Future Searches

Quora – What Makes it Different?

I’ve always been quite a fan of the “question and answer,” platform online. It interests me both in a general internet marketing context and also from a user perspective. The ability to share knowledge online and actually communicate directly with experts from various fields from all over the world is incredible on any level.

That’s why I was, in the early days, a bit of a Yahoo Answers fan. However, I started to find the quality of many of the answers (and the questions too) quite poor as time went on. Enter Quora.com. Dubbed, by some as “the new Yahoo Answers,” the site is growing at a rapid pace. 3.5 million indexed pages in Google in January, 5.9 million at the start of February and, as of today, 6.5 million.

But it’s not the new, ‘Yahoo Answers.’ Not in my opinion anyway. It’s like a higher quality Experts Exchange meets a much higher quality Yahoo Answers and somewhere along the line meets Twitter too.

But what makes this platform different?

Social Media Past Twitter & Facebook

There can be little doubt that social media is one of the most important recent innovations for both the business world and its’ customers. The speed at which it has been adopted means that businesses simply cannot afford to ignore social media platforms.

That being said, there is a problem that threatens to damage all the good work businesses have put into becoming active members in the social media community. While there is no doubt that Twitter and Facebook are the major players, their very dominance can lead to a false sense of security as well as a business’s social media strategy becoming stale and static.

The truth of the matter is that there are a number of other key players that most businesses need to be aware of so that they can ensure they are covering all the bases and not getting a nasty surprise that can have a negative effect on their brand’s reputation.

Linkedin

Probably the other major player after Twitter and Facebook, Linkedin is arguably the most “professional” of social media platforms and is a superb resource for networking. However, even if a business feels that their core audience lies beyond its typical user, it should still maintain a presence, especially if the business provides B2B services.

It is Not Just Social Networking, The Word is Nicheworking

From networking to nicheworking:

When it comes to business needs, social media boils down from “general” to “niche”.  Social media evangelists better term it as a ‘target’ or ‘passion’ market. Businesses want to undergo a makeover and so they need to add dashes of social nicheworking. Becoming the cynosure is the mantra.

How to kick-start nicheworking?

• Grow with your users: Growing your business does not mean to have a great product or service. One needs to enhance the product into a brand. This manifestation takes place when we start developing the brand identity around the people and following their behavior.
• Find the passion points: Your target market is the niche or passion market. Niche refers to a particular element that becomes inherent in your business goals. This is same for users. For example, if you want to start an online business on real estate, you need to approach people who are searching for low cost homes. Just an add-on like “Find low cost homes” could work wonders for your business. You are catering to the immediate needs of your users. Today if you are thinking of an idea, you never know that is already in the light. But you need to make more noise so that your users come to you. So you got to reach out to those fine passion points!

5 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools

Have you ever tried to find out what people are saying about your brand? As social media optimization (SMO) is enlarging with its presence, most of the businesses are now engaging with their customers on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin etc. More and more people are revealing their likes or dislikes about a brand on those sites, but one finds very tough to keep tracks of those conversations of customers online. Therefore, we need a tool where we can monitor and know what actually people are saying about our brands. There are plenty of paid tools available online but we’d like to address some free tools.

Free Social Media Monitoring Tools

1. Social Mention

This is one of the best social media monitoring tool available online where you can find each and every data about your brand. There are so many options available in this site such as:

• Top Keywords – Where you would find the keywords which speaks about your brand
• Top Users – Users who are ranting about your brand
• Top Hashtags – consisting of your keyword or brand name
• Top Sources – sources where you were getting involved

Top Search Marketing Courses and Certificate Programs

SEMPO Institute

SEMPO is a global non-profit organization serving the search engine marketing industry and marketing professionals. SEMPO Institute’s self-paced distance learning courses are written by a team of leading Search Marketing professionals, and peer-reviewed for accuracy and Best Practices. The course prices vary from $ 1,399 to $299. SEMPO members ( paid membership) receive a discount based on their level of membership.

