With Twitter seemingly taking over the world (I believe it started by taking control of Stephen Fry’s mind), Facebook now accounting for a quarter of all worldwide page views; and a fifth of all Internet users now sharing status updates, it was only a matter of time before the search engines realised they needed to take notice of social media.

Indeed, it would be crazy to ignore the vast amount of regularly updated user information available through social interactions. Looking for a takeaway? Your mate’s review of the Chinese around the corner is always going to hold more weight than a stranger’s review from 2002.

Bing's deals with Facebook and Twitter

It’s this up-to-date nature of Facebook and Twitter that has got Bing’s attention. They’ve just independently struck deals with Facebook and Twitter to incorporate real-time status updates into their SERPs. Unlike Twitter (where status updates are public for anyone to see), not all Facebook updates will be available in the results, due to users’ privacy settings. However, this strategic manoeuvre will still deliver an unfamiliar feeling to rival Google, who have been outplayed for once.

How Google are integrating social media results

Google, having struck a deal with Twitter hours after Microsoft, are trying to integrate social in a slightly different way. Rather than taking Microsoft’s worldwide approach, Google Labs are to offer an opt-in service, where one you have supplied your social network information, your friends’ views are incorporated into search results. Because you’re supplying log-ins, in comparison to Bing, you’re likely to get more information.

What’s that you say? Doesn’t this pose an issue of privacy? Of course – Google will now know even more about you! But before you get all agitated, remember it’s an opt-in service.

What does this mean for businesses?

Integrating social into search engines will mean companies will now have to adopt new and different strategies to market themselves. It will also mean that Twitter will be ignored by less and less people.

With Google and Bing now bringing in real-time information on searches, it will be very interesting to see how everyone is affected. An interesting view on the travel industry has been talked about by tnooz.com.

Yahoo, on the other hand, are taking no steps towards social integration, perhaps due to the impending deal with Bing…

We all know that Twitter can be an interesting tool for users to share their thoughts, feelings and everyday occurrences and for companies to share news and special offers with their customers. But what happens when a malicious rumour is started and begins to spiral out of control?

Kanye West tweets officially rocketed on September 16 after he publicly humiliated Canadian country singer and teen princess Taylor Swift on the MTV VMA awards by barging on stage, interrupting her acceptance speech and announcing that Beyonce Knowles should have won the award as she 'had the best video of all time!' Kanye was booed off stage and a shocked Taylor stood in silence as the whole world watched... and tweeted!

Kanye-related Tweets soared with fans and fellow celebrities casting their opinion on the whole episode. Some especially stand-out tweets came from the celebs who were tweeting live from the VMA audience:

Pink: ‘Kanye West is the biggest piece of @#*! on earth. Quote me.’

Katie Perry: ‘It’s like you stepped on a kitten’

Following a very public apology after the awards ceremony, West-related tweets soon returned to their normal level.

That was until rumours of Kanye's sudden death surfaced...

Once again, on October 21, the Twitter world went wild (twild?) after a tweet surfaced claiming West had been killed in a car crash. “RIP Kanye West” also became the most searched for term in the USA just hours after the tweet.

It was just a Twitter-propagated hoax (twoax?)

The Twitter death (tweth?) rumour was soon put to bed by West’s girlfriend Amber Rose (via twitter of course!) which then led to some comical tweets linking the death hoax with the balloon boy hoax which was also making headlines in the news that day ('Imma let you finish, but Balloon Boy was the best hoax of all time!')

It is thought that a replication of the Fox News homepage, announcing that the rapper was dead aged 32, was the source of the rumour.

Let this be a reminder to us all - Twitter does not equal the twuth!

With the internet now reaching far-flung corners of the world, and social networking still on the rise (Facebook now boasts over 300 million active users), Facebook has now introduced a stripped back, lighter version of its more-popular-than-ever social networking site, cleverly named Facebook Lite.

The faster-loading site is designed with countries that have limited broadband in mind. Currently aimed at India, where statistics show a large number of new users flocking to the site, it is likely to be tested next in Russia and China.

