Ways Real Time Web Search Is Used For Real (Or Could Be)

Real time search is the order of the day. Google has already incorporated an algorithm to serve up tweets in search results. A number of companies are salivating at the data that can be amassed from real time search. Here are some ways real time is being either applied by an industry in a real way right now and some ways it can possibly be used. Do you have more ways that companies are using real time search or other possible applications? Please share them in the comments section.

Stock Tips.

In the Nineties online broker websites made day trading possible for the average Joe. Precursor to the blogger, day traders were the mass of unemployed who used the internet to track stocks and get news about their investments (or potential investments) while at home with a cup of coffee in one hand, presumably in their underwear. At a moment’s notice they could buy sell then buy back again a stock, hopefully making a profit along the way. Some did. Most didn’t. But the thrill of the trade was what made it all worth it.

Today, investors looking for tips on the current market mood intraday can just look it up on the social web, aggregating all the user created data from a variety of websites in real time. Individuals who day trade can really take advantage of this. Remember when Peter Lynch said to invest in what you know? Well in today’s world it’s very possible to know a lot about a lot and much of it is available online. When things happen worldwide we know about it instantly. Much of this affects how investors trade stocks, bonds, currency and commodities. Instead of waiting until the next day to find out about a situation in the Middle East that will affect oil prices or in China that will affect US Treasuries, we can keep the stream of data flowing at all times until it trips up one of a number of keyword searches. With trades coming down to the millisecond, real time search should be a part of every investor’s toolkit.

Famously, StockTwits has made this a partial reality, as it applies directly to companies listed on the major exchanges. Members add a “$” symbol to their tweets along with the company’s stock market listing to tag tweets with real time info about a company. You can then follow what people are saying about the tagged companies in your entire StockTwits portfolio.

What’s the downside? Well, as always people can be susceptible to rumors and falsely reported information (that NEVER happens on the Internet!) or jump the gun on information when it comes, miscalculating the way the market reacts. Then you lose money.

Breaking News.

Michel Jackson. Mumbai. The Haitian Earthquake. OK. So it’s pretty obvious that any news organization worth its salt has to have an eye—no make that a whole person—on the real time web as it streams by. Once a topic starts to trend you might want to look into it and find out: What’s going on? Is it viable news story? And how do I get my reporter in there to get the scoop? Would you prefer not so accurate, but up to the minute news or optimized news later on? Or both? What’s the balance point?

When nineteen-year old Michael van Poppel used his own editorial judgment to find news items from a variety of sources and aggregated them to the social web, Breaking News Online was born. He took news stories and disseminated them out to the public on RSS feeds and through Twitter. With one fortuitous event (he found himself with an authentic copy of a video by Osama bin Laden that no other news organization had received) he was thrust into the spotlight. Since then, Breaking News Online has garnered thousands of followers and scooped the MSM on stories. In November of 2009 Breaking News Online announced it was starting a wire service in 2010 and it already had a major network subscriber in MSNBC. Not bad for a teenage news geek from the Netherlands.

Of course when breaking news in real time gets gamed, we get stories like Balloon Boy. The reason it worked? Well it had drama, action, suspense, mystery, a bit of the bizarre (a kid trapped in a giant silver, UFO shaped balloon careening across the Midwestern United States!) and of course the main ingredient was that a child was in mortal peril right before our eyes (or so we thought.) The entire episode has turned into some sort of meta-news event – it’s news precisely because it wasn’t news at all, which people are also interested in finding more about. It’s a real life reality show. A paradox to be sure.

Toppling a totalitarian regime.

Sure a year ago you might have laughed at this but we now know that it’s in the realm of very real possibility. China suppresses social networking websites in fear of a subversive plot or government criticism. We all know what is happening in Iran. Twitter was so important to communication during the protests that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asked if they might mind postponing a routine planned outage. She famously quipped that she didn’t know a “Twitter from a tweeter, but apparently, it is very important.”

Sadly, the most powerful of image that came from the Iranian protests was the final moments of Neda Agha-Soltan, a young woman caught in the crossfire. The cell phone video of her death quickly became a YouTube phenomenon making her into a martyr for young Iranians protesting the 2009 elections. All this happened within hours of the event, proving to the regime that no matter what you do, someone, somewhere is watching. An analogy can be made to the Rodney King videotape in the Nineties, which inspired people to fight back against police brutality. Back then you still had to go through analog channels to get the information out but now it’s been sped up to real time. Exposing corruption, fighting against oppression and righting wrongs can be broadcast by a thousand different sources, fed out to the world through a slew of social media websites. They were wrong, I guess. The revolution WILL be televised, though it will be on YouTube instead of VHF. It’s becoming 1984, in reverse, thanks to the real time web.

