alert you when you’re more apt to have something relevant to say. Keywords might be your name, your company’s name/products/services, hot industry terms, hash tag topics (#hashtag), or topics and people you’re interested in learning more about.
3. Target who you follow. Basically, follow those you want to follow you (industry leaders, popular companies, potential customers and partners). Follow-backs aren’t standard, and some think that following everyone who follows you is good “twetiquette” but by doing this, you’ll dilute the impact of your targeted audience. However, by being relevant and engaging your audience, the prospects of your targets seeing your content and following you back is much improved. Twellow lets you search for Twitter users or search by category of user).

Oh, and if you find this useful, please take a moment and retweet it!

Tweet This  Post by Jennifer Gosse.

To follow up on my last blog post and illustrate just how much strangers now influence our opinions and decisions, I thought I’d post some revealing findings about the importance of worldwide input via social media.

In Universal McCann’s recent report, “When did we start trusting strangers?” in the “Proliferation of influencer channels” section, it is posited that the web is encouraging trust among strangers the world over. This trend does not correlate with the societal assumption that strangers are out to get us. Rather, we see the web as an equalizer; a readily accessible platform for expression of all peoples. Tapping into that global authority expands our knowledge boundaries and allows us to shape our opinions based on the widest range of (assumably) unbiased, unsolicited and candid information. If knowledge is power, then it seems that we’re craving the power of that collective voice so much that we now hold stranger’s opinions in nearly as high a regard as the people we personally know.

• We trust strangers online almost as much as face to face recommendation
• The top four trusted forms of recommendation are all direct conversation - significantly two of these are now on internet channels: email and Instant Messenger
• We would much rather trust a stranger than a celebrity, by a long way
• We trust a stranger over any paid-for communications or advertising
• We trust a stranger more in a regulated environment like reviews in a retail site such as Amazon or an auction site like eBay
• Blogs are becoming a trusted form of opinion, blogs from people you know rank at number 7 and those by from professionals or micropublishers, number 15.
• Blogs are almost as trusted as their written word counterparts, magazines and newspapers
• Not everything online is trusted: emails from companies are only marginally more trusted than celebrities

(Source: “When did we start trusting strangers?” page 35.)

Those in our “strangers” sphere might not be our BFF just yet, but from the looks of this report and others cropping up weekly, it seems that they’re quickly becoming PGF (pretty good friends).

Tweet This  Post by Jennifer Gosse.

When you’re looking to purchase, what mechanisms drive your opinion and finally form your decision? As media changes, so do the channels that we rely on for information and the weight we give to those channels.

Word-of-mouth has always been a major influencing factor, with friends and family topping the trusted list. But it is the advice from strangers with experience in what we’re seeking that has nearly doubled in value in the past 10 years.

Other influentials include teachers, religious leaders and then media such as newspapers, magazines, radio personalities, TV news reporters, followed by bloggers, advertising and finally, telemarketers (from eMarketer’s chart, “Trusted Sources of Information according to US Consumers, 1997 & 2007″). But a revolution is well under way: we now trust the opinions of strangers whose material we read or view online as much as our friends!

So when did strangers become such a heavy influence upon our decisions? The boom of social media has given us access to billions of ratings, reviews, videos, blogs and micro-blogs, from people we don’t personally know. This state of affairs has been referred to as the “democratization of influence to the masses.”  This is a serious call-to-action for all marketers. Social media is now key in our hierarchical decision-making processes and must be recognized as a tool to meet your audience on the new communication grounds.

So how do we come to trust Stranger X’s opinion more than Stranger Y and Z? What strangers have to say is obviously important, but perhaps as important is strangers’ ability to identify with us that makes the difference.  As we look at avatars, read profiles, skim comments and blogs and view video clips, we look for clues that help us decide whether this is an opinion we’d trust. It might be abstract, but it’s the little things that influence whether we identify with that someone in one way or another.

It might be their work or life experience, notoriety, social life, family situation, appearance, personality or their style of communication that help form our “online” opinion of these strangers. As we gather those clues, we filter them through our own prisms of experience and knowledge. Does their opinion add up? Can we supplement our knowledge base with the views expressed by Stranger X? We’ll count or discount these influencing factors, and move onto the next review, comment, tweet, chat message, email or video until we’ve reached our own decision-making comfort level. And, we’ll add in a dash of traditional media opinion if applicable, and wrap it all up into our defendable decision.

You may be a little ahead or a little behind this curve, but the reality remains that the opinion of the masses is increasingly important in our lives. Its wise to join the conversation but don’t jump in without some preparation.  Transparency and good user experience are essential ingredients if your goal is successful viral marketing. Consumers want to know what makes your company tick, they want to see the faces behind the image and most importantly, they want a great product or service.

Tweet This  Post by Jennifer Gosse.