My premise started when I read a UK Techcrunch story about a Google / Twitter mashup. This was in February and there was a major snow event blanketing the UK. But if you were to try to get a satellite image of the snowfall in real time, you couldn’t. That’s because the cloud cover prevents the satellite from seeing the ground. So this genius named Ben Marsh comes up with the mashup. In brief, the idea was to get the general UK Twitter population to report on the snowfall at their location in the UK. Respondents reported their postcode and then selected a number from 1-10 to rate the snowfall amount. Ben’s mashup then graphically displayed the results on a UK Google map. Then it hit me – this Twitter data is yielding superior search results for the amount of snowfall in the UK than any other source. So will this type of real-time data stream become a rival to Google in search?

Daniel Foster is the co-founder of 34SP.com – the website hosting service that kept Ben Marsh’s mashup online during peak bandwidth usage during the February snowstorm. I asked Mr. Foster if he thought that Twitter could overtake Google in search, based on his experience with the Ben Marsh mashup site. Mr. Foster replied, "While this use of Twitter was certainly unique at the time and created a superior data set for UK snowfall for that time period, it is still a long way from a true search product. Google clearly has a corporate mission that drives search-related activities. Twitter just asks "What are you doing?". I don’t see Twitter search overtaking Google unless the business directives change."

Here is what a few of the other Internet and search experts I contacted had to say in answer to the question: "Will Twitter Replace Google in Search?".

Rand Fishkin is a legend in search marketing. As the founder and CEO of SEOmoz.com, Mr. Fishkin was recently included in Newsweek’s list of Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs 2009. His involvement in search marketing began in high school, and he is now generally regarded as one of the world’s authorities in search. Mr. Fishkin commented, "No. Twitter is not a search engine and cannot answer the vast majority of queries sent to an engine like Google, Yahoo! or Live. Twitter searches a single stream of user created data in 140 character slices. While searching this database of information can be fascinating and even relevant (particularly for those who are interested in what Twitter users are saying about a particular topic or person), it is not even an attempt to replicate the functionality or application Google provides. Google answers an inherent need that has existed since the web’s inception: users must navigate to web sites and pages that contain desired information. Twitter cannot achieve this function and therefore cannot be a replacement for Google in search."

Michael Gray is President of Atlas Web Service, a full service website and Internet marketing company. Michael has worked in website development and marketing for over 10 years, and shares his thoughts regularly on Graywolf’s SEO Blog. Mr. Gray opined, "Twitter is never going to replace Google for searches there simply isn’t the breadth of information available there. For example say you need to know: "Who was the 3rd Vice President of the United States?". Unless you happen to have a history buff in your stream – very few people are going to know it’s Aaron Burr off the top of their heads. It’s simple and easier for you and everyone else to type the question into Google and have it spit back the answer. However, if I have a tech related search like: "How do I backup my Firefox profile?" chances are I’ll get a few answers from my users. One way that Twitter is better than Google is if I know my followers and trust them. I might not trust Yelp or CitySearch when they tell me what a good seafood restaurant in San Francisco, but if someone who follows me gives me a recomendation, if I know who they are, I’m much more likely to trust their response. The one caveat is the trusted relationship of the person giving the response. 20 people I don’t know telling me someplace is good is never going to outweigh the 1 person I really trust telling me it’s bad."

Danny Sullivan is often regarded as a true pioneer in search. His seminal 1995 work published as "A Webmaster’s Guide To Search Engines" laid the groundwork for his career as an often cited expert in search. Mr. Sullivan he has been quoted in all the major media outlets such as The Wall St. Journal, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, Forbes, The New Yorker, Newsweek and ABC’s Nightline. Here are Mr. Sullivan’s comments, "No, Twitter won’t replace Google search because it simply doesn’t cover enough of the topics out there. It can be used for question answering, but that’s largely limited to the number and quality of your followers. I do think it’s an excellent additional search tool, however, http://searchengineland.com/how-we-search-with-twitter-16920 has much more on this."