What is Facebook Lite?

According to the big cheese itself, Facebook Lite is “a fast-loading, simplified version of Facebook that enables people to make comments, accept friend requests, write on people's walls, and look at photos and status updates”. 

Of course, with the rapid rise in mobile internet taking over the world (I only have to look around the office to notice 10 different iPhones in my vicinity); Facebook Lite has benefits for developed countries as well. With it’s simplified design, it may even find everyday users migrating to the interface, where the less overwhelming design could be better suited to casual users.

The speculation that this was Facebook’s attempt to bite back at Twitter has now died down, although with the recent acquisition of FriendFeed, there are still some rumours floating around that Facebook still has an Ace up it’s sleeve…

It hit me on Saturday afternoon, apparently out of the blue:

The internet knows too much.

It might have been to do with hearing news that social media sites now contain so much information about people’s whereabouts, they are being used by burglers as a form of online shopping.

It may have been connected to recent research I read which showed Twitter is 40% ‘pointless babble’ and 37% ‘mindless chatter’.

Or it could have been down to the rumours that some scientists are speculating the internet could, one day, become so vast and complex that it spontaneously develops consciousness.

I resolved to do what little I could to limit my contribution to this tangled mass of information. I decided to commit social media suicide.

Goodbye, sweet virtual world

It started well. Twitter let me go without a fuss. I had invested very little of myself into the account, after all: no photos, fewer ‘friends’, no groups joined, and I knew I could still find any information I wanted using Twitter Search. Click. Done. Free.

Next: Facebook. I thought about everything Facebook had given me over the last three years: messages from long-forgotten school friends, strange new games involving vampires and zombies, an unauthorised version of Scrabble which was eventually removed due to copyright issues.

I clicked on ‘deactivate’ and was completely thrown by what I saw. For its deserters, Facebook has developed a type of emotional blackmail so potent that I lost my will to leave altogether. This is what it said:

'Are you sure you want to deactivate your account? Your friends will no longer be able to keep in touch with you. Ben will miss you. Nadia will miss you. Sarah-Louise will miss you. Jon will miss you. Annabel will miss you' (each epitaph with a specially sourced photo featuring both me and the friend in question).

I’ll be giving it another go soon. I have temporarily re-activated my Twitter account, though - I just needed to check something.

How to leave Twitter:
Click on ‘settings’ (top of page), then click on ‘delete my account’ (bottom of page)

How to leave Facebook:
Click on ‘settings’ (top of page), then click on ‘deactivate’ (bottom of page). You'll need a steady hand and a firm conviction.

A few years ago, Google kidnapped all their best engineers and smuggled them into a little room filled with squillions of emails, tweets, live updates, events, virtual friends, requests, forums, searches, blogs, groups, irritating quizzes, fans, pages and rss feeds, along with some giant vats of Red Bull.

Google then instructed those engineers to think in terms of 'what would email look like if we invented it today?', and build a tool so mind-bogglingly new and gadgety that it would throw all other social mediums out of the water in one fail swoop.

Now those engineers have re-emerged - exhausted, relieved and with a massive sugar-hangover - to reveal their all-encompassing communication solution: Google Wave.

What is ‘Google Wave’?

Google Wave is the name of their creation. The ‘wave’ itself is also an aspect of that creation. As one commentator put it, Google Wave is 'like email on crack'. The best way to describe it is to explain how you use it. You create a wave and add people to it. All the people you’ve added are then able to share text, pictures, gadgets and feeds from other places on the internet on the same wave page you created.

The moment you change something, all the other people on the wave can see that it has been changed. You can also see how your particular wave evolved from start to finish with Google Wave’s ‘playback’ option. The same goes for Google Wave’s integrated games.

When you create a message for your wave, for instance an invite to an event, all the people on your wave can go in and edit or add to that same message in real-time, rather than having to create their own, separate responses as you would do in an email or on Facebook. Talking about Facebook, you can receive updates (or ‘waves’ of updates) from Facebook and Twitter in your Google Wave inbox, making it a more integrated social system.

