As online publishing platforms and social networks have exploded in popularity, there is a new need to aggregate and search the dynamic “real-time” web.

New platforms hold much promise for marketers who want to understand trends and customer problems in real time. In this article I review three of the top real-time search engines (in no particular order), and each has a unique profile that fits certain use cases particularly well.

#1: OneRiot

OneRiot is the largest real-time web search engine today. It aggregates information about popular topics from Twitter and other social media sites.

OneRiot consolidates all these articles into one headline that you can click that leads you to a list of articles associated with a topic. This is a great way to see multiple articles on one topic all at once and in real time.

Instead of having to search different news sites looking for a hot topic, users can access OneRiot’s aggregated real-time information on the topic. Also, OneRiot does a good job of blending hot topics from different spheres. It has a balanced mix of entertainment news and hard news, but seems to concentrate more on entertainment news.

OneRiot has a bar on the right side of the page that breaks common topics into categories. If you’re looking for the latest news on trends or culture, politics or technology, you can easily find it.

Though OneRiot focuses on news organization sources and provides more reliable information, it lacks the personal touch from integrating commentary from individuals into the feed. This eliminates how the public is reacting to the news. OneRiot is great for lists of news articles related to the topic, but it’s important to get the public’s take on these articles as well.

The best way to use OneRiot for online marketing would be to use its search results about important topics. You could give your audience up-to-date information aggregated from multiple social networks. For instance, if you sell cars, linking to the OneRiot results page with the latest information about models you sell could be a great way to display feedback for people who own your cars.

By going to OneRiot, you can quickly see what the most frequently posted information is at the moment. Overall, OneRiot has the potential to be a great source for generating organic leads.

OneRiot’s real-time results display information about the first person to tweet a story, up-to-date news coverage and social media commentary on those news items.

#2: Collecta

Collecta has more of a mainstream U.S. and international news focus, and does not offer the entertainment and lifestyle content that OneRiot integrates into its results. As a result, Collecta is a great source for people who want important news stories and like to view several sources to understand the breadth of angles on a topic.

The main page displays a general headline for each topic and then three suggested articles related to the topic. This makes it easy to read and gives it a professional, news-style approach. Also, Collecta does a great job of gathering recent social media updates from several sites such as WordPress, Digg and niche blogs; whereas OneRiot seems to pull most of its content from Twitter.

Collecta aggregates multiple sources and displays them based on recentness. There is the option to filter results based on the sources of data you want to include in the results.

Though Collecta does a good job at pulling information from multiple sources, its user interface makes it somewhat difficult to see the information it’s pulling from Twitter and other social media sites. The first suggested article on the homepage is usually an article related to a popular topic, but the next two subheadlines are the newsfeeds for the various social media sites discussing the topic.

The best way to use Collecta for online marketing would be to scan a variety of social media sites updated with the latest information on your business and industry within seconds. Collecta maintains a newsfeed that is updated by the second with several personal and professional social media accounts listed. This is a great way for marketers to research how the public is responding to a topic in real time.

#3: 48ers

48ers focuses more on the collective reactions of individuals to news events in real time. The site is great if you’re searching for keywords and want to see what people are discussing about a certain topic. For example, during the eggs recall you could enter a search for “eggs” and see the discussion on all social media sites about eggs.

The tradeoff here is that if you aren’t aware of a particular topic, you don’t know to search for it to explore it further. Twitter and Google have both overcome this problem by adding trending results and searches. The main page of 48ers is set up almost like Google where you type in one word and review the results. The difference is that 48ers results are social media results, not news articles or irrelevant articles about eggs from last year.

This is a great source for viewing the most up-to-date information on a particular topic, but it isn’t great if you don’t know what everyone is already talking about. OneRiot and Collecta are superior to 48ers in this respect because they offer the functionality of 48ers while also offering suggested hot topics.

48ers has a more streamlined interface than either Collecta or OneRiot, but it also integrates multiple data sources and offers the ability to filter results based on source.

The best way to use this site for online marketing is to analyze a larger number of social media results on a particular topic and discover brand mentions or industry discussions. Results are being pulled by the second and you have a lot more content to work with compared to the suggested social media results from OneRiot and Collecta.

The Final Word

All three profiled real-time search engines offer benefits, and it’s not clear who will plug the holes in their service first and offer the most compelling real-time search offering.

