Only When the Words Outdo the Silence

Well, after hearing about this development – both rumors way back when and current articles – I’ve finally seen Twitter (real time) results appear in Google.  Ironically, they appear when I search for “Twitter results in Google” – ha!  Have a look:

Written on April 8, 2009

It took me awhile to join the Twitter wagon.  I signed up about a year ago, tweeted that same day and then let my account sit for three months.  Who wants to hear about me cutting my fingernails, I thought.  No one.  Life can be quite banal.  No, scratch that.  Life is banal (it’s also many other exciting things, so no existential hand clapping).  Cutting your fingernails is banal.  Boring.  It’s meant to be experienced by you alone.  Again, no tweet needed to inform the world of my clicking and snipping.  Then, about three months later, I sent out an email to the SEO team asking if anyone knew of a program for such-and-such task.  I received one reply; it was an answer,  so the part where most of my teammates ignored me was okay.  With the answer came a post script, “This is the sort of question Twitter is good for; you should check it out more.”   Interesting.  Twitter as a search engine.

Fast forward to last week.  By now, I’ve fooled around 90 people into following me on Twitter.  I follow approximately 80.  By now, I’ve mastered the art of including @ replies anywhere within a tweet.  I use is.gd, budurl and tinyurl simply because I can – why limit yourself?  I follow hilariously pointless accounts like AutomatedHouse and enjoy The Odyssey immensely.  By now, I make sure the number of characters I use in a tweet allows space for people to retweet my message (talk about thinking what you have to say is interesting…sheesh).  Basically, I’m in it.  I understand the ecosystem.  I have enough followers to ask Twitter a question I cannot ask Google, Yahoo or MSN.

While reading a blog I come across the interesting picture at the top of this post.  Didn’t know the name of the painting and didn’t know who painted it.  In a situation like this, Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, Mahalo and every other search engine out there wouldn’t be able to tell me the name of the painting and who painted it.  I even right clicked on the image, selected Copy Image URL and pasted it into my address bar hoping the person who put it on the internet named the file the painting or painter’s name.  No dice – http://www.hegel-system.de/de/gif/Gruen.jpg didn’t tell me what I needed to know (see, tag everything on your site properly; it enhances usability, user experience, findability).  If you search for [gruen] on Google you get to learn about the Gruen Watch Company or Sara Gruen, both interesting I’m sure (side note: if you do a Google image search for [gruen] you can find the answer to this question, but we’re not all that internet savvy, now are we…?).

So, I head to Twitter.  I tweet, “does anyone who know painted this? *url inserted here*?”  Within 5 minutes – no it’s not a microwave – I get two replies, “isn’t that hieronymous bosch?” and “looks like Bosch to me too.”  The plot thickened when I received a reply that read, “Matthias Grünewald 1515 “The Temptation of St. Anthony”…different from Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych version a decade earlier.”  The point, of course, is that I used Twitter as a search engine.  I couldn’t upload the image to Google for the answer.  I didn’t want to instant message each person on my AIM account because that’d be annoying and it only contains co-workers, so the likelihood someone knew the answer was low (you want high conversions, right?).

This is what Twitter has become, a real-time search engine.  Of course, there are still people who tweet about the banal things in life, and that’s okay, do you as they say, but there are also people out there that use Twitter to provide information to followers, links about search marketing or the hunger issue in your town.  Importantly, there are millions of people using Twitter and some are potentially talking about your product, service or your company.

From a broader perspective, Twitter is not the end-all-be-all social medial platform and will never hold that crown – no platform will hold that crown.  The internet is a rapidly changing environment and the crowd moves from one platform to the next.  As a business, you need to follow the crowd.  Will the crowd always move to a platform that is easily trackable and readily monetized?  Of course not.  But, in the age of the internet, it’s about the crowd.  It’s not about the business.  My favorite Seth Godin line, and one I perhaps refer to too often, goes something like this: the internet was not created by business people and does not exist to make you money – it’s not how does it help me?  It’s, “how are people using the internet and how do I help them achieve their goals?”  Taking that same spirit, if I had to create a social media strategy in one sentence, it would be “follow the crowd.”

UPDATE:

Twitter recently struck deals with the search engines that will further incorporate tweets into the search results pages.  Google had already been pulling status updates from Twitter and returning them for people queries – for example, I check my name on Google often because I use it as a sort of testing ground for how things rank and have seen my updates in Twitter for months.  However, this deal could signal the beginning of the search engines looking to these updates as more of a signal in determining how relevant a page/person is to a query.  Even with the links on Twitter nofollowed, it would be entirely antithetical to this deal if tweets didn’t score as a relevancy signal – even if it’s blunt at this point in time.