Jon Samsel

Each morning I start my day reviewing the brands I monitor on a regular basis. I won’t tell you which brands I monitor but I will tell you that I use five tools to monitor them so that I can make the most of my day as a busy online marketer:

1. Google Reader
2. Social Mention Alerts / Google Alerts
3. Google News
4. Twitter
5. Heardable

Were you surprised that my list didn’t contain any of the popular social media monitoring tools such as Radian6, eCairn, Sysomos or Techrigy SM2? There is nothing wrong with utilizing any of these tools as long as you are willing to put the time and effort into learning how to use them. By doing so, you can probably automate 80% of your online brand research effort that is required when trying to monitor a brand.

Frankly, that’s what we have staff for — to be experts at utilizing these types of robust tools. But as a busy executive, I often don’t have the time not patience to learn yet another cool tool to help me do my job. Call me old school, by I am perfectly happy using a handful of simple, smart, user-friendly tools that give me the information that I need, when I need it (without much hassle). My five tools fit the bill quite nicely — and I marry my findings with those on my expert teams to compile a holistic view on brand performance.

Why do I monitor certain brands? It’s my job to measure, monitor and improve brand effectiveness because in the business world I live and breath in– winning is everything. Big companies don’t pay the money they do to come in second place. Management wants to achieve all of its goals. Employees want to advance their careers. Shareholders want to see a fair return on their investment.

Business is a full-contact sport. It’s about beating your competitors before they beat you.

When I am knee-deep in the data, what am I looking for? What jewels am I unearthing? What actionable takeaways to I gain from the work that I do? Glad you asked!

My Tools Help Me

• Understand what communities are buzzing about
• Identify key trends
• Perform competitive analysis
• Optimize brand performance
• Improve the customer experience
• Grow market share / Boost sales

Using The Tools In My E-Toolbox

Let me explain how I utilize each to start by day as a busy online marketer.

Google Reader:  This is what I use to aggregate all my RSS feeds into one comprehensive list that I can scan in less than a minute to see if there are any articles or blog posts from those I trust that I should be aware of. When I find something I want to read, I mark it so I can read the post later in the day over lunch.

By scanning the headlines I collect in Google Reader, I get a feel for what’s being discussed on a deeper level in the blogosphere, and provides the ‘expert’ POV on what communities are buzzing about.

Social Mention Alerts / Google Alerts:  I lump these two together because they essentially do the same thing, but I find neither one is strong enough on it’s own for me to forgo using the other. Basically, I use these tools to seek out and flag certain keywords on a daily basis and serve them up to me in a consolidated list I can quickly scan. Google is fairly comprehensive on its own, but I distrust using a single keyword monitoring service to sift through the entire deep web of data on a daily basis. I like SocialMention.com’s alerts because they tend to provide me with a wider variety of results.

To be honest, there is a lot of dreg one has to comb through to find the gold, but you would be surprised to learn that I find all kinds of quirky, useful and unexpected nuggets of data in these simple, automated data feeds. Set up your keywords one time, then check you email for daily results. Easy as pie.

Google News:  To me, Google News is the one and only daily news aggregator I need to tap into. Sure, I occasionally monitor PRWeb and BusinessWire, or go to Alltop or TMZ (for entertainment), but for news (eg: press releases and breaking stories) Google News has replaced my daily newspaper and my online portals.

I search for certain brand keywords and can sort through countless stories that inform me about strategy, website redesigns, staff changes, and the like.

Twitter:  For real-time breaking information, nothing beats Twitter. It really has become my social search engine of choice. Not because it functions so much as a search engine but as a pulse of what’s happening. I can easily see what’s trending hot right now and I can perform a little bit of competitive analysis by studying how savvy certain brands are by looking to see if they are on Twitter (many still are not, and when they are, you cannot find them because often times their brand name has been hyjacked by someone else). You can also watch how certain brands are participating on Twitter (so many pilot tests, so little authenticity — such as having one’s CEO actively tweeting).

Heardable:  I’ve been a fan of Heardable.com since I was first invited to test their beta site in late 2009. It is quite simply one of the most underrated digital marketing gems out there (although this will be changing fast as their first press release came out today).

So what is the Heardable platform and how do I use it?  Heardable allows anyone to type in a domain name and within seconds, get a comprehensive assessment of that brand’s online effectiveness in six critical areas. I have a free account with Heardable which allows me to scan multiple brands at the same time, store groups of scans that I may need to revisit daily, track how multiple brands perform against each other over time, and determine what specifically one brand is doing to score higher than another.