These independent companies are also competing with Google, Facebook, Twitter and other larger companies that are offering some version of real-time search and actively seeking to improve them.

Have you used real-time search engines? Do you think they hold promise? Let me know your thoughts in the box below.

The growth and usage of Twitter is not surprising. Compete.com estimates approximately 21 million unique monthly visitors, and a quick search on Twitter yields a variety of conversations from music, sports, politics, events and products.

For business however, there’s an art to using Twitter, and the most successful at it follow an unwritten set of rules. The following are 5 important tips to follow on Twitter; all lessons that I have learned while working for companies like HP, Yahoo! and Intel.

#1: Do Some Research

Research is fundamental. I suggest that marketers or small business owners spend a few weeks understanding what types of conversations are happening on Twitter and then formulate a communications plan before actually engaging. This will help drive consistency in the messages shared on Twitter.

#2: Determine Your Goals

Not all businesses use Twitter the same way. Some, like @ComcastCares, use Twitter merely for customer support. Dell uses Twitter to sell products or share company-related information. Often, I see smaller, more local businesses use it to build relationships with their constituencies to drive customer loyalty programs.

Whatever your goals are, it’s important to think about what you want to achieve with Twitter before spending your valuable time and resources on it.

#3: Specify Your Twitter Profile

There are many options you can use when creating a Twitter profile. You can create a company-branded account, a personal account or a hybrid account.

Branded account:

A branded account is simply where your Twitter name corresponds with the name of your company, and usually the avatar is your company logo.

Personal account:

A personal account is a little more human and unites your own personal brand with that of the company you work for or own.

Hybrid account:

A hybrid account usually takes different elements from both the branded and personal accounts.

Every business is different, so whichever option you choose, there has to be a level of balance. Branded profiles are great for certain content—for example, industry news, contests, investor relations, etc. Personal profiles are more beneficial if your organization wants to leverage the employee’s personal micro-community or wants to have a more human presence.

When I worked for Intel, I used two profiles to build community: my personal Twitter profile and one I created for Intel. I followed an 80/20 rule that seemed to work perfectly for the community that I engaged with.  On my personal account, 80% of what I shared was conversational (i.e., asking/answering questions, sharing industry-related news, etc.) and 20% was Intel-specific content. The branded account was the opposite—80% of the content shared was Intel-specific and 20% was personal.  This worked very well and click-through rates on links I shared were well above industry average.

#4: Build Social Equity

To be successful on Twitter, you have to build trust and credibility with your community. The end result is an increase in your social equity. That doesn’t always translate to the number of followers, tweets, or retweets you may have either. Rather, it’s more about developing a reputation as a trusted source of information or being seen as an expert in a particular subject.

You won’t succeed in building your equity by pushing out one way marketing messages about your business. Instead ask questions, be personal, and engage people naturally within the community. Otherwise, customers won’t listen to what you have to say and your equity may even decrease.

Buying Twitter followers is not recommended either. There are a lot of companies that will promise you thousands of followers for a very low price. The problem is that many of the followers will never read your content, click through to your links and they’re probably just bots spitting out a multitude of Bit.ly links. Besides, if it becomes public that you did purchase followers, you will be called out by the community and your reputation may be damaged.

It’s not worth buying followers just to increase your “perceived” equity and influence because that’s all it will be, perceived.

#5: Track, Measure and Iterate

Any small- or medium-sized business should invest in a paid tracking service like Radian6 or ScoutLabs to better track Twitter conversations, identify trends, measure sentiment and get a quantifiable snapshot of what’s going on in the social web.

If you want to measure sales, you can simply use a tracking code or coupon code specific for Twitter that will help measure conversions. If you want to measure how much money Twitter has saved your company, you can track how many issues you resolved, leads you gathered, and dollars you saved through Twitter engagement versus traditional channels. If your goal is to handle customer support issues via Twitter, it’s wise to check if there are any decreases in the call volume to your customer support center.

The great thing about using Twitter for your business is that it’s very easy to iterate your metrics and communications plan on the fly. It’s important, however, to remember that your plan should always map back to your goals and objectives so you don’t lose focus.

What Twitter tips would you add? Are you tracking your Twitter activity?  Got a question?  Please comment in the box below.

And if you work for a business or own one, it’s likely that social media marketing is on your radar.  More and more marketing dollars are beginning to shift toward social media marketing and this trend only continues to climb.

