If your customers can’t find what they want on the first page of results, very few of them will go to the second page.

More people have reached the top of Mount Everest than have been to the 5,000th search result. It’s brutal out there. Up on Everest they suffer from oxygen deprivation, but on the Web its attention deficit. It’s bad, really bad.

“Search is now normal behavior. What do we do about that?” is the to-the-point title of an excellent study of search behavior on the UK Open University website. Among the many practical recommendations it gives is to focus attention on the first page of search results for your customers’ most important search words most important search words.

The Open University study reminded me of some guidelines I had developed for analyzing this critical first page of search results. These guidelines apply equally well to an intranet or public website. As an example, let’s say “training” is a popular search word.

1. For starters, is the correct result for training within the first three search results? If not, you’ve got a problem. If the correct result is not in the first page of search results, you’re in big trouble.
2. Are the first 10 search results generally relevant to the search for training? Asides from the correct page, are the rest of the results logically-related to training.
3. Are the results very minor pages and/or pages that are unlikely to be of any use to the vast majority of customers? Then consider removing these results from the search indexing process.
4. Where appropriate, is there a good variety of search results, rather than most of them linking to the same basic place?
5. Are there duplicate search results? If so, you need to get rid of them. Remember, not every search result that looks like a duplicate is always a duplicate. Sometimes it’s because of duplicate metadata, while the actual pages may be different. This is one reason why it’s important to click on each search result that you’re testing.
6. Does the text of the result contain the words being searched for? People are confused by search results that do not contain the words they searched for. So, if “training” was searched for then the search result should contain the word “training”, or at the very least a relevant synonym.
7. Is the search result somehow restricted? Does it require a log-in of some sort? In such situations, if the person searching has not been logged-in-or perhaps is not authorized to see this page-they should not see links that will lead them to an access restricted or other error-type messages. Instead, send them to a page that is available and explains various access restrictions and/or has a log-in option.

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Brand monitoring has become an essential task for any individual or corporation. Years ago, when people talked about our brands, it was behind our backs and we almost never found out about it. Today, most of these dialogues are right in front of our own eyes and the number of locations where our brands may be cited is astronomical!

We must remember that conversations are being held on the web with or without our consent. That means we can choose whether to be observers, participants or outcasts. Before you select observer or outcast, remember that these conversations can have a negative impact on your brand. Also, when conversations start on the web, like a forest fire, they travel very fast and wreak havoc along the way; what might start out as a mere tweet, may turn into a blog post and then make national news.

Here’s a basic reputation management system that I’ve been using, as well as a list of the top 10 free tools you can start using today.

How to Begin
Depending on how popular and well-known your brand is, there may be few or many people talking about it. If you’re looking to start a blog, position yourself as an expert or start networking actively in your desired topic area, then listening is an important research routine. As you become more well-known, more conversations will be held around your brand name, so you’ll spend more time listening and possibly responding to blog posts, tweets, etc. If you’re a large and popular company, you may need to hire someone to manage these monitoring tools daily.

The first thing you need to do is acquire a feed reader. I personally use Google reader because it’s easy to sort feeds, bookmark/favorite them and share (give value) them with your network.

I would also register for a Delicious account, which can help you sort and organize blogs that mention your brand. Think of Delicious as your own research and development plant. Once you’ve set up these two accounts, the following tools will help you locate articles that mention your brand, feed them right into your central hub (Google reader) and allow you to manage them (Delicious).

1. Google
Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results based on your choice of query or topic. You can subscribe to each alert through email and RSS. The alerts track blog posts, news articles, videos and even groups. Set a “comprehensive alert,” which will notify you of stories, as they happen, for your name, your topic, and even your company. Yahoo! Pipes is also a good tool for aggregating and combining feeds into one central repository.

2. Blog Posts

If you have a blog, then you have to be on Technorati, which is the largest blog search engine in the world. They say that if you don’t claim your blog in Technorati, then you don’t own it! When you register with it, Technorati tracks “blog reactions,” or blogs that link to yours. Search for your brand on Technorati, and subscribe to RSS alerts so that when someone blogs about you, you find out.