Andy Beal is an online reputation management consultant, award-winning blogger, and professional speaker. Mr. Beal shares his expertise via his blog at www.andybeal.com, and he is also the founder and editor of Marketing Pilgrim, an award winning news publication that covers internet marketing news and trends. Mr. Beal added, "Twitter’s real time data certainly compliments Google’s search results, but I don’t see it ever replacing it. Twitter’s data stream should be looked at in the same way as Google News or Google Blog Search. There’s tremendous value in tapping into a fresh, up to the minute content, but people still rely on the structured, ranked data that Google’s web index provides."

Neil Patel’s email identifies him as a ‘professional web surfer’. I know him as an incredibly charismatic, smart and friendly Internet, social marketing and search expert. He has also been named a top 100 blogger by Technorati, and was also one of the top influencers on the web according to the Wall Street Journal. His current company is KISSmetrics, and Mr. Patel shares his insights in his blog – QuickSprout. Mr. Patel offered these thoughts on Twitter overtaking Google in search, "Twitter will not replace Google in search. You can use Twitter to find up to date information, but I doubt you will ever use Twitter to find products to buy or figure out how to fix a technical problem. Just the other day I had to search Google on how to program my router. I don’t think I will ever be able to do that on Twitter."

Todd Malicoat is a Marketing Consultant and on the SEO Faculty at MarketMotive.com. Mr. Malicoat is an Internet entrepreneur who has spent "near obsessive amounts of time on Webmasterworld.com, and Threadwatch.org. Here is Mr. Malicoat’s response, "I think Twitter definitely has an opportunity to swipe a bit of market share from Google on certain TYPES of terms. Anything very time sensitive, Twitter gives very good results for. I think Google will likely be a suitor, but they likely don’t want another youtube over-valuation debacle. Twitter has definitely raised some eyebrows, and what it does do is fill the need for ‘guided search’ that several companies including trexy.com, mahalo, and even yahoo answers (to an extent), and many others have been trying to do for years. Twitter has done this with a different model of getting the guides first with the critical mass of people, and the organization will come later. Most search results, however, don’t NEED a search guide or expert, so for now, Google is perfectly safe, but has the potential to lose out on some niche expert traffic to the new kid on the block."

By way of fairness, I did contact the PR department at Google requesting a comment for this piece. As of the writing of this article, they have not responded.

So there you have it. Practically no one thinks that Twitter will overtake Google in search. At best, in very time sensitive events – perhaps Twitter can be a good companion reference to Google. Of course things can change quickly – and if they do, I’m sure we can all check in with Twitter to learn about them. My thanks to all the experts who participated in this article.

I thought it would be interesting to explore social media and how it relates directly to search engine optimization. I sent a couple of questions to several online marketing experts to get their thoughts on the subject. So contained here are the thoughts of Todd Malicoat, Joe Griffin, Joe Whyte, and Stephen Pitts.

Chris Crum: Where does social media fit into the SEO equation?

Todd Malicoat: Social media is an integral portion of a successful SEO campaign in the current landscape. Social media marketing helps mainly with creating the global link popularity that is essential to high rankings.  Successful social media distribution of high value content has helped to solve the issue of not having enough unique linking domains or global link popularity, which has traditionally been one of the most difficult SEO variables to succeed at.

Joe Whyte: Social media is great as one piece of the Internet marketing puzzle, so is SEO for that matter. The links, traffic, brand engagement and conversational marketing piece to social media is very powerful. Selling it as a stand alone service has always created some issues for me as it takes time and it does not reap the same rewards for clients as quickly and securely as traditional SEO. It is great to do a linkbait piece and get to the top of Digg and see all of that traffic come through but all clients are looking for is a return that affects their bottom line and they want to be able to equate a certain campaign to that success. Social media has always had problems in that regard. Converting Digg and StumbleUpon users to sales is just NOT realistic for every company and every site owner out there.

As the social web evolves, this hole will be filled and is already starting to be filled by the development of more social networking, bookmarking and sharing sites.