Here are 5 studies that show how Facebook is undoubtedly a leading online social contender and a key tool that is continually changing the landscape of online engagement and fan loyalty.

#1: Average American Spent 7 hours on Facebook in January

According to recent findings by Nielson Company, Facebook has officially become a favorite pastime for many (but we’ve known that for a while now!).  However, the findings are pretty astounding when you really break it down:

The average time users spend on Facebook is 7 hours per month (a 10% increase).  To put that into perspective, Yahoo! is in second place, but with only 2 hours 28 minutes per month. The fact that people are spending more than 4 hours extra on Facebook compared to leading sites like Yahoo! and Google is information marketers should note when creating their social media campaigns.

This chart shows the breakdown of user time spent on the major sites:

#2: 44% of Social Sharing on the Web Is Driven by Facebook

With the surge of social networking over the past year, we have seen social traffic begin to rival search traffic—and the major players, including Google, are paying close attention to this trend.

TechCrunch recently looked into the services on the web that drive the most sharing and reached out to Gigya for some stats.   What’s Gigya?  Gigya is a company that powers sharing widgets on more than 5,000 content sites, including major players like ABC.com and Reuters. As TechCrunch explains, “Consumers can click a share button on these sites and send an article link, photo, or video via a menu of different services including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Yahoo Mail, Gmail, and AOL. Over the past 30 days, people have shared almost a million items over the Gigya network.”

Based on Gigya’s data, here’s the distribution of shared items on the web:

• Facebook: 44%
• Twitter: 29%
• Yahoo: 18%
• MySpace: 9%

This pie chart, courtesy of TechCrunch, shows the breakdown of social sharing on 4 major sites:

In addition, some other interesting stats from Gigya include:

For share of authentication via news sites, Facebook took 31% while Google was close behind with 30% and Yahoo at 25%.

With entertainment sites, Facebook was the major leader with 52% (Google was second with 17%, Yahoo with 15% and Twitter at 11%).

As we have seen with the popularity of social sites, people like to share links with multiple people at one time, versus just one-on-one via email. Because real results are strongly tied to the amount of online traffic you’re able to generate, it’s important to break down the sources of this traffic when considering where to spend your time and marketing dollars.  These stats shed light on where the action is really happening.

#3: Facebook Yanks Number 2 Spot From Yahoo

According to a Compete.com report, there has been a changing of the guard in the online world. Facebook has surpassed Yahoo, now taking its place as the number-two most popular site in the U.S.  Facebook drew nearly 134 million unique visitors in January 2010. According to the site, “It’s been two full years since we’ve seen a shakeup at the top—In February 2008, Google overtook Yahoo as number one and never looked back. Is Facebook’s next conquest the Google traffic throne?”

Here’s a great chart that shows Facebook’s climb to the coveted #2 spot:

But as we all know, the real dollars are in the engagement—and Compete.com says it best: “Facebook is second to none.” In January, 11.6% of all time spent online was spent on Facebook (compared to 4.25% for Yahoo and 4.1% for Google).  Facebook is in it to win, to say the least!

#4: “Faking It” on Facebook Is Rarer Than Previously Imagined

The findings from a recent research study conducted by the journal Psychological Science, show that instead of “faking it” online, people are much more likely to reveal their true selves online and not the idealized image of who they want to be.

A largely held assumption (supported by analysis) suggests online profiles are less than truthful when looking at true personalities of the users, and the researchers in this study set out to test that hypothesis. “There has been no research on the most fundamental question about OSN (online social networking sites) profiles,” notes the report. “Do they convey accurate impressions of profile owners?”

The conclusion of the report was very surprising to most. The report states, “These results suggest that people are not using their OSN profiles to promote an idealized virtual identity. Instead, OSNs might be an efficient medium for expressing and communicating real personality, which may help explain their popularity.”

The study focused on both MySpace and Facebook; however, the popular site Read Write Web stated that the “real personality” results were more likely to been seen on Facebook than other social sites. They pointed out that because it only allows the use of your legal name and due to its long-standing privacy controls, Facebook “provided its users with a sense of safety, security and comfort—they could be themselves—their real selves, flaws and all, without the world watching.”