Of course the flip side is a totalitarian government using real time search to suppress a popular uprising or even worse they start proactively using it to spread misinformation. (Oh wait we already have that, it’s called the Fox News Facebook fan page. Zing!)

Fantasy Sports.

Here’s an idea. Set up tracking for the most popular NFL players picked for Fantasy Football Leagues and then watch to see when news breaks about a particular team or player. Should you quick drop a player who just got hurt or put on injured reserve? Should you pick up a hot player that some pundit said was going to have a great game against another team? This of course can work perfectly for baseball as well.

A good idea might be to take the StockTwit model and apply it to fantasy sports. Using a system that piggy backs onto Twitter API and applying it to a fantasy football website can definitely enhance the experience. Hashtags can be applied for information about teams, player positions or individual players themselves using a standard naming convention. Ex. Kurt Warner’s unique tag can be #ARQBKW. AR=Arizona Cardinals, his team. QB=Quarterback, his position. KW=Kurt Warner, his initials. I’m a bit of a Fantasy Sports nut myself and believe me you can never have too much information on a player when you’re trying to beat your brother-in-law in the semi-finals.

Football players are already apologizing on TV to their fantasy football owners when they don’t perform on any given Sunday. Imagine how the players, agents and fantasy owners will obsess over all this in real time, every single day. It could get messy.

Missing persons.

Think of real time search for this type of police work as a hybrid between an Amber Alert and the Missing Person ads on the back of milk cartons. They did it because milk cartons were on everybody’s breakfast table but now Twitter and Twitpic are as close as your iPhone or laptop. More people probably use Twitter than grab the carton of milk. If you see something, tagging the tweet with a GPS location will help immensely. Of course, police agencies all over the country can apply real time search to any of their investigations locally.

In a way this is how Twitter got its start. During the California Wildfires the Fire Department used Twitter to communicate with its workers in the field to transmit real time information.

I can see this backfiring with police running down false leads but for the most part the social web community has been extremely sincere and generous. (Obviously marketing spammers are excluded.) I guess if it starts to work, the police will put up with any false leads they get in real time search the same way they must with false calls to 911 and hotlines.

SEO Research.

If you’re in an industry that has a direct and relevant connection to the meme of the day, you can easily see ways to get pertinent information out onto social networks with links back to your website by keeping an eye on real time search action, a strategy employed smartly by SEO specialists to direct traffic back to client sites.

Keyword and keyphrase research is an obsession of people in the SEO industry. They love keywords and variations in search as they apply to a particular website. But if you don’t have your antennae up you might miss a brand new keyword phrase that is gaining traction. “Motrin Moms,” “Balloon Boy” and many other phrases became popular on Twitter. If you’re not paying attention you might miss these variations on a brand. You can also use this as a way to do research on how people are using specific phrases in real life and make assumptions on how people may use them in search.

Your next blog post might want to mention a popular key phrase meme. While a regular old Google search still brings up a ton of results related to “Balloon Boy” or “Motrin Moms” there’s nothing like catching a trend at its zeitgeist. Obviously you can’t put a search feed up for a term that doesn’t exist yet but if you’re actively watching the traffic on your main keywords then you’ll know when a creative variation using it in a unique phrase pops up. If I were watching “Motrin” and “Motrin Moms” started showing up, I’d suspect something special was going on and I’d be sure to look into it and then include it in my next blog post about pain relievers.

Of course the downside is that spammers will muck it up or people will quickly game the system. People looking to real time search for ways to optimize their websites may just be spammers looking to hop onto the meme of the day.

PR.

Speaking of Motrin Moms, how about the implications all this real time web stuff has already had on the public relations industry. A whole new way to pitch stories has already evolved: The Twitter Pitch. Companies have cropped up to help you disseminate your press release in a really slick fashion on social networks like Pitch Engine. Connecting companies that want to tell their story to the reporters and bloggers who will write about them has never been easier. But the real value for many public relations firms and communications managers is the ability to track your brand awareness on a variety of websites in real time. Before, consultants were encouraging companies to do a Google search for “Your Company Name” with the word “sucks” after it to find websites, blog posts and other articles online that may be saying derogatory things about you. It was a good suggestion, especially when anyone with an email account could start a website of their own on Geocities. That’s ancient history.

Nowadays, people don’t wait to fashion an entire website to bash a company for exceptionally poor service, they just post a quirky YouTube video and it goes viral ala the United Airlines broken guitar video by Dave Carroll. A smart public relations agent or media consultant will have subscribed to one of a number of listening services like Radian6 to find out immediately when someone mentions their brand. This way they can address pending problems before they become everybody’s favorite Facebook wall posting.