3. Blog Comments
Backtype is a tool for monitoring blog comments. If people commented on various blog posts, citing your name, you never used to have a way of tracking it, until now. Backtype is a service that lets you find, follow, and share comments from across the web. Whenever you write a comment with a link to your Web site, Backtype attributes it to you.

Use it to remind yourself where you commented, discover influencers who are commenting on blogs that you should be reading, and continue conversations that you started previously. You can even subscribe to these comments using RSS. coComment is another tool that will help you manage your comments across the web.

4. Social Comments
Yacktrack lets you search for comments on your content from various sources, such as Blogger, Digg, FriendFeed, Stumbleupon, and WordPress blogs. For instance, if you comment on a blog, you can locate other people who are commenting on that same blog post and rejoin the conversation.

My favorite feature of this tool is the “Chatter” tab, which allows you to perform keyword searches on social media sites and then notifies you of instances of your brand name. Yacktrack’s search page results also give you an RSS feed for the search term. You can also use Commentful and co.mments to track your social comments on the web.

5. Discussion Boards
Along with blogs and traditional news stories, discussion boards are another channel where people can gather in a community and talk about you. Most people disregard discussion boards until they see other sites commenting on information viewed on them. Use boardtracker.com to get instant alerts from threads citing your name.

Boardreader and Big Boards are other tools that work similar to this one

6. Twitter

Twitter messages (tweets) move at the speed of light, and if you don’t catch them they will spread like a virus. Using Twitter search, you can locate any instances of your name and decide whether you want to tweet back or ignore them. It really depends on the context and meaning of the tweet.

Conduct a search for your name, your company’s name, or various topics you’re interested in and then subscribe via RSS. Twilert and TweetBeep are additional tools you can use to receive email alerts.

7. FriendFeed
FriendFeed is a social aggregator. You have the ability to take all of your social accounts, such as YouTube, Delicious, Twitter, blog, and Flickr,
and pull them together into a single (Friend) feed. You can conduct searches on your brand throughout all social networks at once using this search engine.

Aside from learning about the latest video or tweet related to your topic, you can analyze comments that people make under them. FriendFeed users tend to favorite and comment on what you share and tracking it will become more important as this service grows in population. You can also receive alerts straight to your desktop with Alert Thingy.

8. Social Search

Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services. It allows you to track mentions of your brand across all of these areas.

The results are aggregated from the top social media sources, such as Flickr, YouTube, Digg, Delicious, Twitter and more. Like the other services, you can subscribe to your results by RSS or email. Other social search engines include Serph and Keotag.

9. Interactive Search
While all the other tools listed are quite rudimentary, this one is rather complex and intelligent. Instead of being hit with hundreds or even a thousand results for your brand name, Filtrbox only delivers the most relevant, credible mentions of things you need to track. Its “FiltrRank” technology scores content based on three dimensions: contextual relevance, popularity and feedback. You can look back to previous searches 15 days out for free as well.

10. Your Network

A lot of people overlook a strong network when it comes to monitoring their brands. If you have a robust network, especially people in your industry who observe the same keywords as you, then you will receive important updates without even asking for them.

I get updates for just about everything now, including Facebook messages stating that I misspelled a word in my blog post and email messages pointing to an article I was referenced in. If you concentrate on building relationships, you won’t miss a beat, even if you want to!

What to Do Next
After you’ve selected which tools you want to use in your brand reputation management system and you’ve set the proper RSS or email alerts for your name, company and/or topic, now it’s time to set a schedule for when you want to check your status.

Will you do it once a day, twice a day or once a week? When you’re first starting out, once a day or week will work for you, but I highly encourage those who participate regularly to pay more attention to their online brands. Just Googling your name won’t be enough. You need to be a bit more paranoid in the digital age. in order to prevent fires from spreading, actually network with people who are talking about topics of interest or thank people who have complimented you.

Think about the brand reputation you want to project to the world. Wouldn’t you like it to be positive!?

