You’ve heard of search engine optimization on sites like Google, Bing, and now even Twitter; the question is, what’s next? Marketers in the digital age need data and content, and there are lots of innovative tools coming out to organize the vast amount of stuff that’s out there. Here are four search engines that will be making huge waves in search by 2012:

OneRiot – The Real-Time Search Engine

The Pitch: “OneRiot crawls the links people share on Twitter, Digg and other social sharing services, then indexes the content on those pages in seconds. The end result is a search experience that allows users to find the freshest, most socially-relevant content from across the realtime web.”

Why you should pay attention: OneRiot gets roughly half a million visits per month, according to data provided by Compete and Quantcast. That doesn’t seem like much, but it doesn’t count the traffic from Yahoo real-time search (which OneRiot built) and mobile real-time traffic through a service called Taptu. The company also recently launched an ad network that provides ads based on the trending topics of the moment.

How marketers can use OneRiot:

1. Track keywords in real-time – One of my clients has two natural soda brands, so I use the term “natural soda” to stay up-to-date on news and trends in the industry and across the web.
2. Find influencers – OneRiot shows you who tweeted the story first, indicating who the influencers for your keyword phrase are.
3. Find publications to pitch – OneRiot shows you which publication published the popular story – you can use that information to create a list of publications you want to target.
4. Follow your industry – Use keyword searches to keep track of breaking news about or from your competitors that you may need to respond to.
5. Find information your fans/followers would appreciate – Use keywords to see what articles are popular and relate to your brands, then tweet them from the brand’s account.
6. Create content people like – OneRiot is the ultimate source on how to write popular articles in your niche – you can learn a lot by studying the articles that are coming to the top and emulate the style and formatting.

Check out OneRiot at http://oneriot.com

Wolfram|Alpha – The Computational Search Engine

The Pitch: “Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything.”

Wolfram’s Alpha version allows users to compute their search engine results, rather than find links that will give them the information. For example, you can use Wolfram to find the phase of the moon from the day you were born in just seconds.

Why you should pay attention: Wolfram gets about half a million visits to their website each month, similar to OneRiot. Their iPhone app is priced at $1.99 (formerly $50 because it can replace your graphing calculator, and then some). The computational aspect of Wolfram is powerful, and the visual organization of data is a great tool for any marketer.

How marketers can use Wolfram:

1. Integrate visual data into your company blog, website, or presentations – Infographics are a great way to demonstrate a point, and Wolfram is capable of creating very pretty ones.
2. Conduct market research and make comparisons – You can compute lots of information about various companies and products in seconds – for example, type in “Big Mac vs. Whopper.” You might be surprised how much data there is.
3. Build separate website properties that are useful to your consumers – There is opportunity to partner with Wolfram to create a niche-based search engine for your company, or even a widget that can be embedded into your site. An application is if a company like Enterprise wanted to incorporate a widget that let users calculate the distance between two cities with one-click.
4. Create an internal knowledge base of data – Wolfram’s corporate services include setting up an internal search engine that can store and compute company data. You could capture accounting data, marketing data, line production data, and more with this service.
5. Analyze corporate information for faster, data-driven decision-making – If you had accounting, marketing, or line production data at your fingertips as an analyst, imagine how much faster and more in-depth you could do your job.

Check out Wolfram|Alpha at http://wolframalpha.com/

Book of Odds – The Research-Driven Content Provider

Pitch: “It is a destination where people come to learn about the things that worry or excite them, to read engaging and thoughtful articles, and to participate in a community of users that share their interests and ambitions. It contains hundreds of thousands of Odds Statements, from the odds of being the only one to survive a plane crash, to the odds of having a heart attack, to the odds of having ever eaten cold pizza for breakfast.”

Why you should pay attention: Book of Odds is a search engine three years in the making that helps people learn more about the odds of every day life. It’s not getting much traffic now, but I think the potential as both a research and credibility tool as well as a marketing too is quite strong.

How marketers can use Book of Odds:

1. Brainstorm ideas for your company blog – Book of Odds takes you places you don’t expect to go. I hang out here sometimes when I’m stuck on ideas for my blog or when I just want to learn something completely new.
2. Integrate visual data into your company blog, website, or presentations – Like Wolfram|Alpha, Book of Odds is a great place to find data-driven visuals.
3. Find funs facts to incorporate into research and reports – For example, “The odds that an adult is a baseball fan is 1 in 2.22″ has to be useful somewhere in your career, right?
4. Suggest odds about your company or brand – Can you imagine if this tool had been around during the Harry Potter craze, when everyone was trying to figure out the odds on various characters dying? You can come up with tons of ways to tie your brand to odds, and Book of Odds has a tool to submit the information directly to it’s search engine.

Check out Book of Odds at http://bookofodds.com/

Evri – The Contextual, Widgetized Search Engine

Pitch: “Evri’s automated content delivery capabilities will help you drive up user engagement, increase page views, and decrease costs. Our platform is designed to help you solve tough problems.”

Why you should pay attention: Evri gets roughly half a million visits per month and has partnerships with major news sites like the Washington Post. Evri also recently acquired the web semantics talent of search engine start-up Twine, which helps you “join groups based on what youíre searching for and connect with people who are searching for the same things.”