Ford did this exceptionally well. When Scott Monty heard some grumblings about a cease and desist letter from Ford to a certain website he went on the offensive. He asked for patience. Then he investigated the matter and helped get to the bottom of it all before Ford became the big bad corporation picking on the little guy. Turned out that the website in question was selling parts to customers with the Ford logo on them but they were not Ford made parts, but knock offs. In a nutshell, Monty used real time search to help avert a PR disaster.

Ever hear of the phrase “too much of a good thing?” Well, this is it for PR folks in a nutshell. You can go crazy thinking every time a frustrated customer tweets about you have to address it. You’ll end up spending most of your time running around the web putting out fires. The other thing is that no one knows what will become viral and what is just going to be someone blowing off steam into a black hole.

Keep Those Lines of Communication Open (All The Time)

It’s absolutely essential to keep your lines of communication open no matter what, especially when you are at your busiest.

In business, we sometimes get caught up in what we are doing we never look up from our desk to manage our communication with customers. We have really busy times when we can’t take a minute to scratch out heads much less send out an email blast or Twitter but you may find that usually when your customers need to hear from you the most.

For example, the tax season is coming up. A CPA that I’d written a few press releases for when I was freelancing for a PR firm on Long Island a few years ago kept me on his list. I received this email from him today:

Just a quick reminder not to wait until you receive all of your personal tax information before sending me your business tax information.

While you may not receive all of your personal tax information until mid-late February, you should have all/most of your business information ready by mid-January.

Sending me your business tax information as soon as you have it ready will ensure that your business tax return is completed well before the March 15th Corporate Tax Return filing deadline.

Thanks,

Mike Hanley

Nothing to dramatic or creative. Just a plain fact. Around this time of year, accountants get swamped. I remember an accountant I once used to use got so overburdened at tax time I’d be lucky to get an email response from him to set up our appointment to do my taxes, much less have him send out a mass email like this one.

What I liked about Mike’s email was that it reminded me that I can get a jump on something that most people dread doing: filing taxes. Second he was taking some of the weight off of my shoulders by offering to have me start sending him my business tax information as I get it. He also had good timing. He was reminding me that I should be getting all my business tax information by a certain upcoming date at the end of this week, which is not too close to make me panic, but not too far off to make me forget. He’s reminding me that I need to start thinking about things early to make March 15th Corporate Tax Return filing deadline.

Lastly, I got from this email a gentle reminder that I should also be thinking about my personal taxes and he set me a timeframe when I should have received everything, by mid February. Most of all, he gets across the fact that he cares about me and my business, not just his own.

All this is a simple note by email. Nothing fancy. No crazy HTML or Flash or even an animated GIF. Just a nice note. It feels personal, friendly and sincere, the way a small business communication should.

I promised Mike that I’d give him a plug for letting me use his email as a case study so here goes: Michael T. Hanley, CPA is a managing partner at Merl & Hanley, LLP located at 12 Bank Avenue, Smithtown, NY 11787. (A CPA office located on Bank Avenue! Can you get more ironic than that? – LC) You can buy Mike Hanley’s book, “Effective Tax Planning for the MicroBusiness” in stores now! Find Merl & Hanley, LLP at www.merlandhanley.com or call (631) 360-CPAS. Mike can also be found on the social web on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Also, subscribe to his Blog, Making Life Less Taxing.

Reinventing The Wheel

A lot of topics I write about as a freelancer concerns the banking industry. Recently I did a spate of articles on Social Banking, how banks are embracing social media to reinvent their business. And it’s not just social media websites but many of the Web 2.0 tools that banks are using to open up communication channels with customers.

One thing I’ve learned during this economic crisis is that American business has drifted away from creating innovative products people want to buy to creating ways to make more money for the company with less effort. In an article in Business Week a former Harvard Business school professor tackles the problems on Wall Street by having them redirect attention to serving the needs of the customer and instead of serving the needs of the shareholder. Trust is at an all time low for American businesses and the consumer has become empowered int he digital age. This makes for a dire situation for businesses who look to keep the status quo rather than go with the flow. In the article the Harvard Professor, Shoshana Zuboff, proposes that company managers unlearn what they learned in her classroom over the years and embrace the space where individuals actually live, what she calls the I-space.

It’s a good read and a wake-up call for the way we build and run businesses in America as we approach the second decade of the 21st Century. Click to read the article, “The Old Solutions Have Become the New Problems.”