If you could search your friends’ thoughts, interests, and activities, would that be a better search experience? In many cases, it would be. Searching for restaurants, books, or movies, would turn up recommendations from people you actually know. If you are researching a trip to Florence, Italy, you might discover ten friends who have been there already, and could ask for advice on what to do. These scenarios have been the dream of social search for a few years, with both startups and search engines taking a stab at it. But so far it’s been a failed dream.

Yahoo’s experiment with social search, Yahoo 360 MyWeb, never took off. is being shut down. It was a rudimentary social search in that relevant bookmarks from friends showed up as search results. And search has never been Facebook’s strong suit. It handed search over to Microsoft, but the search experience on the site is poor. It is difficult to search much deeper than your friends’ names. You need to go to an advanced profile search page to filter through their interests, activities, or other profile categories, for instance. And forget about searching your news feed.

Yet social search done right could become very valuable for Facebook. And it would be even more valuable for Google. (They already know how to make money from search). It is also an opportunity for Microsoft Live Search, but they are not really inspiring much confidence so far. So let’s set aside for a moment the unlikelihood of any Google-Facebook deal or partnership (given Microsoft’s investment in Facebook), and let’s imagine how the two could help each other.

Even if Facebook/Microsoft figures out social search, it is more useful on Google, which is where most of us do our searching. To get a glimpse at what this might look like, you can try Sidestripe, which is both an add-on widget for Google search and a Facebook app. Sidestripe is like Glue for search (Glue is a browser add-on that shows you whether anyone in your social networks has expressed interest in the book, movie, restaurant, product, or other things mentioned on whatever page you happen to be browsing). Similarly, sidestripe indexes all your friends on Facebook and parts of their profiles (where they work, their interests, etc). When you do a search on Google, a box with Sidestripe results appears after the third natural result, giving you a sense of whether any of your friends might be experts on the topic. For instance, when I do a search for “Google” it turns up Facebook friends who work at Google or are somehow affiliated with Google, and looks like this:

A search for “biking” turns up friends who are interested in biking. You can also add your own knowledge to any search result, and it will appear as a subsequent result (although it does not let you add links, which I consider a major bug). Or if you still can’t find what you are looking for from either Google or Sidestripe, you can ask all of your friends a question from inside the Sidestripe box on Google about the topic you are trying to learn about and that question shows up in all of your friends’ feeds. Any answers then become indexed and searchable.

Sidestripe is barely out of alpha and still frustrating to use because more often than not the Sidestripe box remains empty. When there are results, they are interesting. It is hit or miss. As more people use Sidestripe, this should improve. But I think a big part of the problem is that it does not fully index my social graph, and certainly does not return results from my News feed.

Yet making Facebook’s News feed searchable (on Google) would go a long way towards realizing the dream of social search. The Facebook feed already aggregates what my friends are doing not just on Facebook but all across the Web (Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Digg, etc.). It’s like Friendfeed in this respect, but with many more users.

The trick to making all of this seemingly random data useful in search is to come up with a social algorithm that can rank it all accordingly. For instance, when I search for Florence, Italy, friends who have lived in Florence, Italy should show up, but so should friends who have recently taken pictures there or Tweeted about Florence, and maybe in that order. This kind of ranking is a hard problem to solve, and it is what Google is good at.

Imagine instead of Sidestripe, the option to add Facebook Connect to Google search, which would then turn on social search in results (these should only appear when there actually are social results to show). They could keep the Q&A capability in there as well. It would add an entirely new dimension to search.

Of course, Google has its own Friend Connect program, and wants to monetize it with Friendsense. But just as search is not Facebook’s strong suit, social networking isn’t Google’s. All my contacts are on Facebook. They are the ones I want to search. And everything I’ve described above is a big opportunity for Microsoft, if they can pull it off.

But the best results, IMHO, would come form a combination of Facebook and Google.

By Brian Solis

As online conversations continue to gain in prominence and relevance to any customer and market-focused business, it becomes critically important for marketing and service professionals to listen. It’s the listening that serves as the foundation for identifying, guiding, and establishing meaningful engagement.

Twitter is one of the more active and influential communities that can effectively recruit affiliates, incite action, and spark trends. Until now, the only way to measure conversations or keywords by authority in Twitter was either manually or through Technorati – assuming that the majority of people discussing any given topic had already claimed their Twitter. I suspect most haven’t done this nor realize that this is even an option with associated benefits in doing so.