How marketers can use Evri:

1. Get a visual mock-up of all the latest news on one keyword – Evri is a bit like a newspaper that only talks about one subject – the keyword you give it. It incorporates videos, pictures, headlines, blog posts, twitter updates, and more into a mash-up that quickly gives you a snapshot of the subject you’re searching about.
2. Get data on keywords over a 30-day period – for larger search terms like “Tiger Woods,” Evri let’s you browse through the keyword trend history for the past month.
3. Put contextual results on your blog or website – Evri offers corporate and partner services to bring more functionality to your website and provide users more content value.
4. Integrate widgets with your social media accounts – Evri’s selection of widgets can be plugged in anywhere that accepts HTML and JavaScript.

Check out Evri at http://evri.com

Have you heard of any other good search engines out there? As marketers, what other search engine tools do you want to see in the future?

Monica O’Brien is the author of Social Pollination: Escape the Hype of Social Media and Join the Companies Winning At It. She also serves as the Director of Digital at Fizz, a word of mouth marketing agency. You can also read Monica’s blog, Social Pollination.

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The more I learn about search engine optimization, the more I want to experiment and play with search. I’ve begun to develop my own opinions and instincts about search as a business driver, some of which I’m sure all the SEO dorks would refute and criticize me for, but nonetheless, I’m better armed as a digital marketing strategist because I’ve taken myself to school on SEO.

When Brian Clark came out with Scribe SEO, I immediately signed up to see how this tool could help, not only my knowledge of writing for search, but for my clients and their projects. Using it helped me develop an understanding (or maybe it’s one of my theories that the SEO dorks can yell at me about) that it’s not about targeting keywords with your content. It’s about targeting a singular keyword. Scribe helps you identify a primary keyword and recommends steps to take in order to go after search results, one term at a time.

Last week, I tried a little experiment to measure the effectiveness of primary keyword targeting on a Google search. It turned out to be an interesting proof point that targeting a primary keyword works, but also an interesting read of how Google ranks a post over the course of the first few hours and days of a new piece of content’s activity.

Last Friday’s post, “Where Social Media Monitoring Services Fail,” was constructed specifically to win the search term, “Social Media Monitoring Services.” Using Scribe, I optimized the post for that primary keyword phrase, ensured the phrase was in the title, description and several times throughout the copy, tagged it and published at 7:35 a.m. ET. Look at the post image below and notice the occurrences of the keyword phrase:

Here’s a snapshot of that search result at the moment I published (Click on any of these images to see larger versions):

You’ll notice the starred result is from Social Media Explorer, but this is the result of me starring that item in Google Reader for reference. It was a relevant result from my own Google information. You would not have seen that result. The search winners on that graphic are, in order, Trackur (a social media monitoring service); an article on social media monitoring from ReadWriteWeb; a post on social media monitoring services from Jeremiah Owyang’s blog; Radian6, another service; a Wikipedia entry and an article from Marketing Pilgrim on social media monitoring tools. (Note: Marketing Pilgrim is authored by Trackur CEO Andy Beal, so kudos to him for having a double entry of sorts.)

Using no promotional tactics of my own, other than an automatic Twitter and Facebook Brand Page post when there’s a new article on my blog, and the fact that Social Media Explorer is a widely read industry blog which has accumulated an organic marketing army of its own from readers who Tweet or Re-Tweet links to its posts, here’s what happened next:

At 9 a.m. ET, almost an hour and 30 minutes after the post goes live, a Google search of the term begins to show Twitter links to the article. The post is already ranked No. 5! (Keep in mind the starred item would not be there on any search but one I conducted.)

At 11 a.m. ET, the post still ranked No. 5, but at 12:30 p.m., it’s all of a sudden the second ranked result for the search term:

Notice a previous post (actually the one starred) is showing up as a sub-set result under the result, meaning Social Media Explorer technically owns the No. 2 and No. 3 result for that term. In a weird reversal, however, a check of the search term at 1 p.m. shows the post coming at No. 5 again. How this happened, I can’t explain. Perhaps Matt Cutts can shed some light on it?

On Saturday morning, 24 hours after the post went live, I checked again and the post seems to have settled in to a solid No. 5 position in the Google rankings for the term:

But three days later, on Monday morning and after several other blogs and websites have picked up on the post and linked to it, the entry ranks an impressive third, putting it in the sweet spot where 85-90 percent of all clicks occur on a search result page.

As I write this, a full week later, the post has now dipped back to No. 5 in the rankings again. Still, with no link-building tactics, no post promotion other than two automated mechanisms for Twitter and Facebook and no SEO magic, my blog now ranks in the top five for a search term that might prove useful.

It’s fair to note that, according to Google’s Adwords traffic estimator, there is little competitiveness for this particular search term. Still, logic tells us that the phrase “social media monitoring services” is likely to be used by someone looking for one, or a list of them. Aaron Wall of SEO Book estimates that for long-tail keywords like this, on-page optimization accounts for 50 percent of the search algorithms. Not to mention 25 percent of all keywords entered into a search have never been entered in one before.