I love to ‘look under the hood’ at the top brands in the world that are profiled in The Heardable 100 list of companies. At a glance, you can see common threads of what leading brands are doing better than everyone else, such as:

• Who is optimizing their website for mobile browsers — and which browsers?
• What analytic tools are certain brands using?
• Which brands are excelling at SEO and which are not?
• Is brand x sociable and/or sharing data — living up to the spirit of the giving web, the foundation of which all of web 2.0 and now web 3.0 is based on?

Heardable is brilliant. And from what I hear from the company’s founders, their growth strategy is very exciting. Keep an eye on Heardable.

In summary, I perform my daily ritual not because I yearn to to better than I did the day before. It’s my job to help brands win by increasing sales and growing market share. This can only be done of you know what’s happening in your market, you’re being the best steward of your brand as possible, you’re learning though trial and error and testing, you’re listening to crowds and trying your best to please, and you are optimizing everything you do as often as possible — from landing pages to the language you use to talk about your brand to the way you engage your constituents.

Online brand optimization ain’t easy. But with the right (free) tools and a little hard work come great rewards.

Recently, I wrote a blog post titled, “Which SEO Agencies Practice What They Preach?” The article generated a lot of comments from professionals within the creative agency world–most of them lukewarm. Respondents fell into two camps: 1) Those who disagreed with the methodology of utilizing a free site grading service to evaluate and compare SEO companies, 2) Those who were embarrassed by the results. After rereading my post, I not only stand by my words, but I have decided to expand the concept of comparing leading class companies by WebsiteGrader Score into a regular feature on my blog.

Why compare firms by WebsiteGrader Score? Because looking under the hood can tell you a lot about what companies are doing to promote their brands–both on site and off site.

So which category would I zero in on next? Well, it didn’t take me long to decide. I stumbled across an interesting article by Linda Tischler published on FastCompany.com on Feb 11, 2009 titled, “The Fast Company 50: The Most Innovative Companies in Design” that purported to profile extraordinary design enterprises across the nation, part of a larger article looking at firms across various industries.

Prepping the List to Grade

I had only heard of two of the design companies profiled by Fast Company, so I looked up each company on Google and verified the corporate URL for each firm. Then went to Websitegrader.com and evaluated each site.

Here are the top 10 design firms ranked by Fast Company along with their WSG score:

1. Ideo 98.3
2. Marcel Wanders Studio 71.0
3. Rockwell Group 77.0
4. Pentagram 97.3
   
5. Whipsaw 53.0
   
6. Ammunition 71.0
7. Frog design 95.0
8. Fuseproject 88.0
9. Smart Design 93.0
10. NewDealDesign 59.0

Big Ah-Ha’s

Ideo had the highest WebsiteGrader score and they were also ranked #1 design firm by Fast Company. That’s a fairly compelling confirmation that this firm is as good as they appear to be. Pentagram, Frog Design and Smart Design each scored above 90%, so my takeaway is that they each made a respectable showing and deserve some props.

Most of the other firms on the list scored lower than I would have expected. These are not big dumb brands…these are cutting-edge design companies. It just doesn’t seem acceptable that any of the firms on this list score below ninety percent, yet 6 out of 10 did!

The two design firms that scored that lowest were Whipsaw and NewDealDesign. Yes, it’s true both sites were built using Flash. But in 2009, there are plenty of ways to optimize a Flash website in a way that makes them accessible to humans, search engines, and social media sites. These two firms, for whatever reason, chose not to put the extra effort in to make their online content and code up to par. Tsk, tsk.

Digging under the hood at NewDealDesign.com, you will see that basic SEO best practices were not performed at all. According to WebsiteGrader, meta descriptions and keywords were missing from the NewDealDesign website. Images on the site were missing ALT text. There were a surprisingly low number of pages indexed by Yahoo: 26. One of the most important measures for a website is how many other sites link to it. The more links the better. NewDealDesign had only 577 inbound links, and the domain is 9 years and 9 months old. One would surmise that a leading design firm would have many, many more inbound links. No blog, no RSS feeds and no contact forms were detected on the site either.

In Conclusion: There May Be A ‘Return On Awesomeness’ After All

To be fair, NewDealDesign appears to be an offline design firm (packaged goods, industrial design, etc.) and doesn’t appear to offer web strategy & design services. Their client list is impressive: Puma, Samsung, Microsoft, Epson, Dell, HP, Kensington, Nokia, Logitech, SAP, Sun, Toshiba, Verison, and more.

