Googles Real Time Search & It's Impact on Online Marketing & Brands

The integration of 'Real Time' Search in Google's listings is going have to some real impacts on online marketing and some of them may well cause Brand Managers a bit of concern.

What is Real Time Search?

Basically it means the inclusion of items from Twitter (later from Facebook and the like too), short items of news or comment that are related to the search term used. These real time lists seem to vary in size and placement on the screen, and in many cases are constantly changing in their own Marquee area.

Being helpful as ever, Google allow you to pause the lists, to remove them totally, or to switch to another screen where you see just these 'real time' items.

For an example see below (the real time search being shown twice here):-

The next question is perhaps 'How do Google choose what Tweets to show?', well Google state that only information deemed highly relevant will be included. So spammy tweets, low quality pages and other content might not make it into the real time search “layer” that they use. A map showing which things Google take into account is shown below:-

What will the effects be on Branding & Online Marketing?

This is a more difficult question to answer, but some things are already coming out of the woodwork here.

First there is the matter of how Brands can ensure that their Tweets are shown as many times as possible, and that means that they will have to tweet on relevant things an awful lot of times a day, and what is more these tweets will have to be of good quality and not just spammy as otherwise they may well be filtered out.

Then there is the matter of brand protection & reputation management. Take Starbucks for example. In this case Brand managers are aware that people use Google to search for the location of outlets when visiting somewhere new. Now what if someone is ranting on Twitter about how bad the coffee was on their last visit. In the past this was not an issue as these 'rants' would not have been visible to most people (unless they were really searched for in Twitter), but today, well, they could well be seen by a lot more people. What is worse is that the story could be looked at more deeply as the interested party drilled down into the data.

The good news is that Google are aware of all this stating:- “In Google search, we use automated and manual processes to identify results appearing to be malicious and add warning labels to help protect users from compromised sites. The shortened links in real-time search are also automatically checked to detect sites that may be malicious, and those that can’t be resolved to their full form will not be displayed. We will continue to improve and refine these systems, and also to help keep sites using bad SEO tactics out of our index.”

Whatever, this latest change is one that will have a major implication on how businesses use Twitter in the future.

Scan & Tweet Service

By the way, SOM is ahead of the game here, our "Scan and Tweet" service being available to people worried about brand protection, for more info, please do contact us.

Graham Baylis
Internet Marketing and Promotion Specialists
www.S-O-Marketing.co.uk
"Making sure your needle is found in the Internet Haystack"