Publishers: Don’t Punish the Readers

A long time ago even Pennysavers raked in the money just on classifieds alone. I should know, because I used to design ads (both display and classified) and manage the computer network for a Pennysaver. I didn’t typeset those little text ads. They were done by minimum wage making working mothers and elderly ladies. At first it was done on phototype machines but then we got smart and had them typeset on Macs. When we purchased those Macintoshes and some of those ladies in the classified section lost their jobs, boy was there a lot of screaming and yelling. This was back in the early 1990s, so in the entire history of the newspaper business, it really wasn’t that long ago. When we implemented a pagination system so that we didn’t need the paste-up artists anymore few years later, again people bitched and complained.

Back then Apple Macintosh networks were rather small affairs and in small shops the head Graphic Designer was most often also the Macintosh network administrator. Crazy, I know. If this was your lot in life at the time, then you must remember what it was like being caught between a rock and a hard place suggesting to your Art Director and Publisher and Editor the immense savings they would see from pagination and typesetting on the Macintosh. See you were essentially selling our your fellow artists because some of them were going to go extinct in the transition to all digital design and lose their jobs from this change. On the other hand, if you didn’t suggest these small investments in equipment and software to show a cost savings, someone else was going to come in the door very soon and do it. Then you lost your job (or risked demotion.)

When the cost savings was going toward the publisher, all was well and good in the industry. We happily traded human power for machine power in the production department because we could slash costs while still cornering the market on display ads, a market monopoly the print business had since Ben Franklin’s day.

Then one day a guy named Craig came along with his confounded list and ruined the party. We all know the story of how the newspaper business made a ghetto out of the web until they just couldn’t ignore it anymore. Call it blindness. Call it ignorance or arrogance. Call it what you will, but publishers let it all go by as they watched first Google, then eBay then Craigslist steal their revenue right out from under their noses when what they should have been doing was hiring these guys and buying them out for pennies on the dollar before they were billionaires. The web was just the ultimate printing press but no one (except young innovators who may or may not have been bought for a song back in the late 1990s) saw it for what it was.

Newspaper men will be newspaper men and now that the truth is staring them right in the face, what do they do? Go after the little guys once again. Just like when technology made it easier to beef up the bottom line by eliminating costly staff and their benefits packages publishers like Rupert Murdock think a paywall is the life preserver for their sinking industry.

“Google is ruining our business!” they cry, among other things.

What they don’t realize is that what traffic they are getting is because of the sites that scrape their stuff and provide backlinks. Or the search engines that crawl their news sites and provide an easy way to find news then go read it, even if it is one story at a time.

The rallying cry of the industry: Blame Google. But that’s the lazy way out. What they aren’t looking at are the advertisers. Google manages to monetize their product very nicely with ads sitting astride news results being only a small fraction of their income, according to an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal by Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Newspapers and magazine publishers rushed to get online put the cart before the horse, so to speak. At first it was a ghetto. Then it was the place to be. But what they didn’t do is think about a business model before throwing all their content up for the world to see for free.

I don’t have numbers to support this but I suspect that if you take out distribution and printing costs what’s left can be supported strictly by advertising in the news industry if you do it right. I think a website like newjerseynewsroom.com poses as a model. Ex Star-Ledger newspaper staffers started this news site. It seems to be going string but I can’t find any stories on its financial stability.

The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal with the sheer number of visitors they get and the long history of each of these publications can easily dictate to advertisers a fair price for all those readers. They are not eyeballs or clicks, they are exactly what they used to be: readers of papers of record.

By the number of times I see these news organizations’ stories cited by bloggers and on twitter I have to suspect that they also have just as high a brand loyalty and trust than they ever did when they were printed on paper only. Papers like that have to set the bar a little higher. They must charge what a reader in that paper seeing and ad is worth, just like they did when they were in print. No one in the world can compare one little blog banner or an ad network buy to a display ad on the New York Times website.

In another version of this blog post I wrote a couple of paragraphs about a central clearinghouse standard whereby all newspapers and magazine publishers can filter content to eReader devices to be distributed and charged a fair subscription rate. Alas real life beat me to the punch and I saw this story on Mashable about a Hulu type of website for magazines. I think it’s a step in the right direction. Of course it’s in the early stages and I know very little about it yet but it’s a start.

Tweeting Out Articles Behind A Paywall: Bad!

(I can’t make it any simpler than that.)

Please publishers. For the love of god learn a lesson. Today I clicked on a link by @newsday only to discover the story was behind a paywall! My immediate thought: WTF? Why would a publisher tweet a link out for their own stuff and then hide it behind a paywall. That is not a tease, it’s a slap in the face. It makes zero sense to do this. Let me read the stories you link to on twitter at least before hitting me up for a subscription.

By now everyone knows the basic courtesies and ideals behind social media. It’s about sharing and trust. When you hide your stories behind a paywall and then go to tweet links out to your followers without taking down the blockade for at least that one article, you erode (destroy) my trust. My time is important. Publishers who do this are on par with spammers.