In my opinion, the best social media marketing tactics to fit into your online marketing campaigns would be researching who you need to target then cross reference that criteria against the different social sites in order to quantify for yourself and your client that you are targeting the right sites. Then building a presence while engaging users and creating unique and interesting content for that community is the best method.

By doing this you create brand awareness, ubiquity and engagement which is the ultimate goal. Social media marketing is great for targeting the same demographics but just on a different platform away from your traditional search engine results pages.

Joe Griffin: Building a presence in the social web is all about reputation and branding. Most of the web’s top ranking websites maintain strong brand recognition in their respective industries. Strong branding leads to natural inbound links, and this is the lesson to be learned about building a reputation within social media networks. Most of the major social networks like Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter, purposely nofollow or truncate outbound links. This strategy drastically cuts down spam in their networks, and improves their quality and relevancy in the major search engines.

So, simply building profiles and linking to your site won’t help. If you’re interested in leveraging social media portals to improve your website’s rankings, then you need to look at the strategy in a completely different light. First and foremost, participating in the social web means building brand recognition, which can be used for your personal brand, your business brand, or both. It’s the brand recognition that leads to improved linking to your website – it’s not the social media websites themselves that will give your website link popularity. The inbound links will come from bloggers, forum moderators and users, resource websites, and new friends and colleagues that you will meet along the way.

Social networks build brands. Brand building is the key to top rankings over the long haul. Recent updates by Google, including the Vince update validate these comments.

Stephen Pitts: Social media is a form of offsite promotion, just like link building. A quality link doesn’t only come from any site, but one that is relevant and has visibility to engines and users, as should a social media effort. As with a SEO campaign, a social media effort should not be considered a project, rather a process that is continual. It can be one of the most effective means to entice users to speak and share online what you offer along with what is great and not so great about you.

Chris Crum: Strictly from an SEO standpoint, what are the benefits to using Twitter, Facebook, etc.?

Todd Malicoat: I’ve honestly yet to have someone show me a great SEO use for Facebook.  There is certainly potential for distribution through it though, based on the raw size of the user base.  With either medium, and with ANY social medium – the goal is simple for SEO’s: high distribution of top level content so it gets well linked. 

The traffic will ultimately help with this, and having traffic from the right people (namely webmasters and promiscuous linkers) will help immensely with this.  Twitter, on the other hand, HAS been a fairly valuable SEO tool in the same way that Facebook isn’t.  It helps to get your best content in front of the people that will want it in a very timely fashion. 

Sidenote: Watch our exclusive interview with Todd and Brent Csutoras from SES NY last year where they talk about social media platforms:

One main consideration with twitter should be that most people are not engaged.  To truly use twitter as a means for distribution, you need to have very engaging, or very specialized content.  "Cat blogging" (random posts about whatever is on your mind) didn’t work for regular blogging, and people have seem to forgotten this rule when it comes to microblogging.  If you’re going to use twitter, stay on topic at least MOST of the time in order to keep the increasingly distracted attention of your users.

Joe Whyte: Well with the nofollow tags on these sites the link value can be debated. I tend to think that link value is still passed but at a much lower value. We also know that these links do get picked up and put into Google’s and Yahoo’s backlink checker and we know that nofollow still allows spiders to cache and index, which is still great.

There have actually been case studies out there for people who build nofollow back links to terms and it has been documented that there have been shifts within the rankings. However I mostly use Twitter, Facebook and similar sites to build a targeted community that I could market to. Also it’s another great way to open up a "connection line" with potential or current customers. It is also a great way to do some reputation management – We saw this with Rebecca Kelly of SEOmoz and I think it was Verizon or something. She was unhappy and decided to tweet it to all of her friends. A Verizon rep contacted her through twitter and helped her out where a telephone customer rep did not.

This is a great example of social media for reputation management.  One more way Twitter and Facebook can help with SEO is through a method I call parasitic hosting. Parasitic hosting is the process of creating pages on social sites and 3rd party sites that you do not own and building an optimized page for your business. This page has the ability to rank for a particular term through traditional SEO techniques and can be another way to dominate your SERPS!