What this experiment leads me to believe includes:

• Targeting a primary keyword is a smart way to rank well quickly.
• You don’t have to promote your posts to rank well, but probably only if the content is on a well-trafficked website. (Hence the need to begin building one!)
• Google’s algorithms are dynamic enough that your ranking can be affected by the hour, especially as the early activity builds around a post.
• Scribe SEO really does work and is helpful.

Now it’s your turn. What did this experiment stir in your brain? If you’re an SEO expert or professional, what am I missing, what factors have I not considered? What other methods can be implemented to see that singular blog post get a win rather than a top five?

Please jump in the comments and help us all understand what good SEO copywriting can do for a blog or website. We’ll all learn something good from your thoughts.

You’ve likely read about my recent research project with Chris Baggott, Jay Baer and Debbie Weil into the web analytics of corporate blogs. Our underlying premise is that most corporate blog traffic is not what many social media marketers assume it to be. Our survey results actually found that upwards of 80 percent of traffic on most corporate blogs comes not from your passionate community of fans, but from first-time visitors.

If you subscribe to the notion that you want to serve the needs of the majority of your audience in order to maximize the efficiency of your marketing efforts, this metric shifts the purpose and focus of corporate blogging from engagement and community building to winning search results.

Chris and I will explore the topic in more depth on April 1 with a free webinar. If you’re interested in learning more about our research, what first-time visitors mean to your blogging strategy or even in just arguing the point with us in the webinar discussion, joins us and register for, “Dispelling the Myth of the Repeat Visitor.”

The webinar will take place from 2 p.m. until 3 p.m. ET on April Fool’s Day. But the topic really is no joke. Your audience probably isn’t who you think they are. We hope to help you see that and talk about what strategies you can use to capitalize on that 80 percent rather than under-serving your audience focusing on the 20.

We’ll also cover:

1. How social media and search engine marketing are impacting today’s marketing tactics
2. How companies can align social media strategies to turn visitors into prospects
3. Why blogging should be the hub of your social media tactics
4. How to measure and profit from social media and search engine marketing

For more on the survey, check out Marketing Profs coverage of our results. You can also register and download an interesting white paper, also from Compendium Blogware, entitled, “Why Blogging Is Your No. 1 Search Marketing Tool.”

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• Compendium Survey Finds 80% of Business Blog Traffic Comes from First-Time Visitors (eon.businesswire.com)

You want to write smarter web copy to attract better organic search engine results. You want to know how to write blog posts and website copy that is optimized and makes it easier for prospective customers to find you. You want to be a good at SEO copywriting. But the layers of technology knowledge you assume you need are intimidating. So where do you begin?

Here’s a quick way to get started with smart SEO copywriting without having to know a lot about search engine optimization. Let’s start simple. Drop your website’s URL into the free Google Adwords Keyword Tool to see a list of what Google thinks your website is about. (Don’t worry with what this tool is supposed to be used for. That’s for another blog post.) What you’ll see is a listing of keywords, grouped by major subject, that Google thinks represents the content on your website. Some of them will be spot-on. Others will be a little off.

A keyword report for Social Media Explorer, for example, returns these subjects, with lists of suggested keywords in each subject:

how to make (6), public relations (28), social media (13), email marketing (13), a blog (8), bulk email (6), blog (31), email (13), marketing (6), social (5), money (10), pr (14), blogging (7), blogs (5)

I’ll toss out “how to make” “bulk email” and “money” because they aren’t really relevant, combine the similar ones and I’ve got the following general content topics for my blog:

• Public Relations
• Social Media
• Email Marketing
• Blogging

Not too bad considering social media and public relations are my two largest subject matters here. I’ll continue to write about advertising and marketing and even search marketing. Remember this is what Google thinks your site is about, not necessarily what it is about or you want it to be about.

Now, make a list of the major groups which accurately represent the content on your website or the products or services you sell. Go through the keywords Google suggested under those topics and pick out 5-10 keywords or keyword phrases from each grouping. Put those keywords in a spreadsheet or list under the appropriate heading. (See my sample one on the right hand side of the page.) Print that out and keep it handy when you’re writing. Refer to this keyword glossary to remind yourself of the keywords you wish to win and that you need to incorporate them into your content.

Obviously, this is a very simple approach to SEO copywriting and there are many more tricks of the trade to learn. As you target a more broad base of keywords or are writing content for a more well defined topic, you’ll adjust your writing and keyword focus accordingly. But this is a good start for someone who doesn’t have time or inclination to dive into learning SEO but still wants to improve their content’s chances of being found by the Googley Googs out there.

For more advanced techniques and education around search engine optimization and SEO copywriting, I recommend SEO Book from Aaron Wall. By signing up to the subscription learning community, you have access to more knowledge about search engine optimization than you’ll know what to do with. It’s not cheap, but worth every dime.

Disclosure: The link provided here and the ad below are affiliate program links. I subscribe myself, recommend and endorse it for others and present it here as a qualified product you should consider.

The social media purists will tell you that a corporate blog serves as a community hub for your brand. They say it gives your customers a connection point to your company and engenders a sense of community. In some cases that’s true, but you’re going to see me exploring corporate blogging a lot more this year to follow up on a theory that your “community” or “audience” for your blog isn’t what you think it is. That, and the ultimate judge of a corporate blogging effort must be more closely tied to success metrics than making everyone feel good.

