Business Blogging

If you’re registered for any of Google’s services and have recently tried searching whilst logged in, you’ve probably noticed a big change in your results – the addition of a few extra icons. These allow you to make use of Google’s newest toy, SearchWiki, and I think they might be the first step in a significant change to the way we use search.

Users of social news services like Digg and Reddit will be used to the concept of marking up and down – if you see a story you like, you mark it up and it rises up the page, if you don’t like a story you can mark it down and it falls lower down the page. Using the wisdom of crowds in this way, social news sites are able to display stories which are more likely to be of interest to the majority 0f their readers, while the less interesting stuff gets relegated to the bottom of the page or discarded entirely. And, of course, what makes it all so much more fun is that everybody can leave their own comments on each story to share with other users, which often results in some lively discussion (or trolling and flamewars, if that’s your bag).

This isn’t exactly what SearchWiki is doing – you can mark up the search results you like and remove the ones you don’t (as well as leaving comments on individual search results), but this will only affect the results you see if you perform the same search in future, it won’t change the results other users see. At least not yet. I’d like to think that this is the first step of a social search experiment that could filter into the mainstream. Imagine the results produced by Google’s increasingly sophisticated algorithm being refined by the collective intelligence of billions of users helping to promote the best results and demote the worst.

Sure, there are a lot of potential problems to think about (the spammers will have a field day trying to figure out how they can abuse this idea) and others have tried before with no great success, but Google already has the momentum and resources needed to make this work.

What makes me think Google is looking in this direction? If you scroll down to the bottom of a results page while you’re logged into Google, you’ll see an option to display ‘all notes for this SearchWiki’ – this will allow you to see how many other SearchWiki users have marked up or down all the search results on that page as well as any comments they have left.

All it needs is a fairly simple option to display your search results so that the ones with lots of votes are at the top of the page, and you’ve pretty much got a functioning social search tool – half Digg, half Google. I’m not promising it’s going to work any better than plain old algorithm based search, but I’ll be really interested to see how it plays out.

Since the dawn of time, one question has struck icy fear into the hearts of PR executives: How do you plan to measure the success of your campaign?

Old-school offline public relations can be something of an ethereal discipline which delivers a lot of fluffy, intangible benefits but very little that can be clearly and definitively measured (beyond a few pretty looking press-clippings) but fortunately, I think, it’s a little easier to find useful metrics for online and social media PR campaigns. The important thing is to build measurement into the campaign right from the very beginning – this means making sure the client understands what can and can’t be measured and agreeing on the campaign goals and KPIs with those things in mind.

Since so much of online PR is focused on search engine optimisation tactics for the client’s website, one of the most obvious ways to measure results is to track how the site traffic changes in response to a campaign, although it’s a brave PR who’ll promise specific web traffic increases (either absolute or relative) as a KPI. SEO, like PR, is an inexact science. A more realistic approach might be to use inbound-link generation (since inbound-links are still the staple ingredient of good SEO) as a quantitative and qualitative KPI.  So rather than promising the client a 10% increase in traffic, you might instead tell the client that a particular tactic will generate 20 links (quantitative) to the specified landing page from subject-relevant sites with a Google PageRank of at least 5 (qualitative – for the record, I strongly agree with Steve Rubel’s assertion that PageRank is currently the best meaure of a website’s influence for public relations purposes).

But obviously this kind of thing can’t be the only measure of how a PR campaign has performed, so here are a couple of useful tools that I think are particularly good for producing truly meaningful metrics that are backed up by some solid science and should stand up to scrutiny from even the most nitpicky of clients. Plus, they both generate nice shiny graphs which look good in Powerpoint slides…

Google Insights for Search

What it does: Since 2004 Google has accumulated a massive amount of data on what people are searching for on the web. Insights for search simply lets you examine that data by entering a key word or phrase and seeing how the volume of people searching for it has changed over any period of time you select. You can focus in on the search habits of different countries, compare multiple search terms on a single graph, and even download the data into a spreadsheet if you’re feeling analytical.

How you can use it:  By examining the search volumes for your client’s brands, product names or other key terms related to the campaign, you’ll be able to see whether the number of people searching for those terms has increased, decreased, or remained unchanged over time.  This provides a good indicator of how public interest in these terms has changed in response to your campaign and you can also try comparing against competitors’ brands to get some market context.

Trendrr.com

What it does: Trendrr is a great tool for monitoring trends in various data sources, such as Google Blog and News search results, Technorati blog search results, Facebook application users statistics, YouTube video stats and much more. So for example, you can set up a tracker to show how many Google News results are returned for your clients’ brand/product name, and every day Trendrr will automatically perform that search and update your graph with the result so that you can see if the number of online news stories mentioning that brand is rising or falling over time – and you can do the same with Google Blog search results too.

How you can use it: This should be fairly self-explanatory. First think of all the key words and phrases that are relevant to your client and set up Trendrr trackers for all of them in each of the data sources you want to track (Google News and Blog results should be your absolute minimum). This will provide you with a useful ongoing measure of how widely all these terms are being written about by journalists and bloggers, and you’ll be able to see instantly whether your campaign has significantly increased volumes of coverage. Trendrr produces some nice graphs that you can cut and paste into reports, or you can download the data into a spreadsheet to create your own visualisations.

If you’ve got any favourite tools for measuring the success of online and social media campaigns, please feel free to drop them in the comments.