What Google's Launch of Real-Time Streaming Search Means For Marketers

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Don’t Let Real-Time Make Your Company Seem Out of Date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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