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What Real-time Search Could Mean For Your Business

Last week in a cute little chapel somewhere in cyber space there was a three way marriage between Twitter, Google and Bing.

A large part of this agreement centres around Google & Bing including Twitter updates in their search results. Just as a marriage between two foreign monarchs of old brought about changes for their peasants, the union of these three online heavy weights has huge implications for businesses around the world.

Advertising Dies A Little More

Yes this is another nail in the coffin of the broadcasting model. Running expensive advertising campaigns will generate even less ROI if you’re not delivering real value. Don’t even bother advertising if you can’t provide great customer service.

Why? Because real-time tweets mean up to the second word-of-mouth, last year’s customer service record means less than ever. If you’re a firm that prides yourself on quality goods and great service real-time tweets aren’t going to be too much of a problem. But if you’re making dodgy products, duping your customers, or if your just plain rude; then you may not be able to sell anything online ever again. As soon as one Tweep receives poor service, anyone, even if they’ve never sent a tweet in their life will see it in their search results.

Join The Conversation

If the benefits of listening, talking, engaging and energising your community hasn’t already convinced you to join the convo and jump on the twitter bandwagon then perhaps you’ll be sold by the prospect of twitter becoming one of the major ways we find the products and services that we purchase.

Active members of the conversation will benefit from this three-way union in many ways. They will gain more followers as their tweets are able to be found with more ease. People will tweet and retweet them more meaning that they gain more Google juice. As a result more products and services will be sold.

You Must Be Responsive

We are increasingly searching online before making purchases for a myriad of commodities. With these juggernaut’s combining forces we’ll soon be able to access real-time information about your business so being responsive is more important than ever. As we have seen over the years poor customer service that is left unattended online can become a viral nightmare, ala Dell Hell. Responding to negative feedback and being active in the social web is now a must.

Take the ego out of your business and realise that your products and services are only as good as we say they are. This has always been the case, but never before has this word of mouth been so searchable.

Start A Blog!

Why? There are loads of reasons to blog, but the newest reason will be that to make the most of this heavy weight marriage you will need to produce interesting content for people to tweet about.

The benefits you receive from blogging will depend on the content that you’re creating. But if you’re active on twitter and people are tweeting about your content then you’re almost guaranteed to see improved search ranking; loads of incoming links are like popularity votes which create higher rankings for your website.

I’m sure there are loads more issues and benefits that come from this cyberspace ceremony and I’d love to hear about the ones you’re interested in.