Pete Dudchenko

On Friday, I had a day off from work. I happened to have a camera with me and below are my photos:

• I think hashtags have gotten out of control #HashTagsAreOutOfControl #
• Captiva Island, Florida [pic] http://ff.im/-2J5UP #
• Leaving Florida [pic] http://ff.im/-2K7tH #
• Its Saturday and I’m at the airport flying home from a biz trip. I think I’ve earned this. http://twitpic.com/4uuyb #
• Pacific Coast Grill [pic] http://ff.im/-2M5a0 #
• Never made it out on the waves this weekend. Today would have been nice but maybe next weekend. #
• Captive Island [pic] http://ff.im/-2Mojc #
• Should you really avoid ordering fish on Mondays? http://is.gd/z3mm #
• That looks awesome! RT @SDNewsNetwork Adventure zip line opens at Wild Animal Park: http://adjix.com/cutm on SDNN. Fly like a Condor!!! #
• Just had a chance to play with the 2nd gen. Kindle for the first time. I don’t read books much but I’m still trying to justify buying one #

In a previous post I mentioned measuring the economy by the number of lock boxes outside my building. I haven’t counted and compared this one to the last picture but my guess is things have gotten slightly worse, not better.

• Should you really avoid ordering fish on Mondays? http://is.gd/z3mm #

Should be a great show, looking forward to going. If you’ll be in New Orleans this is something to check out. May 30th, 2009.

Here's a business strategy. I work in the Search Marketing/Optimization Industry. If you're not sure what that is, you may not find this article as interesting as I do…still reading however? Good, let's continue…

If you've been tracking Twitter at all (and who hasn't) you may have heard a number of articles calling it the next generation search engine and a future competitor/aquisition of Google. I realize this may be a stretch right now but there are a few facts that help the argument:

• It's real time – news events, announcements, decisions, they all are tracked and available to view immediately. There's no indexing, no relevancy checks going on (and no fact checking but that a different discussion)
• They already offer a search capability – http://search.twitter.com is out there and available to find whatever you are looking for from tweeters.
• Twitter's popularity is growing faster than Facebook

So as a business user how can I best take advantage of this for my company?

Before I answer that question, let's look at how successful search marketers manage their paid campaigns. Pretend I'm a Search Marketer for a large Fortune 500 company. I have 1000's, if not more, keywords that I bid on and pay for. The best way to measure the success of my SEM campaigns is by the return I get from the traffic I generate to my website. Maybe I sell a product, or get a user to register for a newsletter, or just watch a video. Whatever my company define as my "success events" helps justify my SEM budget. The best performing keywords that drive the most success events are the ones I need to spend my SEM budget around. If I can't produce a positive return, I'm not doing my job properly.

So let's assume for a minute that Twitter really is the next generation, real-time search engine some claim. As a Search Marketer, what do I need to do to make sure I'm showing up and visible in search.twitter.com?

Think of the search results like a results page from Google. Ideally, if my page is focused around "bicycles" my ad shows up on Google when someone searches for that term. The same thing applies to Twitter except instead of promoting search pages, one must promote tweets to appear in the results. If I have a Twitter account and someone searches for "bicycle" I really should have my tweet appear…and ideally it should have a link that directs someone to a page on my site focused around bicycles.

See the commonality?

If we can track the conversions that occur based upon which terms people are searching for on twitter, I can get feedback on what search terms are most relevant to my users and produce the highest conversions, and best of all…I didn't spend a dime to figure this out! My experimentation around search terms was free and still provided me with results that I can then translate into paid campaigns where money does factor into showing up. Plus in doing so, I've also developed yet another channel to direct traffic to my website which may not be a Search Marketer's goal, but it's certainly something the CMO or VP or Marketing might be interested in.

Only thing, I don't think this can be done yet. There are some issues to overcome. First, search results on twitter are not based upon relevancy but more around chronological order. The most recent tweets show up first so unless you want to spam any followers to your account all day, there's a good chance you may not show up right away in a search. Second, I don't know if there's anything out there that can track these analytics properly. There are some Web Analytic systems that measure tweets but not like this. They track how many times a word has been used by tweeters, not the conversions that result from a link provided in a tweet.

Until these items are addressed, I don't think the true value of what's possible on Twitter for Marketers (ignoring reputation management) can be realized.