The sector is very competitive, and it is Hamilton Brady’s policy to work with the best providers in each area that they outsource, so we are doubly pleased to be their choice on the Search and Social Media side. Being selected is another recognition of the skill of our team.

Fluid Creativity MD Lee Turner said, “Recent wins in Search and Social Media include a major hotel chain and an online FMCG retailer. As our reputation grows and we are able to demonstrate returns, larger businesses and brand names are turning to Fluid Creativity for help in getting their target audience to engage with them.”

Hamilton Brady MD Quy Tien said, “We view each agency appointment as a long term relationship, and so are very particular about who we partner with.  It took us almost 5 months to find an SEO and social media specialist that ticked all the boxes that Fluid do – creative flair and commercial awareness go without saying but just as important is the human element, the quality of the account management and support team – and we are very pleased to welcome them to our team”.

“Google’s new Social Search will allow users to opt-in to having search results from content created by their friends on social networks around the web included in Google search results. Those friend connections could come from any number of sites that you and your friends have listed in your Google Profiles – but it won’t include Facebook

Microsoft announced today that Facebook status messages and other content from Facebook users with public profiles will soon appear in Bing search results. That’s a huge change for Facebook. Bing also announced Twitter search integration, which is live now.

Google announced a deal with Twitter today as well. So Bing has Facebook and Twitter. Facebook has Bing-powered web search. Google just has Twitter, no Facebook search.”

Clearly the search giants think there’s something in this social search thing, evidenced by their bickering over who gets what. There’s been a lot of talk about ‘real time search’ which looks at what people are saying about a subject right this second. Google currently indexes and ranks content based on how many links it has and how “established” it has become. Real time search produces results based on what links people are sharing right this second. Tech Crunch offered their two pennies on how a more socially driven system might work:

“For example, if a link to a post about healthcare reform on an obscure blog suddenly gains currency and is retweeted hundreds of times, that is a signal to perhaps rank that link higher in searches about “healthcare reform.” If people stop Tweeting about it, then maybe it goes down in the ranking… Tweets and other micro-messages will become part of results”

This is a key idea, and one that should sound as a warning sign that things will soon be changing significantly in search. This new method of ranking a website won’t only apply to content based sites; this will happen to your business. What people are saying about your business really matters and soon enough it’s going to either add value to your business, or take from it. Now is the time to consider how your business aims to rank well socially, and there’s probably no quick fix solution. Social isn’t going to just be about having a blog and a twitter profile, it’s going to be about ensuring your business gets as much positive feedback as possible because that positive feedback will make your site rank better, so how are you going to achieve that?

It’s no secret that this is the way things are headed. Already on Google’s search results is the ability to add a comment to be seen amongst your friends, how long until these comments are aggregated and analysed to rank your website?

It seems more likely that this system will be integrated into the SideWiki Project which Google announced today. It allows searchers to see what people are saying about a website right from their browser, and crucially it allows people to write a review about any site they visit – all indexed into Google’s mammoth database. Granted, the implementation of this idea is nothing short of terrible, but it shows a desire and drive for Google to get their hands on social reviews – real data from real people. They’ve made no secrets about analysing the data SideWiki produces, “we rank Sidewiki entries using an algorithm that promotes the most useful, high-quality entries. It takes into account feedback from you and other users, previous entries made by the same author and many other signals we developed.” The headline on the Google Sidewiki reads “Help and learn from others as your Browse the web” – a more appropriate title might have been “Help us learn as you Browse the web”, since this is clearly an effort to get people ranking a websites value rather than an algorithm.

I guess that’s what this whole debate boils down to – who should rank a websites worth, Google’s algorithm or people’s ratings? By knowing and understanding how Google ranks a page, a whole industry has developed to help businesses rank better in the search results. Building links, using carefully constructed anchor text, link bait, and sometimes a few other shady tactics have all become a part of the industry. If current trends continue the switch over from this system to a social one might come as a shock to businesses across the world. Search will rank your site based on how well you perform, the reviews your site has received, and how many people are talking about you. It doesn’t look like there’s an easy way to manipulate that…yet.

Companies operating under this exact search philosophy already exist, and they’re already producing great results. Websites like Qype, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Delicious, Ciao (by Bing), are just a few amongst dozens of socially driven search engines that are springing up. Test the theory that these search engines are producing better results – specifically when looking for businesses, companies, organisations, and services, because they’re listening to what real people say about them. There’s certainly a blog post in comparing the results from these search engines, something I’ll put together in the future. For now I’ll just make my thoughts clear, in many situations these niche search engines produce significantly better results than Google does.

Don’t think for a second that Google will allow themselves to be left behind, they’ll be monitoring these trends closely. All of the changes I’ve mentioned so far are testament to the theory that they’re soon to change the way they operate significantly, and I predict it will happen much quicker than people expect. Those up and down arrows in Google’s search results might be cosmetic for the minute, but that data is flowing into Google’s servers and being analysed right now, they could utilise that data any time they want.