But some of other design firms included on The Fast Company Most Innovative Companies list appear to do a fair amount of web strategy & design work. It seems fair to expect a design company’s website and online brand strategy to be deployed professionally and thoroughly. It surprises me when this is not the case–and the Fast Company list of innovative design firms did not disappoint.

So while many of the design firms profiled in this post failed the ‘practice what you preach’ smell test, they appear to be lauded by the press for their exceptional creative abilities nonetheless.  And the fact that they are being hired by the world’s top brands to transform the ordinary into extrordinary–through design–may be proof positive that generating a ‘return on awesomeness’ is possible after all.

Recently I was on LinkedIn and came across the following SEO question:

“Looking for one of the best SEO companies in the world. Can anyone recommend one that has amazing track record / recommendations?”

I read through the Q&A thread. Over 20 people responded by providing SEO tips, as well as the names of SEO firms to follow up with. Some were big name SEO companies, some were creative agencies, and some were unknown to me.

I decided to do a little detective work. You see, from my experience, not all search optimization firms practice what they preach. So I thought of a quick way to gauge which SEO consulting firms were legit and which ones are full of bologna–run a Websitegrader report on each firm’s URL and then compare the results.

Why use Websitegrader? There are lots of free tools online that measure this and that. I like Websitegrader.com because it looks under the hood of a company’s URL to uncover what developers are doing well and where they could use improvement–mostly from an SEO point-of-view. They also provide a score so you can compare one website against another.

Websitegrader is not foolproof, mind you, but the results are very insightful. And as long as Websitegrader applies the same algorithm to the each website they grade, a user should be able to benchmark the good from the bad, from the ugly.

I looked at 30 SEO firms mentioned in the LinkedIn Q&A thread. The results were somewhat surprising. Here is how these companies ranked by Websitegrader on a scale of 0-100, 100 being best:

99.9 - www.bigmouthmedia.com
99.7 - www.6smarketing.com
99.7 - www.primevisibility.com
99.6 - www.bruceclay.com
99.6 - www.webadvantage.net
99.5 - www.vizioninteractive.com
99.4 - www.submitawebsite.com
99.3 - www.seo.com
98.9 - www.oneupweb.com
98.2 - www.webmetro.com
97.9 - www.netconcepts.com
97.6 - www.iCrossing.com
97.3 - www.thinkseer.com
96.5 - www.purevisibility.com
96.3 - www.seojunkies.com
95.9 - www.increasevisibility.com
95.5 - www.reprisemedia.com
95.5 - www.rustybrick.com
95.0 - www.seop.com
94.0 - www.nowspeed.com
93.0 - www.ilikesem.com
92.0 - www.usawebsolutions.com
91.0 - www.tmpdm.com
90.0 - www.iprospect.com
85.0 - www.360i.com
85.0 - www.razorfish.com
71.0 - www.ip-seo.com
67.0 - the-ccg-group.com
43.0 - www.asenyo.com
27.0 - www.wsiim.com

Who would have thought BigMouthMedia would outperform so many larger competitors? Of course, these results don’t mean that any of the above-rated SEO firms are not good at doing search optimization for their clients. I am pretty sure many of them are just busy doing client work…so busy that they have neglected their own website optimization efforts. However, for prospective companies considering doing business with any of these firms, wouldn’t a prudent client take a close look at an SEO company’s track record–both client results AND the quality of the SEO firm’s website as well? I think so.

If you are thinking about hiring an SEO firm to assist your company optimize its website for search engine rankings, you might want to run a Websitegrader report on the SEO agency first. Not only will the resulting grades be useful in evaluating two SEO firms against each another, but you can use the scores as a conversation starter when talking to the sales manager from an SEO firm trying to sell you their services. It really trips them up when you ask them why they scored so poorly next to competitor X!

Did I just say that?

Good luck.