#5: Facebook Boosts Sales and Customer Loyalty

The Harvard Business Review recently featured a new study from Utpal Dholakia and Emily Durham of Rice University.  For their study, they asked the question, “How much do businesses really influence consumers when they launch pages on the site to attract ‘fans’ and pepper them with messages and offers?”

To gauge the effectiveness of Facebook fan pages, the study used one company’s page to measure the effect on customer behavior. For the experiment, the researchers partnered with Dessert Gallery (DG), a popular Houston-based bakery and café chain. They first emailed over 13,000 customers from their mailing list to gather store evaluations and information on shopping behavior. Then they launched the fan page and invited the mailing list to the page.  Over the course of three months, the company “updated its page several times a week with pictures of goodies, news about contests and promotions, links to favorable reviews, and introductions to DG employees.”

Three months after that, they resurveyed the fans and here’s the overall result: Facebook changed customer behavior for the better.

Those who had replied to both surveys and had become fans stood out as their best customers. Here’s the breakdown of the findings of their new fans:

• Store visits per month increased after people became fans.
• The new fans generated more positive word of mouth than nonfans.
• They went to DG 20% more often than nonfans.
• Fans gave the store the highest share of their overall dining-out dollars.
• They were the most likely to recommend DG to friends and had the highest average Net Promoter Score—75, compared with 53 for Facebook users who were not fans and 66 for customers not on Facebook.
• DG fans also reported significantly greater emotional attachment to DG—3.4 on a 4-point scale, compared with 3.0 for other customers.
• Fans were the most likely to say they chose DG over other establishments whenever possible.

“We must be cautious in interpreting the study’s results,” Dholakia said. “The fact that only about 5% of the firm’s 13,000 customers became Facebook fans within three months indicates that Facebook fan pages may work best as niche marketing programs targeted to customers who regularly use Facebook. Social media marketing must be employed judiciously with other types of marketing programs.”

But overall, Dholakia stated that the results indicate that Facebook fan pages offer an effective and low-cost way of social media marketing.

Your insight and opinion matter!  What is your opinion of the “power of Facebook”? Do you agree or are you not seeing the same success rates as these studies suggest?  Do you favor another social media tool over Facebook?  I want to hear your insight, so be sure to share here!

#1: Social Media Engagement Big Challenge for Many Businesses (Deloitte)

Survey results from a recent Deloitte study (2009 Tribalization of Business Study), point to some key challenges that organizations are facing as they move toward integrating online communities into their social media strategy.

Here are the top three areas respondents identified as obstacles:

• Keeping visitors engaged:  30%
• Getting people to join:  24%
• Encouraging return visits to the online community:  21%

In addition, the majority of respondents agreed that the following are key business outcomes for their online communities:

• Increase word-of-mouth:  38%
• Increase customer loyalty:  34%
• Increase brand awareness:  30%

#2: Social Media Used as a Discovery Tool by 18% of Online Population (Nielson)

With the recent integration of Twitter and Facebook with Microsoft’s Bing, there is no doubt that social media has become a top player in the world of search.  A recent study by Nielson Company examined the relationship between social media and user search options.  The report compared social sites to search engines and portals like Yahoo! Of those surveyed, 18% reported social media sites as core to finding new information.

Jon Gibs, VP Media Analytics, reports, “While still a smaller percentage than those who use search engines or portals like Yahoo! or MSN, it is a significant figure. And as social media usage continues to increase I can only expect this figure to grow.”

It is speculated that the amount of information on the web, especially on social sites, contributes to the increase in content discovery on these sites.  The report goes into much more detail and is worth a read.

#3: Businesses Slow to Incorporate Social Media Into Practice

Although numerous recent reports show how businesses plan to incorporate social media into their 2010 marketing mix, a recent study by BIA/Kelsey reports that many small- to medium-sized businesses are slow to incorporate the strategies into their plans today.

When asked about their current social media experiences, results showed many businesses are slow to adopt social media:

• Have used Twitter to market in the last 12 months:  9%
• Have used social sites in the past 12 months:  23%
• Have incorporated video into their website: 16%

In addition, according to the survey results, adoption of social media by small- and medium-sized business is more prevalent among younger businesses:

• Businesses 3 years or younger: 16% report using Twitter
• Businesses 11+ years:  2% report using Twitter

What are your thoughts? What effect, if any, do the constant changes and shifts in social media have on your overall marketing strategy?