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

Posted: January 21st, 2010 | Author: obilon | Filed under: All | 3 Comments »

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.

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