An email revolution could be afoot...

Essentially, this is an exciting new kind of email which allows people to communicate and work together simultaneously on a live email/conversation document with richly formatted text, videos, maps, photos, games and more, and it might be about to revolutionise email.

In February this year, when a meagrely Twitter population of self-promoters and internet junkies was suddenly invaded by hoards and hoards of regular people, something quite special happened.

A community appeared which represented a reasonable cross-section of society, happily donating their thoughts and feelings to a bottomless database of information, all instantly accessible through Twitter Search.

Twitter & the collective consciousness

What we have now with Twitter Search is a meaningful barometer of the collective consciousness, along with the ability to react to tiny shifts in that consciousness, as and when they occur.

With more than 10 million users (even if 90% of tweets come from 10% of users), Twitter Search provides a fascinating window into people's thoughts, beliefs and attitudes, about pretty much any subject in the public eye.

Whether it’s the latest Susan Boyle revelation, shock success of the BNP or simply the fact that it’s Friday (Twitter’s trending topics currently lists the acronym ‘TGIF’), if something is happening, people will be tweeting about it.

Reacting to complaints

Some companies have already made good use of the online marketing opportunities available through Twitter. Comcast's director of digital care, Frank Eliason, regularly searches Twitter for the word Comcast (and, allegedly, ‘Comcrap’), to react directly to any customers' issues that they happened to have mentioned on Twitter.

Comcast has had around 30,000 Twitter interactions in the last year. Eliason said that the initiative has been a success, customer-relations wise, because: ‘It's a little more personal. More back-and-forth discussions and it's less formal. And it gives immediacy to interactions.’

Wholefoods also reacts to complaints on Twitter, with replies including the cheerily personal: ‘Sorry to hear that your soup was cold. Let me know which store it was and I'll see if I can get you in touch with the store team leader.’

Tweeting special offers to followers

Another way to engage with customers on Twitter is to build a community with some sort of incentive to check what you’re tweeting, and to respond to their questions to reinforce the connection.

A number of street food businesses have used Twitter to alert customers to when they’re in town. An LA company called Magic Curry Cart, which offers spicy tacos in a moving truck, alerted customers to when they were in town, and responded to one Tweet with: ‘Yes the magic curry kart offer[s] both vegetarian and chicken options’.

What should you do?

While it may not be appropriate for all companies to react to their customers’ tweets, it can never hurt to just take a look for you own brand name and find out what kind of Twitter-press it’s getting.

The information can then be used in a number of ways – to assess brand loyalty, pick up on recurring problems and deal with them, and even, once you’ve got the hang of it, to interact with Twitter users on a one-to-one level.

Ideally, though, you’ll think of something so brilliant and fresh to do on Twitter that your brand name will become part of Twitter history and gain infamy simply through endless Twitter articles like this one.

Twitter is about to unveil a major revamp of its search capabilities. New features will include a links search and ranking by ‘user reputation’.

Twitter Search currently searches only the words within tweets, but changes have been made to the algorithm, meaning that searches will be able to include the links people have tweeted, as well. The Twitter crawler will visit the links, index the page and correlate the 3rd-party content with the Tweet, which should help give more relevant Twitter search results.

The updates will also mean that while currently, Twitter Search finds keywords based on the text of the most recent Tweet and uses only this to decide the order of results, in future it will be able to rank results for trending topics according to ‘user reputation’, or the popularity or the Twitterer, as well.

The changes to the Twitter search engine were uncovered by Twitter’s VP of operations, Santosh Jayaram, previously the VP of Search Quality for Google. He hopes that the changes will remove some of the duplicate tweets which currently appear on Twitter Search and ensure that the results that do appear are more relevant to the search.

Social is the new buzz word. Everyone’s doing it, and everyone’s talking about it. Buzz Tracking, Social Media Monitoring, Perception management – it’s all big business now, with agencies popping up all over the place specialising in this market alone.

Meanwhile, marketers are running around trying to get in on the bandwagon which, without proper consideration, may not even take them anywhere.