As you know, I’ve partnered with Compendium Blogware, Debbie Weil and Jay Baer for a research project and some other extensions of that project this year. Part of that partnership gives me access to case studies of Compendium clients in addition to the external research we’re doing. One such case study caught my attention recently.

Aprilaire’s corporate blog has seen a 1,000 percent traffic growth in the last year. Yes, that’s 1,000 PERCENT, not people. Pretty strong. (For reference, Compete.com says their corporate site in total had 50,000 unique visitors last month, so we’re not talking 4 visitors to 4,000 either.) The social media purists will probably jump on that statistic and say, “See! Building community and engaging in conversation is what social media success is all about.”

Don’t jump to conclusions there, hippie.

Aprilaire approached corporate blogging with capturing leads through search engine optimization and winning keywords as their primary goal. Using Compendium’s system, which turns a blog into a keyword and search-driven model rather than a single-author, ego platform, the company began climbing the organic search rankings. Of their 1,000 percent traffic increase, 80 percent of it came from organic search results. Mission accomplished.

What Aprilaire did is approach corporate blogging with business metrics in mind. Community and conversation are part of the effort, sure. But even if they all but don’t exist — at this writing there was but a single comment on their last 10 blog posts combined — your corporate blog can (and should) drive your business. The Aprilaire blog features good content focused on targeted keywords and drives traffic. This traffic isn’t their “community” but rather web searchers trying to find content on the keywords Aprilaire is writing about. When they arrive on a blog post, there are clear calls to action on the page and links to action items (more information requests, landing pages, etc.). The blog converts more readers into customers.

Don’t get me wrong! Engaging in conversation, building community around your brand and bringing humanity (and human-ness) back to the marketing table are all vitally important to a company’s social media success. But please know this can be done in one or many channels and others, even a corporate blog, can focus on driving business.

Go look at your blog’s traffic. How many of your visitors are finding your content for the first time (through search or referral links)? How many are your, “community?” What does this tell you about your blogging approach? The comments are yours.

If you subscribe to the notion that social media is a discipline that is most appropriately aligned with public relations, customer service, customer relationship management and similar business channels, you probably have a hard time seeing social media’s link — pun intended — to search engine optimization. SEO probably comes across as a very scientific process, heavy on paid search strategies and with little relevance to the warm and fuzzies you get with social media.

But measuring the warm and fuzzies can be challenging. CEOs understand the value of spending $1,000 on paid search if those clicks can translate to 100,000 website visitors and $10,000 worth of conversions. They don’t often nod and smile when you say, “Well, we have 40,000 Facebook Fans this month!” Unless, of course, they aren’t any more focused on the bottom line than you are if that’s your proof point.

Chris Baggott and I have discussed search engine results and corporate blogging a lot recently. We’re working on a research project together you’ll hear more about soon. In a couple of conversations we’ve had, he has shared with me some ways he shows the value of corporate blogs to clients of Compendium Blogware, his company. I’ve been kicking around the idea and thought this might be useful for you to see.

To prove the value (at least part of the value anyway) of what you’re doing in social media, let’s see what the search traffic equivalency of your organic keyword rankings is. (Hang in there, it’s a process, but easier than it sounds.) There’s a lot of disclaimers I need to throw in about this (largely so the SEO dorks don’t set fire to my blog) but I’ll save those for the end.

To find out the monetary value of your organic search rankings, use a keyword research tool like SEO Book’s Competitive Research Tool or SEM Rush (which actually powers SEO Book’s tool) to get a list of the keywords your website ranks for. (If you know of a different tool, particularly a free one, please recommend it in the comments. Both of these offer some free results, but not a full report without paying for a subscription.) The results will give you a list of keywords your site ranks for, the position it ranks in a given search and the cost per click (CPC) value. (It gives more info, but these are the relevant pieces for now.) That value is what a paid search click sells for in a similar position in a paid search advertisement. (Bear with me.)

For example, SocialMediaExplorer.com ranks No. 2 for “social media strategy” which goes for $0.05 per click; No. 1 for “corporate messaging” which goes for $6.04 per click and No. 3 for “educational blogs” which sells for $2.49 per click. (It ranks for more, but I’m keeping the examples short to explain the point succinctly.)

Now go to your website analytics software. Click through to traffic sources, then search engines to view the keywords that bring you organic clicks. My analytics shows that I generated 644 visits in the last 30 days from the keyword “social media strategy.” The corresponding paid ad goes for $0.05, so my blog generated $32.20 in search traffic equivalency (organic value compared to paid search cost per click).

Simply put, if I had to go out and buy 644 visits from that keyword search in paid advertising, it would cost me $32.20.

SME had 11 visits from users clicking on our listing under the keyword “corporate messaging” which is worth $66.44. The keyword “educational blogs” brought 44 visitors last month, which is worth $109.56 in equivalent paid value.

So, for those three keywords alone, my monthly efforts generated $208.20 in search traffic equivalency for Social Media Explorer. I didn’t have to spend $208.20, but did invest time and attention to those subject matters to write the posts that garnered those rankings. (More on this in the disclaimers.)

If you added up all your organic traffic value based on this equation you could say to your boss, “Our social media activity brought in (let’s say) $45,000 in website traffic value this month.”

