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There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who divide the world into two sets of people, and those who see us as one big blob of humanity…
OK, more seriously, while presenting Hootsuite and Tweetdeck, at the webinar on Thursday night (it was Friday in Sri Lanka) it struck me that these two interfaces, while similar in terms of dashboards, appeal to two types. After all, Hootsuite is a web-based application – no downloads necessary. There are some who are not very comfortable with apps that don’t reside on their computer. Tweetdeck on the other hand, is a slick application that resides on your desktop (now also for the iPad and iPhone. Both are great search engines in their own right.
In my experience Tweetdeck gives you a lot more search results.
Tweetdeck Advantage: Try this: Look for “Floods in Pakistan” on Tweetdeck. The Search within Tweetdeck gives you a real-time feed of tweets. BUT you could get a broader, deeper set of results by going to Tweetdeck.com, and searching there. The same phrase gives you this. It is a lists of Lists, that also give you a snapshot of the number of followers of that list and the number of tweets a day by people on that list.
Hootsuite gives you a lot more filtration.
Hootsuite Advantage: To conduct the same search on Hootsuite you could either do a quick search using he magnifying glass icon and it brings up a floating column with results, or you could create a permanent feed. But what I like about Hootsuite is that you can then sort through those results using the pull down tab and selecting ‘filter.’ This is very useful when searching for a keyword, organization name or hashtag within the results.
So what’s your dashboard preference? Does it say something about your work style? How does it simplify your search?
On last Friday’s webinar I asked Dave Barnhart to co-present with me on the final in this 6-part series on Passport To Digital Citizenship. Dave is a social media coach who runs a successful business practice around blogging strategy, micro-blogging and web content. Steve England was also on hand with his mobile marketing insight on how all this plays out as we take our tools and our content into a wireless world.
In this session I focused on filters and deep drilling!
We had previously taught attendees how to create content, leverage the channels, connect and interact with audiences. So in this final seminar, I asked them to consider what it might be to be on the other side of the equation -as recipients. Too Much Information (TMI) is clogging up the arteries, and customers, readers, listeners and viewers may be filtering us out. What do social media filters look like? How do they provide us with deeper insight?
We’re talked about Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, Bloglines and much more! It was a great rounding off of what we do a both communicators and recipients!
I’ve been waiting for Caffeine for a long time, since I heard it being mentioned at SMAZ last year. So this week we get a taste of what a caffeinated search looks like.
It’s Caffeine, and it’s finally a way to see real-time information (not archived results).
If you’re concerned about page ranking, keywords, meta-tags and most importantly rich content, it’s worth trying to understand how the complex Google search algorithm works. Not that even the so-called experts know, because there is the secret-sauce factor that Google will not disclose.
However, this video from Google is as far as they will go. serving as a refresher course in search:
But is it that all?
Now while I find Caffeine a terrific improvement, I don’t only rely on (or recommend) Google to deep dive for all information. It’s easy assume that ‘everything’ is out there online, having been spidered and indexed online, when the fact is there are stacks of information you may never see or know exists.
Unless you make a trip to a library! Or visit bookstores, read journal abstracts –the ones that have not gone digital yet — or scale the walled gardens of subscription-only sites.
So I have two questions to the search experts:
- Do real-time search results change how archived content shows up? All those white papers, videos, sample book chapters, podcasts etc. Do they get buried and pushed down away from the main results page?
- Is Caffeine –the real-time engine — trying to be Bing –the relevance engine? Or is it the other way around?
I took a screen shot of similar searches for the keywords “Gulf of Mexico” on Google and Bing today. Big differences!
Take this one from the Associated Press. A story about a reporter who dived into the oily waters in the Gulf. It’s up there on Bing, but not on Google.
The story is probably a good metaphor of how murky it is when you dive into search as well. “I open my eyes and realize my mask is already smeared,” the unnamed reporter says.
“If we get to that point, the business of e-commerce and m-commerce may get a huge jolt”
Ian Schafer in Advertising Age about the dawn of Facebook currency
“Writing in the voice of another.”
Mike Klein, responding to Steve Crescenzo‘s post at IABC Exchange, on the three kinds of writing communicators need to know.
“Front-load your subject lines.”
Doron Kritetz, on the four subject lines that grab readers
“We know some people are suffering because of this blockade, but we have to obey the court order in letter and spirit”
Najibullah Malik, secretary of Pakistan’s ministry of information technology, on why Facebook was banned this week in the country.
