I’ve already admitted my recent addiction to real time search. I love it, and I’ll tell you why. My experience on the Internet has been one in which most interactions take place after the fact. My guess is, instead of participating right now, most Internet users are still functioning in this delayed response mode (with delays of up to several months). But I think real time search is going to change that.  I definitely don’t think it’s reached its threshold either, simply because one company can’t be identified as the leader in real time search. But mark my words; someone’s going to blow this out of the water, and when they do, we’re all going to wonder why we ever did search any other way. Maybe it’ll be LeapFish, maybe uberVu or maybe it’ll be…Collecta real time search (still in beta!).

What is Collecta? 

"Collecta is not like other search engines," or so it states on it’s homepage, and for the most part, it’s true.  While I recognize the value of real time search analytics, Collecta isn’t so much about that. It’s more of an experience of the Internet, as it’s happening. And from a user’s experience, I had a blast!  I can’t tell you how fun it is to watch a topic as it comes in (in real time) and tweet back to someone.  Really, I just find it so hard to follow conversations on Twitter, but with Collecta, I could watch what people were saying about a particular topic and actually participate in the conversation.  It can also be great for getting the first comment in on a blog too. Or finding something that people are just starting to talk about. Like the fact that LeapFish is launching a new real time search feature today at 8AM EST.  LeapFish says, "If you don’t understand why the Real Time Web is huge, you soon will." After a statement like that, you can bet I’ll be testing it out today! (hmmm…I wonder what one of my future blog posts will be about…)

Collecta Real Time Search Features

Back to the topic at hand. Collecta has a lot of great features. These are just a few. If you try it out and there’s something important I missed, let me know in a comment.

• Open API – This could be one of the best features.  Just check out all these real time search applications that have already been developed. I especially like the Firefox app. For those of you who are programmers, this is a great opportunity to make a real mark in the real time search market. This field is new enough that creating an app now could give you notoriety and lots of link love, especially if you create something people really like.
• Filter search results – Filter results by type: stories, comments, updates, photos or videos. This comes in handy when you’re looking for a story to comment on or a video that no ones talking about yet.
• Share your search - It wouldn’t be much of a social tool if you couldn’t share the information you gather with your tweeps and fans. So you can definitely share your search through a variety of social sites.
• Track multiple searches - Collecta keeps the results of your previous searches, so you can toggle back and forth between various keyword terms you’re interested in.

 Curious? Don’t just take my word for it. Go try Collecta for yourself!

Ralphm

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I’m your typical alternative conscious tech guy. I start my day with some Yoga and meditation, I ride my bike to work (almost every day), and we even started recycling in our office.  Before I lived close enough to start riding my bike, I’m the guy who advocated for a carpool with my co-workers (and we did it). So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’d be writing about opportunities to create a green marketing strategy for your business.

Why a Green Marketing Strategy?

Well, I’ve noticed a growing trend on the Internet. It’s probably been there for a while, so forgive me if this isn’t news to you. But there are a lot of websites dedicated to green, eco-friendly businesses. There are green websites, green directories, and green businesses…and they all offer opportunities for you to demonstrate your commitment to green initiatives while building links to your website.  But it only works if you’re green. So the question to ask yourself is: "Is there an eco-friendly side to our business?" and "How do we make green part of our marketing strategy?" Once you have your ‘green’ marketing strategy, it’s time to use it to get create some exposure for your company, and some inbound links.

Green Communities

There are many websites that are dedicated to green living, and they’d love for you to participate and include some content about your eco-friendly business.

• Ethipedia
• Greenopolis
• Carbon Rally
• Zero Footprint
• Celsias
• Change.org
• Care 2 Make a Difference
• 2 People

Green Causes

Donate to a green cause and they’ll often include your business on their sponsors page.

• 1% for the planet
• 1 laptop per child

Green Directories

Directories are a great source for links, and you can only get into these by meeting their ‘green’ standard.