If we go back to Google’s stated plans – having your friends thoughts and feelings included in your search results. It’s a sign that you and your business had better make sure those friends are saying nice things about your brand and business; a personal recommendation is very valuable. And if all goes to plan, Google will soon be serving everyone personal recommendations.

It’s not really a search engine, we’re not really sure what you’d classify it as, but as far as we know it’s entirely unique. On their site it’s defined as a computational answer engine, and for the moment that’s a good enough description. Type in a question and expect Wolfram Alpha to offer some sort of answer. Does that mean you can type in “What colour eyes does my cat have?” and expect it to know? No it doesn’t. Wolfram Alpha uses structured and curated data which allows for that data to be computed on the fly and the colour of your cats eyes hasn’t been deemed important enough for WA to know. Google takes a question and tries to match it up to the best answer it has in it’s monolithic database, Wolfram Alpha can generate that answer itself.

Let me give you an example. You can type into WA “length of railways in Europe” and based on the data it has in its database, it will calculate the total length of the railways in Europe and deliver the answer. Interesting. Well how about we take that result and mash it together with some other data in their database. Is there a correlation between GDP and railway length? Just type in the two queries you’d like to compare and WA will do the rest. So I enter the query “GDP in Europe railway length” and to my (and I hope to your) utter astonishment, Wolfram Alpha then computes that query and plots the data on the fly. Turns out there IS a relation between how long your railways are and GDP.

http://www24.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=GDP+in+Europe+railway+length

What about the weather on the date you were born? Or the weather on the date a famous person was born? What about the unemployment rate in a country of your choosing? For example, did you know that the unemployment rate in Detroit is 23.2%! Well Wolfram Alpha knows, all you needed to do was ask. Sitting in front of the search query box can be a little off putting, “what on earth can I type in here?” you might wonder. If that has crossed your mind take a look at their examples by topic page where you can get a good understanding of what WA is capable of. A quick browse shows that WA can answer complicated mathematical problems including geometry, trigonometry, and Algebra. It has a good database of physics data, including mechanics, quantum theory and relativity. It knows plenty of historical dates, anthropology, weather forecasts, weather history, health and nutrition, travel, geography, money and finance, the list goes on and on.

There’s a whole number of things you can ask Wolfram Alpha and get some really meaningful responses but it’s entirely reliant on the data it has in its structured database. It’s certainly not the all seeing knowing computer of dreams just yet, but it’s obvious there’s plenty room for it to scale up that way. The structure is in place for this to have a massive impact as an educational tool, it’s useful for the most highest of high brow queries, and scales right down for use in primary schools. What does red mixed with blue produce? Wolfram Alpha can calculate it with this query.

It’s a shame they went with such an intimidating name, it sounds like a vietnam war game from the sega mega drive era, hardly the rosy “come and use me I’m fun” image that Google projected. Despite it’s definite branding problems Wolfram Alpha has truly astonoshing potential, with a few improvements in understanding queries and a constant stream of up to date structured data it could soon be as much a household name as Wikipedia. We’re in the process of developing some really interesting WA queries, so if you have any that you like, let us know in a comment.

A storm of problems has been heading Google’s way since January, when Twitter exploded into the mainstream and attracted users from all over the world. It’s now super easy to share links on the microblogging service, and that’s exactly what people are doing. The collective link generation of our mass mind is creating quite a database of information which twitter can search in real time. The problem is turning a search of peoples tweets into a useful service?

Tweetmeme now offer realtime twitter search capabilities, each and every time you post a link to twitter, tweetmeme spiders crawl and index it. This opens up the door for a new type of search engine, one that ranks websites based on how many people talk about them rather than how many sites link to them. People are the future, not websites. Twitter need to hurry up and develop this system themselves before their colossal database is indexed and sold on to users by third party websites.

The trend in “real time search” leads us to OneRiot, a search engine that indexes the links Google has been ignoring for years – links shared by normal people on social networks. OneRiot indexes the links on twitter, reddit, digg, and so on, making their search capabilities very much in the “what’s hot right now” territory. It’s very quickly turning into the social search engine and could pave the way for a new kind of ranking system that’s much harder to game. It’s been easy enough to game Google’s algorithm to increase the rankings of a particular site, article marketing, link baiting, hidden links, and other SEO techniques have meant hitting the top spot for a search term is not about providing the best service, it’s about spending the most money on SEO. A search engine that ranks a site based on what people are saying about it in real time is going to produce more accurate results and maybe we’ll see the rise of “social optimisers” who work relentlessly to improve the way a website or service is talked about in the social arena.

If you’ve been reading the blog regularly you’ll know my thoughts on google reader’s aesthetic; it’s butt ugly. The new search engines springing up are far from ugly, they’re fun and inviting to use, and their eye candy is making Google look naked and shamed. Some time and attention has actually been taken to make them look like the future while Google’s software increasingly looks like yesterdays.

A good example of a nice aesthetic is a new search engine called Kosmix, we’re pleased with out initial experience of it. It produces good search results and organises them into relevant boxes instead of just producing a long ugly list of links for you to scroll through. Take a look at how nice their explainer video is!

