COMMENTS
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.
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.
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
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.
@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!
I think this will be an interesting release...A lot of possibilities, the effectiveness and relevance of the application will be the real question.
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?
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 on
Twitter
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
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.
@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.
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!
@Internet Marketing: Um, that is exactly what I said. All you did was cut/paste my previous comment. What's up with that?
Hey Martin, just deleted that comment copied/pasted comment. Evil spammers - thanks for calling it out!
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
@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.