I can just imagine the water-cooler moment with two marketing heads talking about how amazing it is that Facebook has grown so fast, before immediately deciding that they need a corporate Facebook page. A month later, they’re starting a Twitter account and presenting to their bosses about how they’re at the forefront of digital.

Fools rush in

While this ‘social media strategy’ may get them a pat on the back, it rarely results in any genuine business success, neither does it really represent any form of strategy. However, you could argue that the only thing wasted is a bit of time, so it’s not a huge problem. This is true only until we realise how significant the gain may have been – as which point the opportunity cost becomes quite significant.

The problem arises from today’s action-led corporate world, where we are obsessed with all things ‘doing’. What we’re doing, what we’ve done and what we’re going to do. As long as we’re doing, our salaries are safe.

Sit quietly and listen...

When developing a social media strategy, we advise a different approach. Just this one time, park being proactive and instead, realise it’s ok to not know what you’re supposed to do. Only with this mindset will you be able to extract from the new and exciting world of social media the real value. After all – this is not an arena for you to flex your corporate biceps, but rather to sit quietly. Listen. Absorb. Consider.

When search marketing started booming, it was a revolution. Representing ‘pull marketing’, search allowed companies to target active consumers who were genuinely ‘in the market’. As the consumers were in charge, they didn’t mind being fed messages by companies trying to bid for their business as they had, in fact, requested it. This happy relationship meant we could all go about our business, lining the pockets of Google.

The mindset of a social surfer is entirely different. They're not calling your customer service centre or placing an order online, they're just chatting. It just so happens that the online world is so transparent, you know exactly what they’re chatting about. Whilst the ‘doing’ urge might be strong, it would be rude to barge in.

Design a considered response

The first problem is that consumers are bored of companies trying to sway their opinion. And to be fair, you can see why, given that an average person is exposed to 1000s of marketing messages each and every day.

The second problem is that a company’s urge to ‘do something’ often results in a defensive approach, rather than a creative one. My favourite example is from EA Sports, who responded to a video posted by a customer on YouTube.

The ‘Jesus Shot’ showed Tiger Woods being able to walk on water due a bug in the PGA Tour 2008 EA Sports game. Clearly a glitch, a natural response would have been to run off and try to fix it for the next release. Perhaps communicate with the poster about the fix, send him a free game as a thankyou for his feedback, and assume you’ve correctly leveraged ‘social’ to its full potential.

EA took a different tack, using this feedback to create a reply which has now been viewed over 3 million times. Had EA not tracked the space with such an open and creative mindset, this initiative would never have occurred, and their brand would have been interacted with 3 million times less.

Let the consumers take the lead

We recommend that the first thing you do is simply to start tracking. There are a number of paid tools you can subscribe to, although many will be too expensive for non blue chip companies. However, there are other few tools you can use, or get your agency to start tracking this for you.

At the very least, you should set up some Google Alerts for your company name, your competitors, and indeed the core terms relating to your market and offering. Make a list of some of the key sites you know where people discuss what you offer and check them regularly.

Check in on Facebook every now and then to see if there are any groups which related to what you do, hunt out relevant blogs, track the twitter space closely to get a feel for the zeitgeist of your industry – immerse yourself in your consumers.

Know your audience

With the correct systems in place, it's possible to learn more about your audience than ever before. What they like, what they hate, what they tell their friends and what they fear. Intelligent, considered and creative analysis of what you find can lead you down many a road which you had not even considered.

As we said – it’s ok to not have a social media strategy just yet. In fact, we think that’s the whole point...

A recent video by Nike, ‘Nike Naked Running Camp’, shows a fictional group of running enthusiasts who love nothing more than to streak naked across the US wilderness. 

The imaginary running camp is based in South Dakota’s Bear Butte (a genuine State Park), and group members gather every day to embark on long-distance runs wearing nothing but their favourite pair of Nikes.

It seems that sports and viral videos may have a natural connection. Eight months ago, EA Sports capitalised on social media with their Tiger Woods YouTube video.

