This morning I was pleased to see that Google’s real-time search has finally arrived in the terminal. Now, the question is how Inbound Marketers are going to entertain it once it rolls out of the gate for everyone.
What’s Streaming in Real-Time Search Results?
According to Mashable, the real-time search feature will tell you what’s happening right now by streaming real-time tweets, news articles, Yahoo answers, and even web pages. You may also remember that Google created partnerships with Facebook and MySpace earlier this year, which means content from your company’s Facebook Fan and MySpace Pages will be streaming real-time in search results very soon.
If you're like me and have yet to play with Google search results in real-time on your browser, take a look at Google’s very whimsical, Harry Potteresque video about it:
Marketers Need to Start Thinking in Real-Time
Now it’s more important than ever to produce remarkable content consistently every day. You want to produce content that's not only optimized to GET FOUND in the top ten Google search results, but you also want to be a thought-leader in your space and produce timely content that will appear in Google's real-time stream. Though it might take many months for your blog to rank highly in Google for a specific keyword, you can still produce timely content that grabs the attention of your prospect using Google's real-time results.
Also, take an inventory of how many sites you currently use that are part of Google's real-time stream. If you’re on Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace it’s becoming even more important to consistently and periodically update your streams everyday. The benefit is two-fold. Your subscribers and followers on these social networks have the potential to become more deeply engaged with your brand within the network, but you’ll also have the added benefit of leveraging Google’s massive search audience (many of whom do not know your brand already.)
Don’t Let Real-Time Make Your Company Seem Out of Date
We’ve talked a lot on this blog about how the marketplace is evolving. Every day search is empowering more and more people to discover products and services on their own. Now, Google’s real-time search has just made easier and simpler for customers to find out what’s going on with your brand right now – good or bad.
If someone asks a question on Yahoo Answers, you need a social media plan in place that allows for someone on your team to quickly answer that question. If people are having a conversation on Twitter about your brand or industry, you need to chime in and give insightful answers. You also need to be creative and offer current information. As you can see from the video, real-time search isn't just limited to news stories - you can also gain insight into local information (such as ski conditions).
Now that Google real-time has arrived, I leave you with one bit of advice. Keep working to transform your company website from stagnant pages into a mini-publishing house that produces timely, interesting content that your prospective customers are searching for right now, at this very moment, somewhere out there
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Frank Reed 9:40 AM on December 08, 2009
Great points, Shannon. It will be interesting to see which verticals / segments really see the impact of real time results.
Marketers will certainly need to be on their toes to see where the true online opportunity exists for them as the evolution of the online space moves on.
John McTigue 9:41 AM on December 08, 2009
Timely post. There are also some real interesting implications that come out of real-time search. Will social media now become an SEO tool, replacing discussion and interaction? What about spam? I blogged about these subjects this morning: http://bit.ly/7FSL1m.
Bobby Gallagher 9:50 AM on December 08, 2009
Thank you Peter and HubSpot for always feeding us the latest and greatest info to build a better business! This information will be the focus of our meeting this afternoon!
BG
David Fisher 11:04 AM on December 08, 2009
While people are going to make a huge deal over this, Google's had 'realtime' search available for quite a while if you just edited the URL a bit. It wasn't a pretty Ajax streaming, but if you specified the last 10 minutes in the URL, it was there and worked just fine. I'm shocked that this wasn't common knowledge for markets such as yourself Mike and I'm not really sure why the ajax viewing of this is all of a sudden news?
Its also not as useful as you might imagine. Push out a press release and watch the realtime results. 99% of them are just random places picking up your release. Useful? A little. Probably more of a waste of time to watch them.
I'm just waiting for the SEO crowd to try to find new ways to trick it.
Shannon Sweetser 11:16 AM on December 08, 2009
@David - While insightful marketers might have known special tricks to access Google real-time, it makes a helluva lotta difference when you unleash a Google tool to the entire search population. It needs time to catch on and HubSpot will certainly be talking about it and how useful it is for marketers. Also, not to state the obvious, but there are other types of content other than press releases out there which make perform much better in Google's real time results.