• Green America
• Best Green Blogs
• Green People
• Eco Business Links
• One Green Globe
• Solutions for Green

Business Niches Built Around Green

Don’t just fake it. Here are two examples of businesses that have built a nice niche around a green marketing strategy. Creative Slice is a green website design firm. What does that mean exactly? Well, I’m not entirely sure myself. But you can see a list of all the green choices they make. But wait? Don’t laugh yet. The keyword, "green web design" gets 2400 searches each month on Google. Hmmm…you could base an entire business on that if you ranked in the top search results. And if you look, Creative Slice does. Dreamhost offers green hosting. Sure, it sounds simple. But realize that over 8,000 people search ‘green hosting’ every month. And close to 3,000 people search for "green web hosting." Once again, that’s a nice little niche they’ve got there. Go search Google’s Keyword Tool and see if anyone’s searching ‘green’ keywords in your industry. Need help? Consider using our website marketing services.

Other Opportunities for Green

There are lots of ways to make your business green. The most important thing is to make sure you demonstrate what you’re doing, so it becomes part of your public image and part of your marketing strategy.

• Participate in green energy initiatives like Green Watts Program or APS Green Choice. If your local energy company doesn’t have this, consider purchasing green energy credits from a national company.
• Start an office recycling program.
• Develop in-house company initiatives like carpooling, bike riding, etc.
• Adopt a highway.
• Find other green causes and participate in them.

It’s just too bad that ‘green SEO’ isn’t a term that gets many searches… Oh wait…! 480 searches isn’t bad.  Maybe there’s a niche in there for us, too.

What’s one way your company is green? Leave it in a comment, and…GET YOUR FIRST GREEN LINK.

Ralphm

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I’m obsessed with real time search! and I don’t think it’s just me (Google just announced social search), and in my last article, I talked about Twitter real time search and trends.  Of course, some people have their doubts about the viability of social search, but I believe real time search is only going to get bigger, and better. The primary basis for this belief is the fact that I see countless contenders battling for real time search dominance.  Consequently, I’ve been exploring different real time search options, and trying to figure out what the best tools are for managing real time conversations, particularly in regard to the website marketing services we offer clients.  Last week I was introduced to an interesting option I’d like to share: uberVU metrics and analytics.

What is uberVU?

Have you ever found yourself using social media and feeling a bit isolated from the conversation? Especially with Twitter.  You can see half the conversation, right? But often, you can’t see what other people are saying. That experience sometimes leaves me feeling empty.  Not to mention that half the conversations are taking place not just on Twitter, but on blogs and forums.  Well, uberVU is really trying to eliminate that empty feeling experience by bringing the full conversation into perspective.  Simply stated, and in their own words, uberVU lets you "find out what people are saying about brands, stories or events. And follow the comments all over the social web."

Real Time Search Interface

uberVU’s real time search uinterface is slick. A simple search allows you to see how many people are talking about a particular topic, and a nice little pie chart shows you where those conversations are taking place. Below that, a graph shows you exactly when the conversations were posted, allowing you to put it all into a time reference.  This feature will allow businesses to determine the relevance of the conversation to their marketing campaigns of today and tomorrow.

By creating an account and linking it to your social media accounts, you don’t have to leave uberVU to participate in the conversation, and I really like that. It’s a big time saver not having to click on a link, find the spot to comment, etc, etc.  All you have to do is hit reply in uberVU, enter your comment, and submit!  Wicked awesome!

The only drawback, if you can call it that, is the free account is going to brand your messages with a link to uberVU, a small price to pay for an awesome service. But if it’s a real concern of yours, all you have to do is upgrade your account to remove their branding.

uberVU Features

• Reply to Twitter users, blog comments, FriendFeed and more from within uberVU, and they send your message back on the right platform.
• Track conversations within a particular niche "community" (or multiple communites with an upgraded account) and receive email alerts.
• The uberVU widget lets you aggregate the conversations about your blog from all over the web, right there on your blog! How cool is that?
• Use the uberVU bookmarklet to track stories and converstations as you find them.
• Pricing – The free uberVU account comes with one community you can track, no exports and links to uberVU.com each time you use the reply functionality. The paid services range from $20-$150/month depending on what features you want.

I still want to know what you’re using for real time search.  So leave it in a comment!

Ralphm

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Recently, Robert Scoble expressed his surprise as to how no one had done a real-time Twitter search and trends for just the people you are following. Within 30 minutes, many people had commented on his remark with similar surprise. But one person stood out and shared the information we all wanted, and we owe a special thanks to Mike Lizun of Gregory FCA for tipping us off about the fact that a real-time friend trend application, indeed, already exists. And it’s called Friending Topics.