The sports games company noticed a video clip by an EA Sports enthusiast on YouTube, ‘Jesus Shot’. It featured a glitch in their Tiger Woods PGA Tour game which made it seem that Tiger Woods was walking on water. 

EA Sports’ video reply, 'Walk on Water', featured the real Tiger Woods in a scene where he apparently walks on water to take a shot from the middle of a lake.

The clip skyrocketed in popularity and is now a classic example of successful viral marketing.

Why go viral?

While it’s difficult to get right, viral marketing can be a great way to engage with customers and increase brand loyalty.

The key is to show that the company is in touch with the zeitgeist and happy to meet users on their own terms, creating a level platform for interaction.

This kind of interaction is very different from the traditional method of advertising, where the advertiser to consumer relationship automatically takes on more of a teacher/student character.  

That old, one-sided approach seems increasingly unbalanced and outmoded as open interaction between brand and consumer becomes the norm.

The government is now looking into monitoring social networking sites, with a view to using the information gathered to tackle crime gangs and terrorists.

Critics are attacking the idea on the basis that tracking the sensitive personal information stored on social networking sites amounts to an infringement of privacy. Liberal Democrat MP Tom Brake said the plans constituted the 'most expensive snooper's charter in history'.

This is the latest of a series of news stories about privacy issues with sites such as Facebook. The site ran into trouble in February, when the terms were changed, explaining that Facebook would store personal information, including photographs and messages of users, even when they had unsubscribed from the site.

As a result of an onslaught of negative feedback, along with a heated media debate about the ownership of user generated content, the terms were subsequently changed back again.

Compare the Meerkat, we salute you.  This contemporary web marketing campaign has perfectly demonstrated the potential for crossover from TV to online advertising, with the charismatic meerkat Aleksandr Orlov persuading viewers of his TV ad to ‘compare the meerkat’ on his website.

Once there, visitors are able to find all kinds of meerkats, such as, ‘scuba diving meerkat in Rio’, and then compare that particular meerkat to other kinds of meerkat, thus pleasingly mirroring the main site, Compare the Market.

Although this may have been intended primarily as a brand awareness campaign, in fact 21% of Compare the Meerkat viewers went on to visit Compare the Market, causing visits to the main site to soar by 86% in January, according to Hitwise.

This terribly modern online marketing campaign has also capitalised on the booming social media market, replicating the meerkat persona with over 200,000 fans on Facebook and over 5,000 followers on Twitter for the most enthusiastic Orlov fans (including atomic).

‘Twittering’ used to be the poetic sound of little birds in the garden in springtime.

These days, we’ve all lost interest in the birds and logged on to do our own ‘twittering’ on microblogging site Twitter.com.

Whether you love or hate Twitter, it’s hard to deny the momentum it is gathering, with users snowballing to 55 million as of February 2009. It’s the blogging site for busy people.

What is Twitter, anyway?

To all those Twit-free surfers out there, Twitter is a website which allows you to update the world on your every move, within the space of 140 characters, from getting trapped in a lift (Stephen Fry) to giving birth at home (Erykah Badu).

When you write a message it’s called a ‘tweet’ and will be sent to all your ‘followers’. And you can communicate with, and keep track of, all those you are ‘following’. Sign up and your mum will know what you’re having for tea, and your mates will know when you’re leaving for the party.

In addition, Twitter Search allows you to find out what twitterers are tweeting about in relation to your chosen subject.

Crucially (in atomic’s view), as a Twitter user you can follow the day-to-day actions, irritations and words of wisdom of some very famous people. The success of Twitter has been heavily influenced by celebrities such as Jonathan Ross and Stephen Fry, both of whom recently extolled the virtues of the site on TV.

How could Twitter possibly make any money?

The question on everyone’s lips is: how will Twitter capitalise on their success? They could take a leaf out of their Japanese sister site and start to offer advertising. They could also charge companies to connect with their customers (perhaps on a ‘pay-per-tweet’ basis!).