Once I click on a link from the publisher itself to find the story is behind a paywall I know that publisher is not serious about social media. They are only there as an extension of their old school marketing programs. I get so infuriated by this. It displays such contempt for what we are trying to build here. Spammers are one thing. We know they’re a disruptive force playing a numbers game, but a major publisher? Please, get a clue. Hire a social media consultant as an adviser so you can get the basics right. Shit, read an article or two on Mashable. But do something that shows you are in the game and not just getting a bored intern to tweet out random links all day.

Twitterlist Backlash – Why Don’t You Want To Be On A List?

There has been a very small but vocal backlash against one aspect of Twitter Lists: What if I don’t want to be on your list? What can I do about it? I have seen a few tweets propose that question. The only solution I have seen so far is to block the person who has put you on their list. Others have said they don’t want to block people, they just want to refuse to be listed by them.

I’m not exactly sure why people are objecting to being on certain lists. If someone wants to put me on their Twitter list of “Fugliest People on Twitter” or “Tweeters Who Pick Their Nose In Public” then I might object, I certainly belong on those lists, but I still might object to being on them. Point is that Mashable and many others (myself included) have been generating lists like my Twitter Professors blog post or my charities that tweet post and so far I’ve never seen anyone object to being on those lists. As a matter of fact they are usually pleasantly surprised to be on them.

My question for the community is: What kind of lists don’t you want to be on an why? Please leave a comment with your answer. I’ll do a follow up post analyzing the results if I get enough responses.

Google: Do no evil? Then pony up some dough for a starving artist.

By Lon S. Cohen

“You’d think that if anyone can afford to pay artists and designers it would be a company that is making millions of dollars.” – Illustrator, Joe Ciardiello in an interview with the New York Times about Google’s offer to artists to use their work for free “exposure”.

This still gets me angry so I thought I’d finally post this even though I wrote it months ago:

In an article in the New York Times titled, “Use Their Work Free? Some Artists Say No to Google” I was taken aback to say the least by the gaul of a company worth billions of dollars to ask artists (and we’re talking working, successful artists here) for the opportunity to use their work to decorate one of their new beta programs, for free. I find it appalling the level of disrespect that some people and most companies have for artists and writers. They always want us to work for free or for the vague idea of “exposure.” There is value in exposure but when it’s tied to a good cause or a charity not the product launch of a billion dollar corporation so they can appear cool and hip to the public. Want to be alternative, different, cool or hip? How about paying for an artists’ work. Paying what it’s worth.

I’ve been a painter and a writer in my years. In some form or another I’ve been creating art for my entire life. You wouldn’t believe the number of times I’ve been approached my companies or groups looking for me to expose my work to the world all for their own benefit and for zero pay. Imagine how many people will see my work. Also imagine all those people passing me by with my credit card bills through the roof and my stomach grumbling. It’s been a long slog but I worked very hard to get to the point where people actually pay me to write. I’d be damned to give it up to Google for free! So I understand how illustrators approached by a multi-billion dollar corporation that claims to “do no evil” would be insulted/angry.

Google should at the very least offer like a full year of Advertising for these artists with an unlimited monthly budget. That would be of value. Seems to me that Google should understand the value of “exposure.” That’s how they make all those Billions.

Brand or Spammed

Saying that a brand can Twitter is a pretty broad statement but what does that mean? Just as I learned in the advertising classes I sat in during college (my degree is in Advertising Art & Design) there are many ways to position your advertising in the public. Your message can be as diverse as there are personalities in the world. There are lots of different strategies to approaching social media in general and Twitter specifically.

There are some that say even thinking in terms of strategies and planning how to approach Twitter is antithesis of the whole social media mindset. You come to the social media tools for conversation, honestly and openly. Having a plan or a strategy implies from the start that you aren’t being entirely honest with the other folks you engage with. From a certain point of view this is true. For my own personal Twitter account I have no strategy or plan. When I tweet from @obilon, I’m there as myself, just a guy who wants to talk to other people. I’d never ever think of myself as a brand or having a tactic to my tweets. And I certainly don’t do it for marketing purposes. That said, like everyone else in the world that you will meet, I have an agenda at times and a particular point of view or opinion on everything from politics to wine, I don’t consciously try to make others see me in a certain way, except as I see myself.

That’s my personal account. With my personal account I am a lot of things, and one of them is a consumer. I do follow businesses on Twitter and enjoy see the tweets float through my Twitter stream. If something interests me I click on it. I may even be motivated by a brand to go check out one of their products and services. The only stipulation I have is that it’s not deceitful. I don’t want to be spammed or tricked into clicking a link I never intended to click. Do I like naked pictures of women? Well, to be perfectly honest, yes, I do. But do I want to be tricked into clicking on one? No way.