“I never started a Facebook page. I apologize to people of Muslim faith and ask that this ‘day’ be called off.”
Seattle cartoonist Molly Norris, who called for the ‘day’ to draw a cartoon of the prophet.
“If an economic boycott is truly what you desire, I will be happy to encourage Arizona utilities to renegotiate your power agreements so Los Angeles no longer receives any power from Arizona-based generation”.
Gary Pierce, Arizona’s Corporation Commissioner in an empty threat to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. The spat was over several states and counties calling for a boycott of Arizona over its new immigration law. The law has promoted many cartoons and punch lines.
“A severe breach of rules by staff”.
Message by British telecom company, Vodafone, apologizing for an offensive message posted to its Twitter account
“The BBC is the arm of MI-6 … We will settle accounts with them when the time comes.”
Gen. Ismail Ahmadi Moghaddam, Iran’s chief of police
“the security tracking software has been completely disabled”
Christopher McGinley, Superintendent of the Lower Merion School District in Phiadelphia. One high school was accused of secretly turning on the web-cams of laptops loaned to students to take home.
“Twitter Toppled Toyota!”
Devang Murthy, in Topnews.in
“Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007 … Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day—that’s an average of 600 tweets per second”
Twitter blog, charting the popularity of micro-blogging that created a 1,400% growth spurt last year.
“That Wacky Mahathir!”
Headline of a post by the Hugh Downs School of Communications at ASU, on the statement by Mahathir Mohamed, former PM of Mayalsia (who said earlier this year of the US that “If they can make Avatar, they can make anything.”)
Beyond the visual effect of Bing –especially if you’ve been a Google user out of habit–there’s a lot we could learn from how the search engine treats relevance.
Take for instance its hot-linking parts of this iconic symbol of the Inuits– the inukshuk. It is on one level a way of creating a dynamic home page for searchers surrounded by Olympic-related information.
Embedding links is just a start. But like the inukshuk itself, that I quickly learned is more than a marker, it could sometimes create a ‘window’ to guide someone, and reveal something about the terrain –to suggest a good hunting or fishing area.
So the next time you are tasked with create content, think of it more than a pile of sentences. Stories are more than pyramids, inverted or not. They are windows to deeper knowledge. Like a good search engine, they surround a seeker with context, history and information that could be acted on.
“Right, I think I’ve got it. It’s a mixture of Facebook’s more intimate networking and Twitter’s broadcast style.”
Rory Cellan-Jones reviewing Buzz, the social application from Google
“It is not the first time Google has tried to launch a social network.”
BBC.co.uk on Google taking on Facebook and Twitter
“Ashton Kutcher, who is famous for being married to Demi Moore, who is famous for having been married to Bruce Willis, is its high priest. This is the avatar of our new global culture. Wow.”
Michael Dentandt, at Trentonian
“I’m not tied to the term “citizen journalism … it’s going through an evolution. We’re just adding another voice.
Amra Tareen, CEO of Allvoices.com a citizen journalism who says that that in this period of displacement in journalism, the community judges the value of content.
“The whole country watches the Super Bowl, the whole country knows the score, and we get it wrong? Preposterous. Unbelievable. Embarrassing.”
Dennis Finley, Editor of a Virginia newspaper, the Pilot, on accidentally publishing a story that had probably been a placeholder for a possible win by the Colts over the Saints.
“Your paper makes a HUGE error and I am supposed to pay you $79 for a corrected framable(yes I am a Saintas fan)version!”
Reader responding to the Editor who also wrote that the the ‘error’ in question, in print, could be ordered from the web site for those who buy sports fronts suitable for framing! The reader continued: “Do the accountable thing and make the reprint available for free..I know when pigs fly right. WHO DAT!”
“Now, we all know that whether someone liked or disliked a spot is a bad proxy for effectiveness.”
Michael Learmonth, in AdAge, commenting on the high popularity of Google ad than ran during the Super Bowl –popular among among online audiences, that is . He also noted that “online popularity can start to wag the dog offline.”
“What people need to understand is that Forrester is an intellectual property company, and the opinions of our analysts are our product. Blogging is an extension of the other work we do — doing research, writing reports, working with clients, and giving speeches, for example.”
Josh Bernoff, on Forrester’s new blogging policy.
“Aren’t we all already swimming under copious amounts of status updates and shared media coming from services like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Foursquare, etc.? Do we need another social filtering system?”
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