Enter Twitority.

Twitority is a new service that that facilitates the search and sorting of keywords in Twitter by authority, or in less controversial terms, popularity. At the moment, authority is measured by followers, but perhaps, Twitority will eventually create an algorithm similar to Twinfluence in order to more accurately measure influence.

In the marketing and service worlds however, popularity is still relevant. As is, Twitority is a simple, yet helpful service that will help brand managers, community managers, and communications and customer service professionals tier research and response strategies and programs. It’s also helpful to identify and measure potential opportunities and new trends based on the weighted discussions surrounding relevant topics.

For more on services available for Twitter, please read, “Twitter Tools for Communications and Community Professionals.”

by Michael Arrington on December 18, 2008

BackType, a Y Combinator startup that launched in August, is a sort of “Twitter for comments” that aggregates comments from millions of blogs into a single, searchable, parsable stream.

Today they launched a new feature called Alerts that will let users track keywords included in comments on tracked blogs – a sort of Google Alerts for blog comments.

This will be useful to anyone who likes to track what’s being said about them, their companies or their brands online. Google Alerts only show keywords that are in the main text of articles or stories, and sometimes only catches keywords when they are included in titles of stories. BackType gives users another level of information.

For now alerts can be tracked on the site’s dashboard or via email delivered daily, weekly or whenever a new one pops up.

This should give those of you anxiously awaiting the return of Twitter Track, which does the same thing for Twitter messages, something to play with in the meantime.

They also launched a new feature today called Subscriptions, which allow users to track comments on any blog post. Many blogs already have a built in feature that emails readers when a new comment is left on a post to let them keep up with the discussion. BackType now allows people to duplicate the feature for blogs that don’t have it.

Video search on YouTube accounts for a quarter of all Google search queries in the U.S., according to the latest search engine numbers from comScore. Its monthly qSearch report, which was released on Thursday night, breaks out the number of searches conducted on YouTube. If it were a standalone site, YouTube would be the second largest search engine after Google. More searches are done through YouTube than through Yahoo, which has been the case for the past few months.

Christa Quarles, an analyst at Thomas Weisel Partners, writes in a report:

YouTube continues to be a standout contributor for Google generating 2.73bn searches in the U.S., up 8.5% from 2.52bn last month and up 114% from 1.28bn in November 2007. YouTube currently represents 25.4% of U.S. Google site searches compared with 17.4% in November 2007 and is larger than all of Yahoo based on total U.S. queries in November.

The comScore numbers show healthy growth in core search activity as well (stripping out video search, map search, etc), especially for Google. Plain-vanilla search for Google grew 32.3 percent annually, compared to a 29.6 percent growth rate in October. Perhaps all of that holiday bargain hunting is helping.

Google’s core search market share (which does not include YouTube) edged up 0.4 percent from October to 63.5 percent (and up 5.9 percent year-over-year).

Yahoo’s market share of core search queries was 20.4 percent (down 0.1 percent from October, and down 2 percent year-over-year) and Microsoft’s was 8.3 percent (down 0.2 percent month-over-month, and down 1.5 percent year-over-year). See the tables below.

Searching for things through a service that scours multiple engines is one thing. Searching for things through a service that scours certain aspects of the news and social discussion space is another. This is what a new invention called Social Mention allows you to accomplish.

Employing Yahoo’s increasingly noteworthy BOSS search platform, Social Mention, an Ottawa, Canada operation, distinguishes its results by their variety of source. If you’re looking for items to do with, say, today’s official debut of the T-Mobile G1 device, you can specify that the engine find blog posts, microblog posts, bookmarks, comments, events, images, links from social news websites, or videos.

Adding extra flavor to the mix is an asset labeled “Hot Conversations.” Everything deemed of the moment is listed, though these are not specific a category. If you search for the abovementioned handheld, and transition from left to right through the available tabs, the picks in the right-hand column stay largely the same.

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eptember 17, 2008 – 12:13 pm PDT – by Paul Glazowski Add a Comment