1. Apple’s design process revealed!
2. Hilarious video about ‘Death By Committee’ group decision making processes. Love the logo designs!
3. Naming tools to help get your creative juices flowing.
4. The Components of a Writing Business Plan.
5. Website up-time tool.
6. What every web designer needs: A handy Lorem Ipsum generator!
7. An online font tester!
8. 100 things on the Internet that might be of interest to you.
9. Type in a word to find rhymes, synonyms, definitions, and more.
10. Life of Pi - Interactive promo. The mood that this creates is almost like a movie. Awesome.
11. The website is down: Sales guy vs. web dude. Funny!
12. ZeFrank’s song about social networking
13. Good site for hiring freelancers to work on social media gigs or web dev projects.
14. Quantcast - Free, competitive website analytics.
15. See every mouse movement and every click on your website. Record & more.
16. Fun brain teasers and exercises.
17. Need to quickly translate text into another foreign language?
18. Nice gift idea - give a personalized book to your child or relative.
19. SEO tool. How many desired .edu or .gov links does your site have?
20. Over 1,500 stories about coffee’s impact on real lives. Very cleaver marketing.
21. Social search engine. Pretty cool.
22. Where’s WaldObama? 1,474 mega-pixel picture of the Inauguration. Wow.
23. Mint or Rudder - which is best online tool to manage your money?
24. Runners. Track your distance, pace, progress & calories with this cool NIKE tool.
25. Looking for the perfect Web 2.0 domain name? Try Dot-o-mator.
26. Download free Web 2.0 logo designs!
27. UGC traffic to triple by 2012, according to Cisco.
28. UGC / user reviews are critical. See latest Nielsen findings.
29. “The Crying Game” of viral marketing. So well done. Click till you see the surprise ending!
30. U.S. real estate prices from 1980-present plotted to a roller coaster ride!
31. I just love Howcast - learn about almost anything!
32. Creepy girl. Watch as her eyes follow your cursor.
33. Amazing interactive simulation by Motorola.
34. Heatmap simulation for any image you upload. Sweet.
35. Design for Emotion and Flow.
36. Website User Journeys, Needs, and Trust: A Volkswagen Case Study.
37. Very helpful usability blog site by Craig Tomlin.
38. Net Promoter Score: Pro’s? Con’s? Full of bologna?
39. Get Elastic’s landing page optimization webinar recap.
40. Consumer purchase preferences by zip code.
41. Free version of the Word of Mouth Manual Volume II.
42. Social media marketing case study: Will It Blend.
43. Free 34 page ebook - The New Rules of Viral Marketing.
44. Social Web Analytics eBook 2008.
45. Introduction to Good Usability - Free PDF Ebook.
46. How to think virally w/ Jeff Benjamin, the creator of  Subservient Chicken.
47. Customer Feedback Usability Insights.
48. 5 new skills for the future of marketing.
49. Bring Holistic Awareness to Your Design.
50. Long live the Cluetrain Manifesto! 95 theses ahead of their time.

Source: http://twitter.com/jonsamsel

As I have stated in previous posts, for a company to be successful online and to grow its brand in a calculated and constructive way, executives and marketing managers must develop a proactive strategy that directly influences and impacts who, what, where and why branded content results are FOUND–whenever, wherever, and however social publishing is performed.

Yeah, that’s a mouthful!

Successful online branding, especially via social networks, may require a company to consider a range of possible tactical approaches, including:

• Social media publishing, syndication, outreach, monitoring, and measurement activities
• Embracing a multichannel marketing approach that includes both paid marketing (search, display, email, mobile, etc) and well as emerging marketing activities (social-search, SEO, blogging, etc)
• Partnering and experimenting with pilot programs in a way that frees up proprietary content & data, empowers employees & customers, plus supports open networking & really simple integration

Even if you actively participate in all of the above activities, you still need to be part of the social conversation. And the rub is–many of these online communities don’t want you there. That is, unless you have something of value to offer–and you can do this is an honest, straightforward, and transparent way.

If I were a brand manager ‘worried’ about social markets diluting my brand, I would hunker down in my boardroom with some of the best and brightest staff (along with an many agencies & consultant that I could muster together in a room) and figure out the best way to leverage this ‘loss of control’ and morph it into an opportunity to ‘influence & expand’ my brand reach. The way I look at it, if your product or service is solid and your efforts to become part of the community are sincere and of value to others, I can’t see why the social web wouldn’t benefit your customers, your staff, your investors, and your company.

Your brand is a living, breathing example of your value proposition in action. Your challenge is to determine how best to humanize your brand and become accepted as a trusted community partner–while encouraging the masses (your customers & your constituents) to be constructive advocates for the brands they are passionate about.

