There’s already been a lot of coverage about the Twitter deals with Bing and Google announced in the last couple of days and waking up this morning the day after Windows 7 launched and Nick Griffin made an arse of himself on Question Time, just goes to show how important these innovations are.
Trending on Twitter 10 minutes ago (writing at 10.06am on Friday 23rd October) were “Windows 7” and “Nick Griffin” as well as “BBC” “#bbcqt” and “Jan Moir”. All the tweets using those keywords are relating to something that’s happened very recently and are in large part conveying some kind of sentiment about different events or news.
Over two years ago Danny Sullivan and other search marketing luminaries attended a conference I’d organised, the after party of which was held on the same night and 100 yards away from where a car bomb had been planted outside a nightclub on the Haymarket.
Luckily it didn’t go off!
The next day Danny wrote an article called the London Car Bombs – The Big Fat Search Failure – in it he complained – quite rightly – that people searching on KWs relating to the previous night’s near miss were getting tired old news/blog results from 2 years before where the bombers had unfortunately been more successful in their mission.
How things have changed.
These new announcements mean we all have access to real-time results from people on the ground and results that have been established over time through solid linking/content criteria.
We now have a choice.
In the last 14 minutes – yes I’m a slow typer – the keywords in Mashable’s post entitled “Apple Fires Back” – about the new Apple ads dissing Windows 7 – have drifted in and now out of the trending topics, demonstrating a hiatus in sharing of that news while the critical mass are still venting on Griffin and Jan Moir’s apology.
This really is a new dawn for not only how we receive and understand information, but also how we disseminate it. Brands need to tap into what's being said about them like never before.
Pro-activity is key now and much more careful thought needs to go into how we include social media into the marketing mix because it’s definitely here to stay!