Sidenote: Watch an exclusive WebProNews interview with Joe from SMX West 2008 when he discussed social media with Mike McDonald:

Stephen Pitts: Twitter and Facebook are a means for traffic and plant seeds that will hopefully turn into links and spur additional traffic. The other way is to use these platforms to find out what/how people find you and want to find you. Social Media is similar to organic visibility, it provides an opportunity to get a click, but the delivery is so important because if it isn’t delivered correctly it might not be seen!

Wrapping up

I’d like to thank Malicoat, Whyte, Griffin, and Pitts for taking the time to discuss this subject with me. I think while social media marketing is certainly a hot topic. Its relationship to search engine optimization is not discussed as often. Certainly that’s not what the medium is all about, but marketers looking for all possible angles and benefits should be able to keep in mind the effects that pertain to search engine rankings.

See other paralllels between social media marketing and SEO? Do tell.

Talk about your strategies with other WebProNews readers.

1. Spam people with lots of business cards.
We definitely all need more business cards. I’m not a filthy prius driving hippy, but fer’ cryin’ out loud, save a tree, and don’t hand everyone in the group a card the moment you join the conversation. Double jerk points for acting like you’re an escort affiliate in vegas and handing out stickers or cards at the exit at the end of sessions.

2. Be the pushy salesguy
ABC – Always be cobbling (vid). Yes, the new company you’re with is awesome. Give me a good pitch in the morning after three days of hangovers, and interest me in thirty seconds or less and we’ll talk. Put that cocoa down Shelly Levine. Cocoa is for cobblers only. I’m sure you’ll do well selling Rio Rancho and your rank checker software on your next batch of cold calls.

3. The guy with LOTS of “awesome ideas”
It’s very likely that cookie stuffing users with games that are pogo-clones is a profitable business model. It doesn’t mean anyone will want to do your SEO for half of your big bucks. We get it, your ideas are incredible, and you’re going to be rich, and we should absolutely be your slave for 6 years doing the grunt work on your pyramid bingo scheme. Praise Jeebus for your miraculous ingenuity and lack of startup capital.

4. The guy soliciting people to write for free
You have a blog. We get it…you need content and links, and long for acceptance on sphinn. It will be the best – most unique content ever, because there’s definitely not enough SEO blogs on the web.

5. The guy that drinks to much
Before you know anyone, act like Neil when he learns hitting the top of beer bottles makes carbonated beverages explode. It IS funny to see someone’s beer spray all over them, and you should be the one to prove it to everybody. Try to go shot for shot with Rae, Boser, or Dave, because they’re lightweights and can’t drink much. Disregard the rules of SEO club, and proceed to make an ass of yourself (see number 6). Blab about all your sites and great ideas – be sure to tell everyone the best most secret (and spammiest) ones. Wake up with no revenue streams, respect, and a headache when you realize you missed the first 4 hours of a conference that you paid over two grand to attend. Those last 6 shots of petrone were totally worth it, and and offering to pay the thousand dollar bar tab on your bosses expense account was an excellent idea. Nothing says professionalism like binge drinking to the point of blacking out and vomiting.

6. Don’t have a mint and be a close talker
Nothing quite as wonderful and pleasant as the fragrant smell of ass breath with someone standing uncomfortably close blabbing about how cool they are.

7. Ask 17 questions that have been answered already during Q and A
Hi, I’m Peter K… from www.IamADouchebagRealtor.com – I have a site where I try to bleed people out of all the money I can in the San Francisco Bay Area. I have one question I’d like to ask in 17 parts (credit Matt for the joke). I will be certain to tell everyone my domain in every session that I attend where I grab the mic from the moderator and ask questions that pertain to no one but myself.

8. Barge in on conversations
There is no business done at these events, and people rarely know each other. They are all there to meet YOU. After all – it’s all about you.