Most companies I know use a handful of different tools (free and paid) to measure, monitor, and influence their social media efforts. The reason being:

1. Companies looking to monitor the social web each have their own unique budgetary constraints
2. Most firms have varying levels of internal staff skill sets
3. No one social monitoring tool does it all

When I think of social monitoring and analysis tools, here is my wish list of top 7 features:

1. Analysis of the external social web + unique website characteristics
2. Multiple, real-time query & filtering abilities
3. Site, sentiment, and SEO analysis
4. Trending, charts/graphs, save & export functionality
5. Theming, grouping, or targeting around a topic/category
6. Competitive & influencer analysis
7. Ability to share, mix, or compare with external data feeds

That said, here is a short list of social tool providers:

http://www.converseon.com
http://www.ecairn.com
http://www.scoutlabs.com
http://www.radian6.com
http://www.techrigy.com
http://www.nielsen.com
http://www.trendrr.com
http://www.overtone.com
http://www.cymfony.com
http://www.heardable.com

I also recommend these tools that monitor site traffic, demographics, and SEO best practices:

http://www.websitegrader.com
http://www.compete.com
http://www.quantcast.com
http://www.conductor.com

Note: According to social media pro, Gunther Sonnenfeld, Ecairn was recently was recently rated by several top creative marketing agencies to be the most detailed and comprehensive social platform on the market.

“Ecairn’s phrase mining capabilities are superior and they have the best ‘market searching’ tools,” claims Gunther. “The simplest way to explain this is that platforms like Radian6 and Scout can keep track of brands, but they cannot easily deep mine conversations that may or may not be endemic to those brands. Ecairn’s engine thinks categorically, not just topically or according to brand sentiment.”

Do you know about a quality social web monitoring tool or service that I didn’t mention above? Drop me a line and let me know about them and I will add them to my list! Or, if you represent one of the companies above, pitch the benefits of your platform by responding to my post. I really would like everyone to have a chance to make their voice be heard.

I’d like to answer my own question by first making two cautionary statements: 1) Ghostwriters are hired hands, 2) A brand is a terrible thing to waste.

That said, I think a company runs a huge risk outsourcing their social media activities to an outside microblogging service unless that ‘ghost-brander’ has some skin in the game. As hired hands, a ghostwriter can make a mistake, be fired, and move on to her next gig while the brand must suffer through the blunder, repair the damage inflicted, and then control the negative impact of the snafu’s aftermath.

If you are a marketer at the helm of a large brand, I would urge you to think twice about the quality of the ghostblogger (is this an individual, a social media agency, etc.) and what type of training and recourse you may have in the event an unforeseen error occurs, or word gets out that your brand may not be as ‘authentic’ online as the corporate brand promise pontificates.

In the book, “The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding,” the authors state that the most important aspect of a brand is its single-mindedness. They tell how most great brands possess a singularity of focus, a clarity of message. Playskool has done it with safety; Armani with class; Apple with “hipness.” The authors caution that the easiest way to destroy a brand is to put its name on everything. Diversification, they argue, can lead to a weakening of a brand’s quality, a drop in top-of-mind awareness, and more.

The gold rush of brands to quickly embrace social media–either to begin listening, to engage and solve, or to get heard–can lead to some pretty poor decisions that could cost your brand dearly in the long run.

Many firms are experimenting with social media by looking at it as an extension of their internal marketing department’s duties. Some have already found great success by promoting social advocacy as an extension of an employee’s job function–training and empowering certain staff to become the living, breathing, extension of their brand’s value proposition (the face of the brand). Ford’s social media advocate, Scott Monty, comes to mind. Another is Tom Dickson the CEO of Blendtec–who can ignore his “Will It Blend” series on YouTube? Then there is Frank Eliason, the man behind @comcastcares on Twitter. Consumers seem to value the sincerity of the brand voice and in most instances, press accolades confirm what everyone feels–this activity makes sense and is good for both the consumer and the brand.

Alternative social media outreach initiatives that many companies opt for instead resemble classic outsourcing models which utilize external creative agencies, social microblogging, and even ongoing monitoring services to represent brands on sites like Twitter, Posterous, Squidoo, Facebook, YouTube, and the like. With the ‘right’ brand partner, extensive training, a tight service level agreement, and close oversight and direction by internal marketing staff, brands can have success embracing ‘ghostbranding.’

The rub comes when a consumer asks questions such as: “With whom am I speaking to? Are you a company employee or a hired hand?” How this questions is answered is critical. An honest answer clarifying that no, this is not an actual brand employee may turn off a portion of your followers and perhaps generate some bad press. A dishonest answer could cause much greater harm if the truth ever gets out, which will surely have a negative impact on your followers and your brand image–likely resulting in a press feeding frenzy to shame your brand into an apology.