Trending Topics on Twitter

Everyone’s familiar with how trending topics on Twitter work, right? When you log in to Twitter, you see them along the right hand side under your profile information and stats. But c’mon, who’s really interested in global trending topics?  I’m sure someone is, but it’s not me.  At the time of this writing, my trending topics included chocolate milk, paranormal activity, Dow Jones and Finland.  None of which had much meaning to me personally.

But when I logged in to friending topics, what I saw had a lot more relevance. As I follow more people, sorting out the clutter into pieces that are relevant and valuable has been a challenge. But I can definitely see how this app can help with all that. After signing in with my Twitter account, all I had to do was hover over topics, tags or web links to see the most recent tweets of all my tweeps. And the best part is, it was related to topics I’m actually interested in, like business, social media marketing and SEO.

What to do if You Don’t Follow a Lot of Tweeps?

Okay, so you might be thinking: "That’s great, but I don’t follow any topics." Well…why not?  With a tool like TweepML, you can find groups of people to follow, centered around themes.  For instance, take a look at the Vertical Measures team.  Following the tweeps on that page would be a great way to start putting your ear to the ground for SEO and link building. Once you’ve built up your tweeps to follow, then you can use Friending Topics to easily keep a pulse on what people are talking about, in real-time.  The only thing left to do then is…add your voice to the trending topics you care about the most.

Got a special way you track search and trends for your Tweeps? Leave it in a comment below.

Ralphm

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Have you heard of BackType? BackType is a real time search engine that indexes "online conversations from across the web in real-time, so you can see what people are saying about topics that interest you." It’s a very valuable tool for social media marketing and link building, and I’ve been using it a lot lately.

What is Real Time Search?

Real time search is a phrase that’s been used to capture this idea that information is being shared on the Internet so quickly, that you really need to be able to search what’s being said about a particular topic right this minute.  Traditionally, search engines take a lot of time to send out their robots to crawl a site and bring back the results. But this isn’t the case with real time search. With real time search, we need to know what was said 2 minutes ago on a particular topic. 

Why is Real Time Search Important?

Real time search gives you the ability to observe and/or take part in an ongoing conversation that really has no end. If you’re involved in a particular niche, the benefits can be enormous. These might include:

1. Keeping up-to-date on your industry and competitors
2. Getting feedback about what people like or don’t like about a product or service
3. Receiving insights and ideas for product creation or improvement
4. Informing potential customers about your product or service as a solution to their problems
5. Contributing your voice to the conversation (and possible backlinks to your company)
6. Gauging the importance of a particular topic within your audience
7. Providing ideas for blog posts and collaboration with others in your field

Why I Like BackType

To me, real time search isn’t just about Twitter.  There are conversations happening all over the web across multiple social networks and individual blogs, and they’re an important part of our social media marketing.  With that in mind, I’ve been using BackType because it pulls results from many places (not just Twitter). I also like the way their results are laid out.  Try BackType’s Real Time Search for yourself.  The layout includes the title of the article, where the article was posted, how long ago it was posted, excerpts of the conversation below that, and a comment count at the bottom. If I want to see the Twitter chatter, I can see the most recent Tweets on the right, and those update in real time. When new post results come in, a notice appears at the top of the screen and I can click there to choose to update the page with the most recent conversations on platforms other than Twitter. BackType also has alerts. And these are great because they’ll notify you whenever a term is mentioned in a comment.

Another great feature is the ability to track your conversations across multiple platforms. By signing up for an account, and providing your social media usernames, BackType will help you claim your comments.  Chris Brogan is a big user of the service.  Just click his name to see an example of a BackType profile and comments. You can see his comments, where he commented, and you can even follow him so you can participate in all the conversations he’s participating in. Just don’t tell him I told you to do that…

Are There Other Real Time Search Options?

Of course. These include Google search options, Bing Tweets, Twitter search, FriendFeed advanced search, Scoopler, and a host of 3rd party Twitter apps I won’t even mention.  But BackType has some unique value compared to other real time search providers, and their service and offerings will only get better as more people use them. So check ‘em out.

What are you using for real time search and why? Leave it in a comment below.

Ralphm

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