9. Stalk a Femozzer (or any other female in the industry)
Girls love it when you email them lots of times after getting their card. Text and facebook messages work well too. Then be sure to write a blog post about them, and add them on every single social network site as your friend. It’s probably a good idea to try to get laid at an industry event (or the opposite), and no one will ever find out that you’re a creep and talk about you behind your back. As a backup plan, you can follow googlers everywhere asking to speak to Matt Cutts, and wondering why your payday loan site with blog spam links got banned from the index.

10. Ask SEO questions first
Why SHOULDN’T Todd Freisen write all your sites .htaccess 301 redirects for your site migration the first time he meets you? Michael Gray OWES you at least a dozen good linkbait ideas for your dental practice because after all, he posts his picture on the internet and talks about marketing on his blog. Just like David Hasselhoff owes you a ride in kit because you watched Knight Rider re-runs for 17 years (as well as that painfully commercial knock off mini movie).

11. Ask people what they do in the first 10 seconds you meet them
Don’t forget to ask how much money they make, their religious and political beliefs, and if their significant other enjoys a little butt play by the end of the first minute.

12. Give away secrets told in confidence
Parlaying secret information, and giving it away in your next conversation is a great way to get more information (or get beat up and ostracized for eternity).

13. Blog everything you hear in the bar
This is a given. If people say something outloud, it should end up on the internet…right?

14. Videotape people without permission
Chicks dig this. Forget privacy. Make gratuitous use of backside and cleavage shots as well. Try to get candid vids where people don’t know you’re video taping their business transactions and post them on youtube that evening.

15. Spam everyone that gave you a business card
No sense in giving out lots of business cards if you don’t GET lots of them as well. Have your intern input all the names, and then send at least a dozen emails to everyone on the list (make sure to CC everyone too!) about a new blog you’re starting in a month that currently just has a default wordpress theme. Follow up with requests to help you tweak your template and ask for guest posters.

And the NUMBER 1 way to be a conference douchebag – Act like you’re really cool – and do a video for the world to see, and act like an asshole:)

Maybe I’m fickle, but so are a lot of others who have been to lots of shows. A while ago, I did offer some some more positive tips on things you SHOULD do at an SEO conference.

Comments

Just wanted to say a quick thanks to all the folks who took the time to let me know there was a problem (and to Mike for helping me get up and running quickly – it probably would have taken me weeks). To the folks who thought it was linkbait, I can appreciate skepticism, but you might want to tip your BS meters a bit further back towards “faith in humanity” – life is more enjoyable that way. Ironically enough, I was having lunch with Michael Gray when I got the news, so I’ll let him tell the story (or you can check out the blow-by-blow at threadwatch, so I can get back to work:)

Comments

Tag:

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

Todd Malicoat aka Stuntdubl made his first horrible looking website full of animated .gifs in 1997, and after fours years of failure and experimentation ended up in the world of SEO and internet marketing in early 2001. He is currently an independent marketing consultant from the SEO school of thought. Todd earned a bachelors of business adminstration from Northwood University in 2003 while running an web design and consulting firm Meta4creations, LLC. Todd is a speaker at both Webmasterworld and Search Engine Strategies conferences.

I recommended “Gene and Georgetti’s” and somehow we ended up at “Dick’s”, one of those places where the wait staff are intentionally rude and give poor service. The service was actually great, the food as good as could be expected and the conversation and experience was all around fun. There was a Janis Joplin cover by the band that went pretty well too.

We ended things up back at Kitty O’Shea’s where a good number of search marketers were hitting it late and I met a few very interesting people who I did not get business cards from, but learned some interesting things about domainers and domain name monetization, AdWords arbitrage and affiliate marketing. I may need to change some of my planned sessions to cover on Monday! Now it’s off to sleep until day one of SES Chicago.

Comments

Tag:

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

Lee Odden is President and Founder of
TopRank Online Marketing, specializing in organic SEO, blog
marketing and online public relations. He’s been cited as a search
marketing expert by publications including U.S. News & World Report and
The Economist and has implemented successful search marketing programs
with top BtoB companies of all sizes. Odden shares his marketing
expertise at Online Marketing Blog offering
daily news, interviews and best practices.