That’s why I follow @playboy. What you see is what you get from them, so to speak. If I follow some spammer account like @Sindee666 who tweets as if she’s a real person but all her links are porn that’s not honest. That’s spam pure and simple. Not all brands are spam. Let me repeat that. Not all brands are spam. At times there’s a fine line, but it’s up to the individual company to know where that line is and not cross it. There are times when your followers will, in fact, let you know when you’ve crossed the line from brand promotion to spam. Like my father-in-law is known to often say, one man’s floor is another man’s ceiling.

Bloomberg buys BusinessWeek…

In other news, Dell computers revealed that it is seeking out a typewriter company to take over.

According to this Mashable.com report, Bloomberg has purchased BusinessWeek for a sum of money that is somewhere between $2 million to $5 million. That’s right M-I-L-L-I-O-N D-O-L-L-A-R-S. As in the joke from the Austin Powers movies. Did we just go back in time?

Seems that the low price is offset by the fact that Bloomberg gets saddled with all of BusinessWeek’s debt, but still… Though I don’t know how much Ford would have paid for a Horse & Buggy manufacturer back in the early 20th Century or Dell would have shelled out for Underwood Typewriter Company in the 1980s.

Stop Worrying And Start Fishing

Small businesses thinking about getting into Social Media or who may have already embraced this new media space on the web but are not seeing the results they expect can learn a thing or two from some basic principles of fishing.

By Lon S. Cohen

I just hate fishing.

That’s what I used to tell my friends who’d suggest a fishing trip as a way to spend a Saturday. It all started when I was a kid and my Dad would take me down to the canal by our house. We’d throw a couple of lines in the water and wait for the fish to bite. But we never caught anything. Nothing. Never. Zilch.

We’d sit there for hours with the little fishing poles in our hands and I’d be miserable because I knew I’d never get anything out of it. It had all the downside of fishing without any of the upside. I’d have to cut the worms, bait the hook, be out in all kinds of crazy weather but I never came home with a fish. I decided that fishing was for the birds.

One day I found myself in a conversation with the director of a small trade school analyzing why his current Social Media strategy just wasn’t as effective as he expected it to be. He had high hopes when he started but things were turning out for him much like they did for me when I first took up fishing; he was coming up empty.

I told him all about best practices in generating useful content that potential customers might find interesting and link to (in this case it would be high school students or adults looking for continuing education), website optimization (SEO and user experience) and we spoke about the philosophy underlying the Web 2.0 moniker. In these meetings I usually get a lot of questions: How do I know what websites to begin with? What do I do when I get there? Which staff member am I going to get to do all of this? How do I know if it’s working? (And the inevitable ROI question.)

When explaining the way to devise a Social Media plan you want to be as specific as possible but sometimes the terms and concepts are a bit foreign to the average person. Then it occurred to me that my buddies had already given me all the explanation I needed when they sat me down to talk to me about fishing.

After years of resistance to taking up the sport some friends finally had enough of my excuses. They wanted to know why I had such a disdain for it. They knew I loved the water, boating and the beach but why not fishing? I told them of the countless days spent with absolutely nothing to show for it. They started in with a few questions about my experiences. Very soon I realized that I had a thing or two to learn from them. The conversation sounded very familiar. It also occurred to me that the same lessons could be applied to the way companies approach their Social Media strategy.

If you’re delving into Social Media the same way my father introduced me to fishing, you’re probably going to end up frustrated, sweaty, and hungry. Halfway through you’ll wonder why you ever thought it was a good idea in the first place, which would be a shame because when done right it can be extremely rewarding and even a little fun. There were five basic principles I took away from my conversation with my fishermen friends that seemed to apply both to fishing and Social Media.

What Water Do You Fish In?

The first thing my friends wanted to know was where I did my fishing when I was a kid. “We’d go down to the canal where the boats passed by on their way from the bay to the ocean,” I told them. Apparently, this was our first mistake. It’s crowded off the canal, too many boats, too much noise and no good place to sit down. It was out of the way and not anywhere near a good bait store or a decent deli. I was always hungry or thirsty and generally uncomfortable.

Turns out, I wasn’t fishing in the right place. When my buddies go fishing they go surf casting on the beach or take a boat out to the middle of the bay. They bring a cooler of food and drinks and they go where the fish are usually biting depending on the time of day and season.

My Dad and I started fishing in the most convenient place because it was close to home. But it wasn’t the best place. With a little time spent researching and a bit of money we could have rented an inexpensive boat to get away from the crowds, find a quiet little spot on the bay where there weren’t so many other people and probably caught a few fish.