But wait! There’s more!

Organic search results draw in roughly 85 percent of all clicks on a SERP. Paid search is, to most users, less trusted and not clicked on as often as organic search results. So while our equation above makes sense if you’re comparing apples to apples, you’re actually comparing apples to oranges. The good news is that because organic search results are more trusted and clicked upon with more frequency, you can argue that your monthly value is not worth $45,000 in website traffic, but $45,000 AT A MINIMUM. It’s probably worth much, much more than that. The value of the additional? Not found a brain that big yet. If you have ideas, please drop them in the comments.

Hopefully, this will give you some ROI fodder to think about or even incorporate into your reporting for your social media activities. As you give this process some thought, however, please keep the following disclaimers in mind:

• This is easy to do if your analytics are measuring a corporate blog or a devoted social media channel. It gets complicated if you want to be all-inclusive and measure the value of where your social outposts rank. (Maybe your Twitter account ranks high for a valuable keyword. You should measure that, but it’s going to take more work to do so and the results will be muddy since you don’t have Twitter account analytics.) It’s also complicated if your social media efforts take place on your corporate website as the social content (blogs, etc.) adds value to the overall domain’s search results. Unfortunately, so do the sales pages and other static content, the age of the site and more. But once you set up the spreadsheet or report and do the research the first time, it’ll go smoother the second go-around.
• Paid search advertisements normally deliver better conversions because, if done right, they lead searchers to exactly the type of information they’re seeking or at least the absolute type of message you are delivering. Organic results are served up based on what Google thinks your content is about, traffic to that page, the number and types of links that page has and from where, how recent the content is compared to other results and more. You don’t have much control over what Google serves up as organic results. So your $45,000 in traffic equivalency might have cost you that in pay-per-click ads, but with those ads, you might have converted customers at rates 30-50 percent higher (or more) than where the organic results sent folks.
• On the flip side, I wrote the SME post on the top education blogs one year ago this Wednesday. I pulled in $109.56 worth of search traffic equivalency last month without doing a single thing. It’s the long tail of good web content at play. That post drives search results for my blog to this day. And will continue to do so. If it has produced the same amount each month in the last year, then I spent 2-3 hours writing a single piece of content that has now driven $1,314.72 in value to SME.
• On a similar note, the history of your content’s ranking matters as well. I’ve ranked No. 1 or No. 2 for “educational blogs” for 12 months now. If a new post on another website hits tomorrow that suddenly has a ton of links, etc., it will still likely take that post a while to knock mine down a notch. The value of ranking high for a term over time has merit.

The great news about all this information is that many smart SEO professionals read this blog. And every time I write about SEO, they provide as much, if not more, value in the comments. If I’m wrong on any of this or missed a few disclaimers you should keep in mind, they’ll tell you below. Feel free to ask for clarification from me or them in the comments, too.

And when you get around to trying it, come back and tell us if you were surprised at the equivalent value of your efforts.

Bing and Google recently announced partnerships with Twitter and Facebook to provide elements of real-time and social search to their respective search engine results. On the surface, this probably blew past most business owners and marketers as not much in the way of being important. If the information is online, aren’t Bing and Google supposed to find it?

And, frankly, the partnership has some interesting implications, but isn’t phenomenally noteworthy … yet.

Keep in mind that I am not a search expert. I don’t have coffee with Matt Cutts … or his cats. Nor do I have insider information about what search engines are doing. But I know what’s possible and think this is what we as social media thinkers and marketers need to be thinking about moving forward. For more of an industry analyst view, Jeremiah Owyang and Charlene Li have some great ideas that partially contributed to my ideas here.

What Bing and Google are tapping into are the message we post on social media sites. Those messages, at their core, are not Wikipedia pages or articles on newspaper websites, blogs or company sites. They are little pieces of social capital we trade with one another. Bing and Google are saying these little innocuous tidbits are relevant, to some degree, in results for certain keywords.

In other words, a popular Tweet about Ford Mustangs (Retweeted, linked to, etc.) could rank (and thus rank high) in search engine results for “Ford Mustang.”

Couple that thought with the fact that most search engines prioritize results based on recency and in-bound links (or how many third party people think that piece of content is good) and you start to see an indication that social search may be emerging as more relevant than we think. Quite frankly, it may be becoming more relevant than it should be.

The future of search seems to indicate that the most relevant content presented by the search engines will include, and perhaps prioritize, recommendations and referrals from our social graph. So when you search for “cheap hotel Chicago” the No. 1 result may not be the hotel that wins a search result for the term like you would see today, but the cheapest hotel in Chicago that someone you know has reviewed online. Or perhaps the top result will be a Tweet a friend sent out about a “good, cheap hotel in Chicago” just 10 minutes ago.

This is both promising and problematic. Promising because we care about our friend’s recommendations more than strangers. Problematic because for many, social media has changed our definition of “friend.” Promising because real-time and socially powered search has the potential to deliver more relevant results. Problematic because it also has the potential to deliver user-generated blather as opposed to qualified, quality information.