I don’t believe most consumers care whether they are having conversations with a ghostwriter or a company employee as long as the dialog with the brand is honest, timely, helpful, useful, consistent, straightforward, and as transparent as possible.

I don’t advise brands to utilize ghostwriters for social services such as Twitter, especially if you are a popular, well-established brand with the wherewithal to develop an internal social media outreach strategy involving real, authentic employees. If, on the other hand, you have tried to launch an internal social outreach program to no avail, or if you are a small, emerging brand with less to risk, partnering with a capable third-party to properly represent your brand on social networks is entirely feasible.

Suffice it to say that the risk of not participating in the social web at all far outweighs the risk that something may go wrong in your attempts to engage in meaningful social conversations.

Unless you’ve had your head buried in a hole for the past few months you have probably stumbled upon a blog post or two touting Google’s interest in purchasing Twitter as a way to leapfrog forward (and dominate) the real-time search market. Whether or not Google is actually interested in acquiring Twitter is not as important as what is says about the prospect of social search as the next big thing. Move over SEO, SEM and social media. Social search (as its own channel) has arrived!

Social search is an emerging new marketing channel. It’s not paid search, nor organic search, and it’s not social media either. It may be a close cousin to each but it’s a channel in its own right–and it is growing at a fantastic clip.

Trust is the Linchpin

As many of you have already heard in popular search marketing presentations, Google currently functions as every company’s home page. Seventy-two percent of all U.S. searches are done using Google, and people tend to type in branded URL’s even though they could just type it into the address bar to get to the site directly.

Most people trust Google but if you asked these same users if they trust Google’s results, you might elicit a difference response.  For many, trusting Google’s results depends on what they’re searching for compared to what’s presented on the results page.

A recent search for the branded term, Allstate Insurance, for example, yielded 3,210,00 results. Something tells me the majority of these results are bogus, spam, or at least, somewhat insignificant on the relevance scale. So does a Google user trust only the results that appear on page one or should all 3 million+ results be trusted as well?

Compare Google with your own person social network. Most people trust their social network. And this trust seems to be manifesting into actions.

Take a look at these recent statistics that showcase social media’s impact on the retail purchase decision and consumption process:

“60% of consumers are actively involved in generating and sharing buzz.”
- Forrester Research

“80% of consumers say recommendations are the best sources of information.”
- Universal McCann

“Over 90% of consumers say WOM influenced their purchases”
- DoubleClick

Social Search Is Not Paid Search *

• Community is at the heart of the web experience, hence the rise of social media
• Hundreds of these communities are emerging
• And there are thousands of services that help connect these communities and share data amongst these communities
• Brands haven’t been invited into these communities, it’s about individuals
• Brands are trying to figure out how to become part of these communities because they know that effective listening is critical to business success
• Social media advertising is an oxymoron. You can’t buy your way into this club
• Social is not about advertising at all

Social Search Is Not Natural Search

• The big search engines are already playing a role in social search
• Most engines are morphing their algorithms and business models to account social content (Microsoft’s Bing comes to mind)
• Some social networks, like Twitter, have built in search (and user love it)
• New vertical search engines and social listening services are emerging to help people tap into this mountain of real-time, word-of-mouth content that can appear in many formats
• But is social search similar to natural search optimization?
• It’s not about tweaking a web site’s content & code
• It’s not about adding localized content pages to a website
• It’s not link building
• Social is not really about optimization at all

Social Search Is Not Social Media

• Social media is more about testing, influencing and monitoring
• It’s about user-centric conversations
• For companies, activities inlcude actively monitoring brand, reputation, and threats
• It’s also about tracking sentiment and buzz volume over time
• And its also about customer service outreach
• For some companies it’s about sales & promotions too
• But social media is not social search

The Social Web (of Opportunity) Is Huge

From a size & scope standpoint, the social web is already huge (and it’s growing!). It’s made up of content that lives as DATA, which does not necessarily reside on a single, traditional website. Consumers are publishing unprecedented quantities of data across all types of networks, sites, services, and feeds.

And the scary part is that the social web is already impacting opinions, brand perceptions, purchase decisions, along with the public psyche.

Social search can be thought of as the mechanisms used to tap into this emerging mass of trusted knowledge. These mechanisms are a combination of popular search technologies we already know and use today (Google, Bing, etc), new platforms (Hunch, Collecta, Cha Cha, etc.) and intra-search tools that help users navigate the popular social platforms (Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, etc).