The tides of search are most certainly turning but it’s not all roses for the new search engines. They’re still unlikely to topple the Google megalith any time soon simply because of the monstrous size of Google’s indexed database. AllGoogle need to do is slightly change their algorithm, stop ignoring a few “no follow” links and add some sort of “what’s going on right now” feature.

Well, you may or may not be pleased to hear that this is exactly what they’ve done. Some new features rolled out yesterday allow searchers to filter out results based on the time published, their type (forum post, blog post, video, review etc) and they even have a new spangly “wonder wheel” in some vein attempt at looking cool. A quick test of the features shows that they’re already indexing twitter updates and if you’d like us to speculate they’re probably crawling and indexing the links twitter too. The holy grail of search will use an algorithm that ranks a site based on peoples discussion of it, rather than the links generated to it. Twitter half hint towards this idea with their search “smiley faces or sad faces” filter but if anyone is capable of really pulling it off it’s probably Google, maybe they’ve got this search game on lock down.

They still look like s**t though.

Integrating your tweets into your blog

It’s a great way to show your twitter presence on your blog; new readers will instantly see what you’re tweeting about and can decide there and then if they’d like to follow you. This method can be used to integrate anyones twitter updates into your site, not just your own, so get creative and use it however you like.

Widgetbox twitter widget

This is a nice simple widget for your blog. It displays your last tweet, has a customizable colour background and has a nice feature to scroll through tweets at the bottom. People won’t be able to follow you directly from the widget though…

Official twitter widget

Slightly more features but still a little cumbersome. You can choose to show a HTML widget or a flash based one. We found that the flash based widget sometimes has a little bit of difficulty rendering and you can’t easily change its size. Your blog readers should be able to follow you directly though the widget and there’s a decent scroll feature to read through your latest entries.

Twitt-Twoo

You can update your status right from the plugin itself – a very nice feature, something that the big burly offical plugin can’t do. It loads in AJAX which means it doesn’t need to refresh your browser to work. This one gets the thumbs up.

Some more resources on this topic:

http://www.twitip.com/181-twitter-buttons-badges-widget-and-counters-to-help-you-find-followers/

Integrating a twitter search feed into your site

We’ve not seen many examples of this technique being used just yet but it’s certainly one to watch out for, it opens the door for many new opportunities. Sky news used a similar method to this in their news article about the G20 protests. Strangely, their use of the twitter application seemed like an admission they were no longer relevant as a news gatherer since twitter is more efficient. Using TweetGrid you can integrate a live twitter search directly into your website which updates as often as you like in the same way that Sky did with the G20 protests.

What could you use this for?

If you’ve written a blog post about peoples reactions to the G20 protests you could make that post all the more relevant and current by including a widget showing all recent tweets with the terms “G20 Protests” in them. As I write this there is a revolution taking place in Moldova, you could include a widget that updates with what people are saying about it using this code:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
/* widget config */
var jtw_search                 = ‘moldova’;  /* keywords or phrase to send to search.twitter.com and display */
var jtw_width = ‘auto’;
</script>

For business

If you were trying to sell a service to someone that they could then sell onwards you could include in your page a twitter search term showing how much people are interested in your service. Let’s say you were wholesale selling iPhone accessories, you might include a widget with the following to show that people are really tuned into the product:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
/* widget config */
var jtw_search                 = ‘iPhone accessories’;  /* keywords or phrase to send to search.twitter.com and display */
var jtw_width = ‘auto’;
</script>

So how does it work?

TweetGrid is a javascript which you call into your page and change the appearance of using variables but it’s not as complicated as it sounds. Depending on the permissions you have for posting  javascript directly into your blog this is a brilliantly simple solution; no installation and very little configuration is needed. Alter the keywords to what you’d like to search for then post the code snippet directly into your blog.

<script language="javascript">
	/* widget config */
	var jtw_search = 'keyword';  /* keywords or phrase to send to search.twitter.com and display */
        var jtw_width = 'auto';
</script>
<script src="http://tweetgrid.com/widget/widget.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

There are plenty of variables in the javascript to edit the appearance of the widget, you can get a good breakdown on what they do with examples here.

Monitter - Another Solution

Unlike TweetGrid you’ll have to upload some javascript onto your server to get it to work but the benefits are that you can style it with CSS and  it’s a little prettier. If you’re going to be using this method alot, Monitter is a better solution.

How else could you use this?

If you knew the bit.ly link being used to direct traffic to your blog, you could use that link as a search keyword and watch exactly what people are saying about the specific post.  Let us know how you got along with this method in a tweet including out bit.ly link, give your ideas for how you might use it. We should be able to show our readers your thoughts in this widget:

Two more interesting wordpress solutions

Twittar

If your readers are avid twitterers then this plugin should help. It will show your users twitter avatars in your comments instead of an empty picture. If your commenters aren’t on twitter then it will display a standard avatar.

Tweetbacks

Trackbacks show when someone links to your page with their blog, but tweetbacks can show when someone tweets about your article then display that information in a comment

That’s all

Let us know how you got on with these techniques and give our bit.ly link a tweet and test out our method for tracking conversations around a blog!

http://bit.ly/ig2cc