What social search means for marketers now, however, is this: If you do not start now building a network of fans, followers and friends who trust you, your company or your brand, you may quickly become irrelevant in not just social media, but in search too. Tell your curmudgeonly CEO if your company doesn’t participate in or prioritize social media, you’ll soon lose your search standing and see if that doesn’t help.

I could be wrong. The search engineers at Bing, Google and others may have a more (in my opinion) responsible way of incorporating social graph data points into our search results than this premise indicates. But if I’m even close to correct and the wisdom of crowds mentality of the Google world we live in prevails, your lack of participation and prioritization of social media may just bite you in the SERP. And that’s gonna hurt.

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Zakta

In July, I told you about a new experiment in search that was refreshing. Zakta is a new search engine — I know, I know. Who in their right mind would try and compete with Google, Bing, Yahoo and so on? — but one that has some legs. I mentioned it in one of my Pitch Log Mashups but with their recent full launch, I revisited them and want to make sure you understand the implications of what they’re doing.

Zakta allows you to do two things with your search results that other engines do not: 1) Edit and cull your results to be more reflective of what you’re really searching for and 2) Share those results with other users. There are a bunch of other interesting facets to the tool, but these are significant for a couple of reasons.

1. If you find yourself searching for similar terms over and over again, you can save and simplify your searches.
2. Sharing your searches with others, and following the searches of those on the network you trust is, at least theoretically, a powerful feature.

Imagine needing to know something about the New York Jets. You know Gary Vaynerchuk is perhaps the biggest Jets fan on the planet. If he were a connection on Zakta and had saved a search about the New York Jets (you know he would), wouldn’t you trust his editing of the search results better than keyword-based or even semantic-powered search results of some computer? I would.

The reason this is significant for businesses is that, if (and it’s a big if … more in a moment) Zakta takes off and becomes a relevant player in the search business, your company could become a go-to resource for relevant search results in your industry. By building trust with an online audience, providing relevant links, information and resources, you could be looked to as the thought leader or authority for your industry or location. If you then share your curated search results for the topics people trust you for, you’ve provided them with additional value and reason to trust you.

The key is not abusing that trust, of course.

Here’s where I think Zakta has challenges, and it is a fundamental point I hope many start-up types are paying attention to:

The biggest challenge you face with a new product is if the success of it depends on changing people’s behavior.

Zakta will have to prove, through relevancy, immediacy and usefulness, that changing people’s behavior from starting at Google, Yahoo, Bing or some other engine, is worth the switch. Will they do it? I’m cautiously optimistic.

I don’t know that my friend’s curated search results are the deal-breaker for me. Bing has changed my habits a bit, but only if I notice the first few Google results to giving me what I want. I still start with Google. Zakta’s connection tool only yielded one friend on their network for me. Granted, Pete Blackshaw‘s search results are worth looking at. Dude is smart. But without a wider net, Zakta becomes less appealing.

Still, I’m fascinated at the possibilities. Sundar Kadayam, Zakta’s CEO, is the former founder and CTO at Intelliseek and was also with Nielsen Buzzmetrics. He knows how to build successful web-based businesses. There’s a ton of relevance and power behind the Zakta idea. I just wonder how the masses will come. If they do, it has game-changing possibilities. If they don’t, they still may have enough technology and juice to get sold to someone big with big money.

Either way, it’s a tool worth looking at and spending some time with. My friend’s search results, culled and curated for my edification, are useful. If we all did it, we’d have something, now wouldn’t we?

What’s your take? What search feature would change your behavior? Is someone you know editing search results for a certain topic relevant? Why? Why not? The comments are yours.

Related articles by Jason Falls & Zemanta

• Zakta Is No Ordinary Search Engine (AltSearchEngines.com)
• Is Zakta The Facebook Of Search? (Doug Ross)
• Zakta – The New Way To Organize Web Knowledge (Matthew Hurst)
• New Search Engine Holds Promise (Cincinnati Enquirer)

Bing has made quite a splash branding itself as a decision engine. You type in a question or topic, you get results that are, at least in my limited experience, more closely related to what you’re looking for than other search engines. But where Bing might miss by casting such a wide net, a tool that has been around a few months called Aardvark is trying to capitalize on with a small, very purposed one.

Aardvark (http://vark.com) essentially allows you to ask a question. Instead of searching the whole web for an answer, the service connects to people touching your social graph to find answers. Instead of relying on a search engine algorithm, you’re asking people you know. Using instant messenger, email and Twitter, users can ask questions and get answers back from other users. The first one I posted was to ask someone if they found Aardvark useful. Within minutes, I got an answer from a young lady in California who really liked the service but was still new to it. Turns out she is a couple degrees separation from me through LinkedIn contacts.

Running another test, I IM’d the Aardvark engine a question about webinar solutions. What cheap and even white label type solutions are best in class? No longer than two minutes later, I had a response from a contact, also in California, recommending WebEx because of its robust user base which would indicate bugs and what-not have been vetted. Within 10 minutes, I received recommendations for Elluminate and DimDim from other users as well, one response included an indication that the person answering was connected to me through Warren Whitlock. I’m assuming that one degree of separation responses, thus, indicate who connects you.

Intrigued by the utility, I reached out to Aardvark CEO Max Ventilla to explore some technical and business questions I had. After that conversation, I like the tool even more.

