Our friends over at Sitewire have a really great article on how the deals between Facebook, Twitter and Google are going to change the way your site is indexed, and more importantly how users will get their results.

To make a long story short – everyone’s Google results for a specific term, say the TV show “Lost” will be different when using real-time search. Everyone’s. This is because if you are selecting Latest Results, you’re jumping into the world of real-time which will include updates from Facebook and Twitter that are using those keywords. Check out this sample query for AT&T.

Notice anything? If you guessed that ‘sentiment is now reflected in Google results’ – you win. Who doesn’t win in this situation? AT&T. Regardless of what AT&T does with any of their PPC buys or SEO their search results page now is going to be trumped by sentiment in large part gathered from Social Media networks. And right now, sentiment towards AT&T is at almost an all-time low. If I were someone who was making a purchasing decision regarding a new cell phone, checking Google’s real-time search would certainly have an influence in that choice. And that’s big.

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This past week I attended BOLO 2009 down in Phoenix, AZ. It’s a 3 day conference put on by the fine folks at Sitewire and Agencyside that centers around Social Media, Analytics, and helping clients grow into and participate in the social media landscape. Not only was the content killer (great keynotes from Bryan Eisenberg, Guy Kawasaki and Jim Lecinski) but I got the chance to share ideas with folks that are doing some amazing work in educating brands about the social sphere (looking at you Jack Smith, Kim Koehly, Scott Kaufman – among others).

With all that being said, I wanted to share some notes that I took from the first keynote presentation of the conference with Jim Lecinski. He provided us with a great baseline for where both search and social are going, and how brands will need to adapt to compete whether they’re a large multi-national, or a smaller more localized business. (more…)

It seems like every site on the web now has some form of “Web 2.0″ or social features integrated with them. Whether that’s an official Twitter account, company blog, a Ning group or Facebook fan page, social media has created a new channel for businesses to use for customer service, marketing, and community building.

This past week Google launched a new product as part of their Google Toolbar that every website owner should be aware of.  Google SideWiki is a huge way to annotate the web. Think of it as seeing comments, additional links, and Wikipedia style annotations alongside every webpage you visit. According to Google’s Video, you can link up additional text on the page to point to your annotation, or leave a comment on the page as a whole. Don’t want to leave your mark? You can still view everyone else’s comments and rate whether they’re useful or not, or share a comment via Twitter or Facebook. (more…)