New types of search engines are entering the fray, allowing users to:

• Conduct real-time searches
• Review conversations, reviews, comments, ratings & tags
• Helps find multimedia content, RSS feeds, blogs, and other web 2.0 content

The big takeaway around social search is the enormous opportunity–and challenge–it presents to companies around the globe. To be successful in social search, businesses must formulate a proactive strategy that directly influences and impacts who, what, where and why certain results are FOUND whenever, wherever, and however a social search is performed.

That’s no easy task. The good news is that nobody has mastered it yet and it will be years before the rules of engagement and optimization best practices are etched into stone.

* Several of the bullet points in the ‘Social Search Is Not Paid Search’ section of this post can be attributed to Rob Key, a panelist at SES NY, March 2008.

Ken Moss is a very smart guy. He led the search engineering team at Microsoft for five years. So why did he, of all people, launch a Twitter search engine known as CrowdEye? Yes, there is a huge demand for identifying, cataloging, monitoring, and just plain making sense of the deep web of conversations and content accessible today online. But a social search engine? Looks like Ken recognized that the social web has reached a tipping point–it’s huge, it’s still growing, and it’s impacting the way people acquire knowledge and make decisions. Social search needs tools to help people find what others are saying.

So what is Social Search anyway? Social search is all about uncovering nuggets of information from real people (like me and you) in multiple formats such as text, video, blog posts, reviews, comments, tags, tweets, pictures, audio, bookmarks, and events. These word-of-mouth exchanges are the new content that is now dominating the web. Try it yourself. Google a major brand and count how many results are company-generated versus consumer generated. One out of eight results, on average, across engines, can usually be attributed to someone other than the firm who controls the brand. This is simply amazing.

Social content tends to be deemed more authentic than prepackaged corporate propaganda–and, thanks to a plethora of easy-to-use web tools and conversation hubs such as Twitter, social participation is booming. The social web is having a MEASURABLE impact on how search works and how consumer behave.

Social content is having so much impact that it’s spawning the next generation of search tools.

Take WhosTalkin? for example. It’s a social media search tool that allows users to search for conversations around topics of interest.

Pipl is a people search engine. AT it’s core, social is about personal conversations–so it makes sense for a social engine to search through public records, social sites, and the web to uncover information about individuals.

Collecta is a real-time search engine. Instead of searching ‘old stuff’ like standard web sites, they monitor the update streams of news sites, popular blogs and social media, and Flickr, so they can show you results as they happen.

Then there is Socialmention, a site that allows visitors to search terms around specific categories of the social web such as blogs, comments, etc.

Caterina Fake recently launched Hunch, a tool for finding answers to a wide variety of questions. What makes this tool unique is that it makes decisions based on a database of responses provided by real people–and the results get better the more people use it.

OneRiot is a service that uses a person’s own social network and takes into consideration what’s currently popular within someone’s network when providing search results.

ChaCha has answered 150 million text inquiries/conversational Q&A’s over the past 18 months. ChaCha uses expert guides (in-house staff trained to use their proprietary search tools) to provide answers to any question–mostly via cellular phones.

These new social search engines approach ‘finding results’ in a way that standard search engines don’t offer. From a marketing standpoint, these new generation of social search tools are helpful, but ’social’ is not yet a fully baked channel that can be targeted and optimized. Social is evolving. There are some standards and many variations–making indexing results a real challenge.

Social search is an emerging topic. Many of the tools to find, sort and serve up results are primitive–and the various types of social conversations they do find are not easily placed into context. However, social search is hat our doorstep and it’s evolving very quickly.

So why should social search be at the forefront of of every company’s online marketing strategy?

1. Paid search can only grow and be optimized so far. At some point you reach the point of poor returns (long tail search terms are one example) and paid search cannot be expanded in a way that makes profitable business sense.
2. Natural search tends to be inward-focused, concentrating 80% of its effort and output around website optimization. Companies tend to take a web development approach to SEO by identifying a small cluster of valuable keywords and then optimize the content and code around them. This in and of itself is not a bad thing, but SEO can be so much more. Search engine optimization is about producing relevant, engaging content in multiple formats. It’s about empowering employees and customers to participate in content publishing and syndication. SEO is about about link building. It’s about harnessing feedback. But when SEO is controlled and bottlenecked by an overzealous technology department, marketers are often left with few ways to innovate, expand, and improve organic search results.
3. Social search, on the other hand, is about tapping into the deep web of conversational data exchanges to uncover jewels of knowledge in which to monitor, influence, or act upon. This hidden web presents an enormous challenge and opportunity to marketers because it’s an emerging channel, research are scattered and not easily aggregated and accessible, metrics are emerging and evolving (they are different than traditional search), and how best to join in the social dialog is a hot topic for debate within some companies due to the legal and regulatory risks some belief social media poses.