The default settings for new users means you will only be contacted to answer questions once or twice a day, so it’s not intrusive to be a resource to the community. You can change those settings to your liking. Users can ask as many questions of the community they like. There has to be some supply and demand math there that might cause there to be not enough answers for questions some day, but math makes my head hurt. If you are a math person, ponder and let us know in the comments how that might turn out.

The service ties into your social graph however you’d like it to. You can use Facebook Connect, Twitter or other services to give Aardvark permission to see who your friends are. It only reaches out to those friends who have signed up and doesn’t spam people. If you want to invite your friends to use it, you can, of course. And Facebook Connect places your use of Aardvark in your news stream for all to see.

Ventilla declined to reveal user numbers, but I could see this community resource of community resources being very popular if they can overcome a couple of environmental factors working against them:

• People are conditioned to search for answers on search engines when they’re on a computer. Remembering there’s a social connection solution to find answers from friends dictates a change in behavior for the user. Anytime you’re trying to change behavior, it’s an uphill battle.
• Posting your question on Twitter is probably just as easy and you’ll get more responses. While the answers will be random and not from someone who has indicated an interest in a particular topic (one way Aardvark routes questions), it’s likely you can find a good response just as fast.
• Advertisers can try to game the system and become the qualified answer supplier for various categories.

While the advertising scenario isn’t likely, it would be a concern of mine. Those with ulterior motives have gamed their way to the top influencer positions on social news sites. Why wouldn’t this be different?

When I asked Ventilla about the possibility of advertisers getting involved and how that reflects itself in any revenue model they might have, he was prepared:

“People that are commercial entities would have to label themselves as commercial answerers and they would get certain additional capabilities or tools as such,” he said. “We want brands, companies and professionals to be able to answer questions in a parallel fashion to how actual friends and friends-of-friends can answer questions. This is still a work in progress but at scale we feel we can support many different motivations for answering while addressing spam, brand and user experience issues that will inevitably arise.”

He also said when people recommend an item to purchase, Aardvark can link to sites where you can buy the product and get affiliate payments for conversions they deliver. Another revenue opportunity might revolve around lead generation for larger scale products and services. He was clear to delineate that brokering those kinds of business-to-consumer connections would dictate transparency in letting the user know it was from a commercially biased source but there is real utility in the answer, much like Google AdWords.

The tool certainly puts a new spin on social search, but is, at its core a recommendation and referral engine. Still, the seamlessness of the tool and easy communication bridges from Twitter to IM to email for users makes it wholly useful and a tool with some potential. The only thing that might make it better is if you could choose which friends you ask questions of … but then again, that’s takes some of the seamless experience out of the tool.

Go sign up and give it a try. Tell us what you think of the experience in the comments.

And I’m not the first person to talk about this tool. Check out the related links below for some good insight from others.

Related articles by Jason Falls with Zemanta

• Aardvark Is Completely Changing How I Get Answers To Questions (Hard Knox Life)
• What Happens When An Aardvark And A Twitter Bird Mate? (Marketing Pilgrim)
• Aardvark’s Personal Touch To Online Advice (New York Times)
• Aardvark Open For Business Via Facebook Connect (Techcrunch)

If your company wants to know the philosophical basis of social media, many resources indicate it rests in the notion that consumers grew tired of advertising and marketing messages all day, every day. They turned to the Internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s when the access and technology barriers to entry conveniently dropped. There, they found like-minded others to share recommendations and information with.

Social media has its evolution in the notion that people don’t like being marketed to, or at least they don’t like being marketed to the way they have been for years.

Through foundational writing like The Cluetrain Manifesto, The Anatomy of Buzz, The Wisdom of Crowds, Naked Conversations and others, plus early industry blogging from folks like Shel Israel, Shel Holtz, Mike Masnick, Brian Solis, Todd Defren and more, we’ve learned that success in the social realm is predicated on sharing. You earn trust by giving of yourself, contributing to the community or conversation or both and only after trust is earned can you then ask for something in return. It’s no longer about one-way communication but a dialog, or as I have argued, a multi-logue where your customers talk with you, you with them, but them with each other in your line of sight. Advertising and similar promotional communications aren’t welcome without some other sort of interaction or engagement.

But gaining clarity in what that actually means for businesses, brands and even individuals is not simple.

Social Media Marketing Balance (click for larger version)

First, the rules change depending upon the platform. It might be fine to be 100-percent promotion or sales driven on a blog that you author. It’s not well received if you treat your Twitter interaction that way. But then again, if you state your purpose, it can be well received on Twitter. The Twitter account @delloutlet has been successful to the tune of $2 million as, primarily, a sales driver. While @StephanieatDell mans (womans?) the account and does engage with people, the original purpose was to drive people to buy product. There are different levels of tolerance for sales and promotion for each platform (blogs, forums, microblogging, wikis) and then even variations on the norm within specific communities built on those platforms (Posting sales messages is accepted on some forums, not on others, etc.).

To add another layer of complexity to the sharing vs. promoting argument, there are different rules and expectations for individuals versus businesses, and even a variety of expectations from a business depending upon its industry and purpose. An independent consultant can be somewhat self-promotional and it is expected and understood since it’s his or her livelihood. There might be less tolerance for the CEO of a company to throw around the same types of drivers in conversations. I think there is a general level of understanding that someone representing a company in the financial services, healthcare, insurance or pharmaceutical industries or even some government agencies can’t always speak freely about products and services because of regulations and public safety concerns. The expectations of the audience then change.

