Search Marketing Sage

One of the sessions I was most looking forward to today was this one where Dylan Casey from Google addressed how real time social media is affecting search engines.

Dylan explained that Google has paid a lot of attention to the type of content being published, not just the platforms. It’s much more than the URLs — where did this piece of content come from? How was it published? What is dove-tailed along with it?

What about SEO? Brand owners are clearly concerned about it. Dylan, of course, said to continue to focus on creating good content. The way that Google delivers social content isn’t that different than how it delivers other content. There are some nuances:

• Look at how the content is being used and interacted with. What happens to the content after it is published?

  

Chelsea Marti from TurboTax discussed how they scaled their Twitter effort this year to help customers with their taxes. TurboTax has over 20M customers and a limited time to help them before the tax deadline each year.

Social creates ways to attain new customers and retain the ones they have. They are engaging through multiple platforms, including Twitter and Facebook.

Before this tax season, they had two people handling the TurboTax account. Over time, they had multiple socially-savvy employees doing some tweeting. They have forty employees now working on the TeamTurboTax Twitter account. They work across the organization using a hub and spoke model. Corporate communications is the hub and they use CoTweet to send out the right issues to the right people to respond.

Mid-way through the tax season, they realized they had lots of tax questions (they had thought it would be TurboTax tech questions). So they had to recruit from within the organization to find the right tax experts and added 10-12 experts right before April 15. This was the first year they did this.

Since employees were helping, it was important to incent and reward employees for helping out. What made the project a success was the knowledge that the group brought to the effort. So they did a series of internal and external rewards (like iPads and beer!).

The average response time was only 4 min. and over half of the people who contacted the team was able to finish the their tax return due to the help they got. Most importantly for them, 71% of helped folks said they would recommend TurboTax to friends. They also found that the people who reached out were mostly already customers, but this effort just solidified TurboTax’s relationship with them.

The keynote address for the TWTRCON conference in New York was none other than Martha Stewart of Martha Stewart Omnimedia. Martha was interviewed by NYT’s  David Pogue.

David started off by asking Martha the top question sent in: How to fix the oil spill? Her answer: She has some ideas and is going to see the devastation and see what she can do to help.

Now what about Twitter? Martha said that she really is @MarthaStewart on Twitter and writes all of her tweets. She emphasized that authenticity is key to a platform like Twitter. If she’s in a place she can’t, she dictates a tweet by phone to a Eliad, an assistant. She mentioned how Britney Spears has many tweets — she can’t imagine that as busy as Britney is that she actually authors all of her tweets.

Martha also mentioned that she believes that the iPad is a game changer. She finds it easier to tweet and type on the iPad.

Giving an example of how she personally uses Twitter, Martha recounted how she was recently was in Montreal and took suggestions from followers on what to do. She got many answers, including to try Poutine. While she ended up not really liking the Poutine dish, she appreciated the instant feedback to her question. One thing she felt would be a helpful addition, however, is for Twitter to show the number of  total responses to a tweet.

Alan Murray, Deputy Managing Editor & Executive Editor Online, of The Wall Street Journal spoke of Twitter as a great news filter, but not necessarily a powerful reporting tool. For the WSJ, social media helps them get feedback from readers. We hear of bankruptcies for newspapers every week it seems.

“Yet the truth is this is the most exciting time for journalism that I’ve experienced in the business.”

Murray continued, “Frankly, it’s making us better. Now we know what our readers want – before we just guessed.”

The WSJ now has a bigger audience thanks to their online presence and social media. Content is reaching their readers in much richer ways and it’s easier to gather feedback from readers.

Real Time Organization panel

Nigel Dessau, Senior Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer, of AMD, John Shea, Public Information Officer for New Media, of FEMA, Ambre Morley, Associate Director of Product Communications, of Novo Nordisk, and Capt. Chris Sukach, Chief, Emerging Technology, of the Air Force Public Affairs Agency along with Moderator David Armano, Senior Partner, of Dachis Group discussed the transformation taking place because of the implications of real-time social media.

The keynote of the morning, Craig Newmark, Founder, craigslist and moderator Alan Murray, Deputy Managing Editor & Executive Editor Online, The Wall Street Journal kept the morning rolling with some humor and advice. The main topic was how micro-blogging powers communities, and the benefits for business, government and society. However, some time was spent talking about Newmark’s interesting Twitter feed and his interest for white pigeons.  Check out his Twitter stream to see what I’m talking about…

“Social media by its nature gets people to work together.” You need management buy in, however.  And, “you need someone at the top to say free the nerds.”

Recently featured in Wired magazine, Craig Newmark is known for customer service.  He said customer service is public service if done in good conscience. Social media helps us accomplish customer service with direct feedback.  Newmark thinks we all need our own publishing channels.  So go ahead and get a blog or Twitter account to share your thoughts and spread insights.

When speaking about the government, the White House blog and Twitter account came up.  Newmark said the White House is being way more open and honest with these channels than expected.  As the White House is doing, brands should be on Twitter for another method of contact.  A suggestion from him was to listen to feedback and then do something about it, which is the history of craigslist from day one.  With the success of craigslist, I think it would be silly to not listen to this advice.

By now, you may have heard the news broke yesterday that Bing and Google will list Tweets from Twitter.  Newmark thinks this is mostly a good thing, but the bad side is that those tweets will be part of a person’s permanent record.  So now, more than ever, think about what you tweet.