If you’re in business and considering Social Media the first thing you need to do is take a lay of the land. If you turn to the obvious places for all the wrong reasons you’ll end up coming up empty. Just because Facebook is big doesn’t mean you belong there. But if it makes sense for your business to be there where do you start? How do you get a presence on Facebook? Is Twitter for you? What about FriendFeed? Yelp? That’s not a cry of pain, it’s a popular website where users add and critique businesses and events in cities across the country. Do you own a retail shop? Do you know what people are saying about it and how to deal with the reviews and comments if they’re not exactly stunning? Do you even respond?

Being in the right place for your type of business is key. You don’t need to be everywhere and quite frankly, if you are, you’re probably spreading yourself too thin. What you will end up with are a bunch of abandoned profiles on Social Networking sites across the World Wide Web. In my opinion that is worse than no presence at all because it shows you’re not sincere or particularly savvy.

Who’s Casting Your Line?

Next thing my friends wanted to know was whom I went fishing with. “My Dad,” I said. Sometimes I’d get to bring a friend but we always got in trouble for making too much noise and scaring the fish. (Never mind that the boats were trolling by us the whole time, motors rumbling.) My friends told me that when they go fishing they have a barrel of laughs. Not only that, they’ve all been fishing for as long as they can remember so they know everything there is to know about it. I think my Dad only took up fishing with me because he found the fishing poles one day cleaning out the garage and he wanted an excuse to get out of mowing the lawn.

The second mistake was that I was with the wrong people. I love my Dad to death but you know how the old man can be sometimes when he’s taking his only day off from work. He wants quiet time to think about important things like oil changes, balancing check books, his arrogant boss and the next mortgage payment.

Believe it or not, Dad was a big sailor. We’d go out on his little sailboat for hours just cruising over the bay. You’d think that someone who spent so much time on the water would be a natural at fishing. Turns out that’s not so. Just because you’re in the same place as people who fish doesn’t mean you’re any good at it. Why didn’t we ever take the sail boat out and fish off of that? Guess he didn’t think of it. That’s because he wasn’t integrating his existing assets with the activities we were trying to engage. He just found two old fishing poles and thought they would do the job without digging deeper.

The same goes for your strategy. The natural reaction for many companies is to grab the youngest whippersnapper in the joint who has a Facebook profile and anoint that employee the new Social Media Marketing Manager. It seems to make sense because if he’s using Social Media then he must understand how it works. Remember that just because I spent all that time on the water didn’t mean I knew the first thing about fishing. That same thing goes for your Generation Y employee.

I’d rather take an experienced Marketing or Communications professional and teach them the tools of Social Media because they understand the underlying basics that drive it. Sure you have to get used to letting go of total control of the message sometimes when you engage in online tactics and the results are not measurable in the same way that you’re used to, but I believe that you can teach an old dog some new tricks.

Let me take a moment here to dispel a myth. Social Media is absolutely trackable and quantifiable as any other channel as long as you embrace it with very specific goals in mind—goals that don’t include saying, “Well, that’s where our customers are so we have to be there” or “It’s hip and cool and I want my company to be hip and cool.” That’s setting yourself up for failure any day of the week. If you generate a reasonable plan for your Social Media strategy it will deliver measurable results. Get the right person on the job and you will see success.

What Kind Of Gear Do You Have?

Next my friends wanted to know what type of equipment we used. Like I said, my Dad found the poles cleaning out the garage. Someone had left them there and probably for a good reason. They looked old. His tackle box was a collection of hooks and lures he got at a five and dime store. Nothing about our gear was professional. When you opened the box everything was disordered and rusty. The poles were bent faded and cracked. They all worked, sure, but they weren’t what you’d call top-of-the-line if you get my drift.

My friends say they invest time and money picking out just the right gear. You don’t have to go all out and buy the top of the line items especially when you’re just starting out but you do have to make sure what you have is serviceable. They also make sure they bring extra, just in case. Nothing is worse than losing your hook and then spending the rest of the day sitting around watching the other guy fish. Turns out that this was mistake number three. My Dad and I never had the right equipment when we went fishing.

We all like shiny new gadgets. Some can argue that Web 2.0 is a philosophy that transcends the actually tools used to engage and measure it but that’s like saying fishing transcends trivial details like poles, fishing line and hooks. There are a number of APIs, plug-ins, widgets and mashups to help get the most out of your Social Media plan. You might find that being on Facebook makes sense according to your product and customer demographic but how do you know it’s working? (The fish don’t jump right into your frying pan.) There is a process that happens to get customers to watch the latest movie on your website or walk into your retail outlet. You need to have the right tools to take part in those conversations and then measure how effective they have been on your bottom line.