So how do you know what’s accepted and what’s not. How do you walk the fine line between using social media for a purpose and participating in social media to have that permission?

Social media purists and philosophers will wax poetic about listening. And it is true: You must listen to the conversations and understand the societal norms for each community in which you participate. You must also listen to know who is talking about you and what they are (or are not) saying. From Google Alerts to the paid services like Radian6, Scout Labs, Techrigy and more, the tools are there for you to listen and learn what is and is not acceptable when communicating with consumers there.

But listening isn’t always enough, from a speed or information perspective. So how can you learn more, faster? How can we participate here and now without considerable risk to our reputations? Here are some thoughts:

• Ask
  You can monitor conversations about Twitter all day without a single person saying, “It’s not appropriate to be 100-percent promotional on Twitter. Only X percent is acceptable.” So ask. Ask other company representatives what they’ve learned. Ask the social media folks you follow what’s on- or off-limits. Or, even better, ask your followers what is acceptable to them. The same holds true for Facebook, forums, blogs and other platforms. Ask those who interact with you there. They’ll tell you what works and what doesn’t.
• Tell
  Clearly state the reason you’re engaging in a particular platform or tool in a place that’s easy for the community to find. Your Twitter background or bio, the signature on your forum or message board entries, the sidebar of your blog or website are all easy places to say, “This is what we use this medium for. If you’d like to reach us for other reasons, here are the best ways to do so.” If you wind up with a low number of followers or respondents to what you do, you’ll know the audience isn’t down with what you’re using it for. Adjust and move forward.
• Answer
  Make sure you tip a cap to the spirit of social media marketing and give consumers an avenue to reach out to a real, live person with your company. Sure, it can be a phone number or an email, but consider a Twitter account for direct interaction with people, a Facebook page where someone actively responds or a blog/forum/message board where someone from the company interacts regularly. So long as people have SOME way of having a conversation with you, they’ll probably be pretty happy with your company’s availability.

Those are my thoughts. What are yours? Furthermore, what are acceptable levels of promotion for brands? Small businesses? Individuals as businesses? Individuals promoting personal passions or hobbies? Is there a threshold or tipping point or does it always vary based on sender and/or receiver and we’ll never know?

Lots of questions … share your answers with us in the comments.

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• Using Internet PR Like You Use Twitter (Justin Levy)

Confession time?  I hate the term “social media marketing.”  It’s one of those phrases that could mean nearly anything.  Depending on the context, it might mean spamming Digg or creating a blog or building up a Facebook fan page or a hundred other things.  By contrast, if I say “social media monitoring” or “traffic generation” or “conversation marketing,” you have a much firmer fix on what we’re actually trying to accomplish.   

Right now, I find myself talking a lot about content marketing, because content marketing is the most natural fit for an advertising agency’s existing abilities. Content marketing requires creative talent, good process and organization skills, and strategic thinking.  

So with that said, and bearing in mind I get sucked into watching a lot of Charleton Heston movies this time of year, I’d like to offer you the Ten Commandments of Content Marketing. 

1. Thou shalt make thy content portable.  The beauty of the social web is that if you make good content easy to share, real live people will be your “channels.”  If your content is really good, the persistent will figure out a way to share it even if you don’t make it easy.  But why make them work that hard?  
2. Thou shalt remember that “content” is not just text.  Photos, audio content/podcasts, and video should be included in any content strategy.    
3. Thou shalt not use the word “viral.”  It makes you sound like the middle-aged dad trying to use his teens’ slang, and is generally running about 2 years behind.  Good, portable online content can become popular.  A virus on your computer is generally a bad thing, remember?
4. Thou shalt not refer to your program as a “campaign.”  Content marketing is a long-haul proposition, and really part of your overall communications plan.  Are you going to stop any other parts of your communications plan when their “campaign” runs it’s course?  No.  And as long as there’s a web, you’re going to need to provide content. 
5. Thou shalt not begin without an editorial calendar.  Unless you like beating your head pointlessly against a brick wall.  Then by all means, go right ahead.
6. Thou shalt delegate clear roles and responsibilities.  Or thou shalt be cursed to play “ownership hot potato” while your stale content just sits there on the web.  
7. Thou shalt honor thy legal department.  Nuff said.
8. Thou shalt match thy content to the environment.   Content strategy is no longer limited to the bounds of your primary URL.  Develop Facebook-y content for Facebook, etc.
9. Thou shalt not allow thy website content to get as stale as week-old bread.   Or thou art not allowed to whine when visitors go away to spend time elsewhere.
10. Thou shalt reward thy enthusiasts appropriately for sharing thine content.   That may mean sponsoring a blogger. It may mean sharing some high-PR link love to someone who is talking you up.  How you reward them is something to determine on a case-by-case basis, but don’t forget to do it.

Okay folks, what do you think?  Do I need to drop any?  Or expand from the  ”Ten Commandments” to rip off “America’s Top 40″ rather than the Bible?