Like it or not…ready or not…social search is already here. Yes, the onus is on smart marketers to monitor and make sense of it all. But analytical search tools are arriving every day to help makes things easier.

Companies have a choice–they can dive in now and start monitoring their brand reputation, conducting competitive research, identifying opportunistic content marketing through social keyword trends, resolving problems, and even selling by providing unique offers and incentives. Or they can choose to bury their head in the sand and wait for social search to ripen as channel…sitting still as their brands are talked about, hijacked, or even transformed by consumers who are hungry for authentic opinions, insights, news or feedback.

The social web is happening with or without listening to the marketer’s side of the story. The business stage is now set. It’s your move.

Every 34 seconds someone in America dies of a heart attack. The American Heart Association reports that more than 71 million Americans, men and women, experience cardiovascular disease.

Asantae is a company that offers healthy products, such as HeartShot and Calorad®ADVANCED, that help reduce the risk of heart disease and the profound dangers of obesity.  And, since they are a multi-level marketing company, you can get in on the action by referring their products and getting a cut of the action. Curious? Read on!

HeartShot

HeartShot is a synergistic blend of the highest quality essential nutrients that are designed to help reduce inflammation. It is the result of years of clinical experience and product development. HeartShot helps block the causes and effects of inflammation at several critical points along your body’s biological pathways. It acts on all cell membranes, the inside lining of the arteries, and in the blood. HeartShot works to fight the effects of our modern environment.

Calorad®ADVANCED

Calorad®ADVANCED is a proven weight and fat loss supplement with well over 6 million bottles sold. It  curbs the appetite, diminishes food cravings and knocks off belly fat.  And Calorad has received critical and clinical acclaim in both the traditional and non-traditional wellness and fitness communities.

Dr. Dwight Lundell

HeartShot was formulated by Dr. Dwight Lundell, a highly respected, Yale trained cardiac surgeon, who has performed over 5,000 open heart surgeries. Dr. Lundell’s mission over those 25 years was to cure his patients’ heart disease. By 2000, he began to be disillusioned.  As patients came back for second and third procedures, he realized that he hadn’t really cured them at all. He also realized that the accepted explanation for the major cause of heart disease, which was elevated cholesterol, was in fact not the cause. The low cholesterol diets that were being recommended and the drugs people were taking to lower their cholesterol were not reducing the incidence of heart disease, strokes, and heart attacks. In fact, half of his surgical patients had normal cholesterol levels. How could something be the cause of a disease, when half the time people don’t have it?  However, there was something that 100% of his patients had: low grade chronic inflammation.

What was causing this inflammation?  Dr. Lundell needed to find out.  He set out on a new mission: to find safe, effective, natural ways for people to eliminate inflammation and ultimately heart disease.  He opened a clinic where he helped hundreds of patients improve their condition without surgery.  He summarized his findings in his 2007 book, The Cure For Heart Disease, Truth Will Save a Nation.   He then formulated HeartShot, a drink rich in the exact nutrional natural supplements needed to reduce inflammation in the body.

Want to Get Started Earning Extra Money?

Imagine being at the very beginning of a company with the single BEST COMPENSATION PLAN EVER for both the Part-time marketer and the Full-time marketer.  That’s where the Asantae business plan comes to the rescue. You sign up to receive one of several Asantae product packages. You recruit a few more people to do the same. You satrt earning the benefits of being a networked distributor (details found on the Asantae website).

Follow this simple, 3 STEP PROCESS to start on your path to earning extra income!

1. Go to: https://www.asantae.com/officialsite and click on the Opportunity link found on the top right side of the navigation bar on the Asantae home page (see purple arrow below).

2. Scroll down the page and on the left side of the page, click the button labeled ‘Join the Asantae Team.’

3. Choose the product package that works best for you, agree to the terms, and complete your order. And that’s it!

You will receive an email confirmation welcoming you as an official Asantae Distributor. You’ll get a unique Distributor #, back-office extranet log-in (so you can track your earnings), and a password.

After that, it up to you to market Asantae to your network if friends, family, business associates, Twiiter followers, LinkedIn connections, and so on.  Success in in your hands. The $$ potential is what you make of it. And, you can enjoy the healthy benefits of the Asantae products as an added benefit.

Good luck!