You can be selling gizmos, providing home health services or raising awareness of a chosen cause but any way you look at it, you need to know if the reason you got a spike in your business is a because your blog is letting customers know that you are a knowledge leader. Drill down on the details and you want to know if you should be blogging using Wordpress, blogger.com or manually churning out pages and XML feeds (probably not). Are you cross feeding your Twitter account to your FriendFeed or Facebook status updates or is it the other way around. Or neither. There are hundreds of solutions for every interaction on the web. But you need to tame the beast and know what tools will work for your business, reach your customers and fulfill your needs.

Does Your Bait Stink?

It was pretty obvious now. Three mistakes all contributing to my abhorrence of fishing. Things were starting to fall into place. I was actually thinking about giving it another shot.

But my friends weren’t done with me yet. They had one final question: What was the bait I used? I shrugged. “Worms, I guess,” I said. “Maybe some little rubber thing with a hook in it that looked like a worm. That’s all I remember.” They asked all kinds of questions I wasn’t prepared to answer. What type of bait, live or artificial? Where did you buy them? What jigs, plugs or spoons do you use? Depending on the season, body of water and type of fish there are hundreds of types of bait to choose from. The conversation had gone on long enough that I knew exactly where they were going with this line of questioning.

You can have all the tools, be sitting in a nice boat on a stocked lake, with surrounded by all your friends but everyone will be pointing fingers at you when they can’t catch any thing because you brought the wrong bait or worse no bait at all. This is what it’s like for what we call spammers. They project all these advertisements and obvious sales pitches out there with no plan and no targets. It’s all the wrong content directed at the wrong audience. Sure there may be a few people who want to see advertisements on Twitter for erectile dysfunction but unless you tread carefully with your advertising and messaging you’re going to piss a lot of people off in the process.

Just like that you understand what it means when people say content is king. It’s wrong to think that Search Engine Optimization means sticking a few keywords in the background of your webpage to achieve a number one search result. You need to produce quality text that speaks to the entirety of your business not just one word or phrase that you have become myopically focused upon. Just like the best fishing bait, you need to offer something that your customer want to take away from your website and blog and then point others toward. The hook is that you are the one offering quality information and services and people will want to return time and again for more or they want to be associated with your superior knowledge base by linking to it. The whole of Google’s search engine result philosophy is popularity. Everything else they do is in the hopes of making sure that that popularity is genuine and not being “gamed” by dubious marketing techniques or spammers.

What’s Biting?

But along with the right bait, you have to know what fish you are trying to catch or else you’re just wasting your time. We didn’t have the right bait and we didn’t know what fish we were trying to catch anyway. If you are looking for a particular kind of fish, you have to know a little something about it and different species of fish go for different bait.

So now we’re on to the good stuff: Customers. For the most part my Dad and I would just throw our lines into the water with no concept of what the heck was swimming past our hooks and really, no idea whether or not we wanted to catch what was in the water. This is where you are at an advantage. For the most part you know your customers or at least who you want your customer to be. If not the first step is to get to know your customers before you try to engage in Social Media. Pull out those old metrics and use them. Your customer demographics are still very helpful to understanding how to embrace a Social Media plan. There are all types of groups, forums, and networking sites. Some are very specific. Do you really want to have a big presence on MySpace if you’re selling REITs? Probably not. MySpace users tend to be filled with teeny boppers and unsigned musicians.

Gone Fishing!

I had come to a revelation: Either my father was not a very good fisherman or he didn’t care to catch anything and was just going through the motions to spend some time with his kid. That’s when I realized that despite everything we actually had a pretty good time but we weren’t there to catch fish. We were there to spend a few hours outside just being in each other’s company. I have fond memories of the few quiet hours we spent together by the water but no good memories of the fishing. I spent plenty more time with my Dad over the years but just gave up fishing. I guess it worked out because it could have been the other way around.

While that’s a nice story, if you’re a company manager, you don’t want to be hanging around the Social Networking pool just for some quality time. You want it to do something for your business. Optimally you want to bring in customers, provide a service or establish yourself as an expert in your industry. As in many new marketing services, especially in the Internet, there are a number of people who will tell you anything you want to hear, perpetrating myths and bad business practices that give the professionals a bad name. The fact is that careful planning with specifically outlined goals over the long term is the best and only way to approach Social Media and online marketing. It will take confidence and patience. You cannot become a trusted source in one day or reach the top of every search engine result page for every keyword or query in a few weeks. It’s a long-term plan undertaken with the utmost sincerity.

Anyone who tells you different just doesn’t know how to fish.