It has been an interesting few days.  On Monday, we officially announced that BlueStorm hadd aquired CYBERCity, another Binghamton-based computer services firm.  The merger is a solid mix of CYBERCity’s personal-to-small business market and BlueStorm’s small-to-medium business focus.  We are looking to expand our enterprise infrastructure business and use the advances in enterprise infrastructure technology to make them available to smaller organizations.  The big upside is in the managed services business where both teams have been having success, so we see this as a great growth opportunity (trying so hard not to use the word synergy, but this is a text book example).

It was a fun strategic/tactical exercise to roll-out news to each outlet.  The first step was to coordinate website updates to show a co-branded presence. This had to be done before I posted the announcement on our Twitter and  Facebook because  of the immediacy of those outlets, so I had somewhere to link readers.  I also wanted to make sure news outlets had a chance to confirm (because they still do that) and assign the story, so sending out email and faxes (yes, dialed it myself) also had to be sent before the social media postings.  The big surprise was having one of the local TV news stations call so quickly that I had not yet received the fax confirmation.

Here are the steps I followed –
A week early:

1. Create a call sheet – name, email, fax, and Twitter accounts
2. Sign up to follow their twitter accounts – You want to give them time to follow you

Day of the announcement:

1. Update website — In case  news people go there to confirm
2. Send out faxes and emails
3. Post on BlueStorm’s Twitter and Facebook — It’s also good to have some of your co-workers on-call to RT and “Like” so the message spreads virally
4. Post on local third-party or business blogs — The local news site allows the public to create their own blog space, so I posted the release on BlueStorm’s PressConnect page
5. Send direct message to reporter’s Twitter — I only did this to those that I had a prior relationship
6. Good old-fashioned follow-up — This worked great because I found that my local press contact was out that day from her voice mail.  I was able to connect to the news desk and placed a press release based article at the top of the Business section. That would have been an embarrassing miss.

The Results The story ended up in the lead segment of two local news broadcasts, including this report on Newschannel 34.  We also had the Business section headline in the Binghamton Press and appeared on the front page of the Binghamton Business Journal.  The only downside was that the WBNG-TV News interview and Press articles were not posted online even after I called.  My lesson there was that next time I needed to include the web producer on my release list.

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Since I’m not having the greatest luck in the Web 2.0 era of the Internet, I decided to skip ahead a generation by attending the Web 3.0 Conference this week. Web 3.0 is a term often applied to my time at Hakia with the driving concept being the Semantic Web or Linked Data. I say “or” because I am not an expert on the subject, so when I am around those that are (or make my eyes gloss over with claims to be), I hear many prospectives on how these terms are used. My perspective is broad, not hands-on, so I tend to group these ideas together as they play themselves out.

The conference program went beyond this broad view of Web 3.0. It included panels on cloud computing and social media from both technical and business angles. Overall I thought the programming offered options for everyone. I focused on topics around monetization and marketing applications, along with a panel on semantic search technology — as you would guess.

One consistent result of these panels is that I get all antsy and want to start building things. So tonight I’m taking my “just good enough to be dangerous” programming skills to the NY Semantic Web Meetup to get a demo of some hands-on tools. Let’s see what I can learn there. Maybe I will be able to post my own little semantic web application here in the next couple weeks — or else, I’ll come back next week and delete this paragraph.

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Very compelling article in Ad Age today from Peter Hershberg at Reprise Media about search and social media called What Social Media Means for Search. On the upside, it adds to the observation that search and social media are coming together, and it also provides a good backgrounder for understanding the relationship. However, it does not offer any tactical side to take advantage of this activity.

Using his Search 3.0 label, Peter and I agree that the new feed-driven social world takes us beyond the “intent” shown by a user during their search engine experience and provides us direct insight to the “it is happening now” stage, such as the millions of daily tweets for “need coffee.”

We’ve heard the story forever from proponents of mobile advertising that they will be able to deliver a Dunkin’ Donuts (my coffee of choice) coupon when we walk past a store. Great in theory, but when does it reach the masses and will it work? My answer to when, is who knows. I’m sure it can happen now with the proliferation of location-based services, but is it better plan than monitoring social media feeds — I say no.

The mobile ad plan is not marketing to a person who has shown intent in this activity; they just happen to be walking by a Dunkin’ Donuts, so now you are hoping that you can change a user behavior as they pass by. However, monitoring a Twitter/Facebook feed will directly let you know who is going to get coffee, NOW! It is up to the marketeer to hit them directly with the coupon for the coffee or a complimentary donut. I guess the next question is when will Twitter or the Twitter apps we use start monitoring our Twitter feeds, or Facebook for that matter, to match ads to its updates.

Update: As I was posting this, I took a look back at the current Ad Age they have posted an article “Google Uses Twitter to Sell Ads.” So it looks like this idea is taking its first steps. This will evolve to feed-targeted networks, not the general Adsense network, because the higher “happening now” feed network will be drive higher CPC values.

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It seems all of our favorite insider blogs are floating a heading that contains “Search” and “Social Media.” Even next week’s Search Engine Strategies Conference in New York contains no less that 6 sessions around social media, including a special social media track. However, with as many of these articles that I have read, none seem to explain how social media and search mesh other than being buzz topics for them to claim an expertise.

I see it as a “Chicken or the Egg” discussion on whether social media drives search or search drives social media. More importantly, if you are in the business of identifying trends, where should you watch if you want to stay ahead of the curve? For my money, I would look at two places, Twitter analysis tools to understand breaking news events and search tools for identifying what people are interested in.

Why two places? News events get reported first on twitter. The event could be as big as the Hudson River plane landing or “I’m having coffee.” It’s highly probably that 99 of 100 event trends discovered on Twitter may have no legs to affect the social media space. However, there is still that 1 in a 100 that strikes a chord with someone. That person does an entry in their blog, that entry gets posted on a Twitter feed, that eventually finds its way into Facebook by someone who has their Twitter and Facebook accounts linked, and all of a sudden you have people searching for the topic to learn more.

The life-cycle of this event would be like this:
News Event > Twitter Post > Twitter Trend > (Facebook) > Search Trend > Steady Search Traffic

Think of the Motrin Mom story or the Octomom. To so many people these were non-issues when they first read it. I remember reading about the women who gave birth to eight babies, and then thinking how amazing that was and that she would get the hero treatment. Then someone looked closer and the story got some serious legs. Soon “Octomom” had regular Google search traffic, and the sentiment completely shifted.

Let’s look at how you can track events and that lead to social trends. Below are some tools that I have used for in tracking terms:
1) Discovering Breaking Trends – Using Twitter trending tools
Below are some tools

• Twitter Search – Found below the search box
• TweetStats – Provides a trend cloud and historical list
• @trending – From Karelia Software (http://karelia.com/)
• Twendz – Highlights conversation themes and sentiment of tweets

2) Identifying What People Actively Want – Use search engine trends

• Google Trends
• Hitwise
• WordTracker

Update (4/1/09)- Thanks goes out to David Berkowitz and his fine blog, Inside the Marketers Studio, for pointing out this article on other Twitter analysis tools: 8 Excellent Tools to Extract Insights from Twitter Streams by Yung-Hui Lim on Social Media Today.

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