@Bobby No problem. It's easy to write about what you're passionate about. I think it's awesome that you're dedicating a whole meeting to Google real-time - I hope you guys produce some awesome action items out of it :D!
Chris Crawford 11:26 AM on December 08, 2009
I think this will be an interesting release...A lot of possibilities, the effectiveness and relevance of the application will be the real question.
Martin 3:12 PM on December 08, 2009
Google became dominant all those years ago because it was very good at giving you the exact content you were looking for. By having "real-time" updates incorporated, we are starting to circle back around. There is more and more content to sift through.
As Craig Oda from Page One PR said, "I'm not sure if Twitter results should be incorporated ... See Moreinto general web search results. The content on Twitter is so scattered. A person reading a Twitter post is not going to get as much meaty information as a person reading an article or a blog post."
I think the search engine that is able to sort through all of it for you and give you concisely what you are looking for will prevail. There's an interesting start-up called Leapfish. Will they be able to withstand the Google powerhouse?
Adam Johnston 3:17 PM on December 08, 2009
Great marketing insights on this new technology. The pace of the real-time marketing race just picked up several notches
Adam
Surgesoft Inc.
Check us onTwitter
Dr. Dave Hale 4:20 PM on December 08, 2009
This is fantastic. From a marketer's perspective what better way to target market what our clients/customer's are looking for.
Anytime we can obtain real-time info, I hear the cash register going Cuching!
Hubspot Rules!!!
Dr. Dave Hale
The Internet Marketing Professor
Jessica Ojeda 4:27 PM on December 08, 2009
Perfect timing for me and my husband. Today he searched, "Events today in Vitoria" to find out if there were any events going on in the city since it's a holiday here. My first reaction was, "You can't search using the word TODAY." I told him search "Events December 8 Vitoria" instead. Little did I know.
Ellen 10:51 PM on December 08, 2009
@Martin: I think you've hit on something. There is such a thing as "too much information." Too much "noise" & the most salient content may get lost. It's about quality not quantity.
Glenna Garcia 12:17 AM on December 09, 2009
I certainly agree that the Twitter listings could be a double edged sword - you won't have any way of knowing the kind of information given by the account holder... That said, this could certainly be an exciting twist to get noticed quickly. I'm putting my thinking cap on!
Martin 10:41 AM on December 10, 2009
@Internet Marketing: Um, that is exactly what I said. All you did was cut/paste my previous comment. What's up with that?
Shannon Sweetser 10:54 AM on December 10, 2009
Hey Martin, just deleted that comment copied/pasted comment. Evil spammers - thanks for calling it out!
Paul McKeon 8:30 AM on December 11, 2009
Shannon, I enjoyed your post, but you last bit of advice ("transform your company website ... into a mini-publishing house") made me wonder, how, and at what cost?
Don't get me wrong--I love the concept. My company provides B2B marketing content. But I wonder if the push, push, push to get out more content, faster (to capture real-time search traffic), will result in a lot of cheap crap.
Marketing leaders *must* rise above the temptation to crank out content fast and cheap--or risk their brands and though-leader reputations.
I blogged on it here and linked to your post. http://bit.ly/4GXDJc
Paul McKeon
The Content Factor
Shannon Sweetser 12:16 PM on December 11, 2009
@Paul You make a valid point that the real-time turn the world is making will change the way we communicate. It's put a lot of pressure on writers like me to keep up the pace while still delivering value.
I think it's totally possible to crank out high quality content on a blog in a short period of time. One thing we teach people here at HubSpot is that you don't need to be a fantastic writer to write a great blog and that as long as the content is original and answers a need your prospect has, then it's valuable to people.
As for the costs of running a mini publishing house - we encourage everyone at HubSpot to contribute to the Blog and write quality content for our prospects - that's how we're able to keep the volume high and the costs, like most inbound marketing efforts is not measured so much in money but the time it takes vs. how many leads we generate from that piece of content through social media, seo, and the blogosphere.