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said recently  that businesses were using Twitter to engage with consumers, and that introducing a fee for corporate use could be one way of monetising the service.

One thing’s for certain – the old Google mindset of ‘get users first – monetize them later’, is certainly easier when you’re talking about a search engine rather than facilitating the odd ‘tweet’.

Behavioural targeting – a potential fit for Twitter

The behavioral targeting model would suggest that whilst users engage in regular twittering, they are simultaneously giving away some quite personal - and arguably targetable – information about themselves, their actions and interests.

Could Twitter leverage this information to deliver highly targeted ads to users? When Stephen Fry is next stuck in a lift – will he be served a free trial to a ‘brain trainer’ iPhone game? Or perhaps this level of advanced targeting will prove just a little too spooky, even for a hyperintelligent, gadget loving national treasure in a lift.

How do we know that ‘cupcakes’ was the most searched-for recipe of 2008? Because, at the end of the year, Google is kind enough to give us a round-up of all the world’s most popular search terms.

Looking down the various ‘top 10s’ can give you a real glimpse into the zeitgeist - the spirit of the times. Here are some of the highlights from Google's round-up of 2008.

Top ten searched-for terms in the UK:

   1. facebook
   2. bbc
   3. youtube
   4. ebay
   5. games
   6. news
   7. hotmail
   8. bebo
   9. yahoo
  10. jobs

Fastest rising in the UK:

   1. iplayer
   2. facebook
   3. iphone
   4. youtube
   5. yahoo mail
   6. large hadron collider
   7. obama
   8. friv
   9. jogos
  10. wiki

Fastest rising globally:

   1. sarah palin
   2. beijing 2008
   3. facebook login
   4. tuenti
   5. heath ledger
   6. obama
   7. nasza klasa
   8. wer kennt wen
   9. euro 2008
  10. jonas brothers

While we credit the readers of this blog with being fully aware of the sites in the first list, a few of those in the second and third might need a little explaining.

large hadron collider: Remember back in September ‘08, when (if you believed the hype) we were all about to be swallowed up by an man-made black hole? Well, the LHC, the world's most powerful atom-smasher, was to blame. Now, due to an electrical fault, this mammoth project won't be ready to go ahead until spring '09.

friv: a free online games site, showing the most popular games on the homepage and removing the least popular when new ones come along.

jogos: another games site - 'jogos' is Portuguese for 'game'.

tuenti: a Madrid-based social networking site which has been referred to as 'the Spanish Facebook'.

nasza klasa: the Polish Facebook (yes, another one)

wer kennt wen: the German Facebook (zzzzzzzzz)

jonas brothers: an American boyband who became famous after starring in Disney movie 'Camp Rock'.

What might make it to the top in ’09? We’re hedging our bets on hip social arena ‘Twitter’ which has enjoyed a good dose of publicity lately, payday loan, debt, discount voucher and UK holiday sites for the strapped-for-cash, and some fun escapism while we all try to forget our troubles. Lady Gaga, anyone?

In October, Google got well and truly onto the Youtube bandwagon, introducing click-to-buy ads to the site which are intended to be directly related to the Youtube video being watched.

The ads, which are placed beneath the video, are intended to entice the targeted Youtube audience to click and buy products such as sound tracks and video games connected to the clip they have just watched.

‘Just as YouTube users can share, favorite, comment on, and respond to videos quickly and easily,’ said Google, ‘now users can click-to-buy products -- like songs and video games -- related to the content they're watching on the site.’

Online video advertising has seen a significant development recently. TV pop-up ads are being tested by ITV chiefs with a focus on the potential of online advertising.

The technique, invented by US company Keystream, is called ‘automatically placed overlay advertising’. It puts an advertiser’s logo into the film when a lull in the action coincides with an expanse of open space such as sky or a blank wall.

The viewer can click on the logo if they want to know more about the product, otherwise it fades out of the picture.

Infuriating?

Concerns have been voiced about the danger of putting off viewers with such obvious, unrelated advertising. What do you think? email us at news@atom42.co.uk