Google Adwords versus Facebook Adds

Facebook is a social addiction. There is no powerful mean at all to connect and share! We are online all time; while working, travelling, resting…even while weeing & pooing. People spend more time at Facebook than they do at Google. Does it make Facebook a better online advertising channel than Google?

The answer is No. Being the most busy website doesn’t make Facebook the best advertising place. It’s all down to the purpose of the visitors. Facebook users are looking to socialize rather than buying a specific product. Advertising a new product on Facebook; similar to Google Adwords placement-targetted ads, can boost awareness; especially for a specific target group however when it comes to purchasing something, Google search comes to our minds.

Google can have less views however people use Google to find what they need. They perform a search about a topic and are willing to click on links during their visits.  Google users are more likely to be close to the sales stage on the marketing funnel and perform an action. Since Google’s core function is search, advertising your products on Google would bring more sales and leads than on Facebook.

Twitter’s New “Retweet” Feature for More Social Users

Twitter is testing a new feature called “retweets” on a small percentage of accounts currently. I felt lucky to see my account has been included in to this Beta Retweets testing so I can write about it promptly.

New “retweet” button is displayed at the end of each tweet. We only see retweets of the people we follow. Retweet button enables people to forward interesting tweets to their followers. You can undo your retweets from the retweets page and get the message “your followers will no longer see the tweet as retweeted by you” message. There are retweets by you, retweets by others and your tweets, retweeted sections in retweets page. To make retweet easy to spot, they have added an icon at the beginning of retweets.

Retweet button screen shoot

Twitter is planning to see the performance of retweets and release the feature once it is ready. Social media is growing as those guys are leading people to communicate, share and spread the word around. Twitter, as a micro blogging platform became so powerful by just asking people the most simple question “What are you doing?” and today the biggest search engines like Google and Bing are racing to sync with it to use it’s power of “real-time search”. Good job Twitter!

Use Social Media to appear in Real-Time Search

Google and Bing revealed their integration to real-time search and social media by announcing their agreements with Twitter during the Web 2.0 Summit on October 21. Google is aiming to give a better real-time search experience by including real-time Twitter updates in their search results hence users will be able to learn what others are saying about what they’ve been searching for under the same roof. Consider you perform a search about “x brand of freezer”. You will not only see relevant search results but also public opinion about your topic that will give you quick and better understanding about your query.

On the other side, Bing didn’t go far beyond than developing a Bing Twitter search facility similar to the other Twitter search engines in the market. Bing’s new Twitter search feature is currently available in Australia, Canada, Great Britain, Indonesia, Ireland, India, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Arabia, South Africa, and the United States. Those guys are aware of the power of real-time web and took their step in to the social media not later that Google.

Google Wave: How It Can Help Online Marketing and Communication

Google unveiled Google Wave, a communication and collaboration tool in Google I/O conference last week. Since I was not there I searched on the internet and found out what Google Wave is all about. First of all, it is something we all need to wait and experience to understand how much difference it can make in our business and daily communication needs. It seems to be a combination of email, instant messaging and micro-blogging all under the same interface. There are some terminologies which we all will become familiar with as we use Google Wave. Ok, lets have a look at it.

Above is a screenshot of how Google Wave looks like. On the left, there is your Google Wave folders and your Google contact list with images of your contacts. There is Google wave inbox in the middle of screen where you can click on any wave to open a pane for that wave on the right side of the screen. There users can see everything about that wave, respond to waves, add more people just by simply dragging pictures of people in their contact list in to the wave,  rewind back and see how that wave evolved over time, change the contents in a wave or see the changes made by other users in a wave.

Yahoo Image Search Filter

This week, Yahoo has announced a very helpful image search filter called Creative Commons license filter.
Users are able to filter their image search results from Flickr according to availability for reuse commercially or that can be modified (remixed, tweaked, or built upon) with restrictions set by the image’s creator.
Yahoo is the first image search engine to offer this capability. Let’s wait and see what Google will do about it