Socialmedialand

Posts Tagged ‘google’

 Twitter, meet paid advertising. Paid advertising, Twitter.

Twoogel launched today – it’s a Google powered search engine for Twitter, complete with, you guessed it, PPC ads provided by Google.

( @Twoogle is a third party site that’s not directly affiliated with either Google or Twitter – simply using the technology provided by both to create an integrated search experience.)

The mix of paid advertising with Twitter search results is interesting. Seach.twitter.com doesn’t include paid ads to Web sites or other landing pages – just search results full of tweets. It’s possible that if a page full of positive tweets about your company comes up in search results, and next to it there’s a paid advertisement directing people to your landing page for a free trail or coupon or whatever, they might be more inclined to click on that ad secure in the knowledge that other Twitterites seem to like you. At the same time, a page full of negative tweets might be just as equally detrimental.

Users may have a different reaction to it – why use Twoogle when other twitter search engines provide social elements (trending topics, tag clouds, sentiment, etc) and all Twoogle has are ads? Ads aren’t a big attraction for users. I think Twoogle will have to step up in those areas in order to get a significant amount of search traffic in order to support their paid ad model.

Time will tell whether a service like this takes off with users or not, but in a way it’s a logical extension of the same old “how will Twitter make money” argument. One of the ideas put forward has been including paid advertising space on the network, on search results, on profiles, anywhere. It seems that instead of waiting for Twitter to make a move like this on their own, someone else has harnessed the power of Twitter with the money making ability of Google ads and made their own search engine.

I’d predict that if it does take off, either Google or Twitter (or both) will take notice and integrate a similar idea into their own search sites.

Thoughts? Like it, don’t like it, don’t care? Leave a comment and let me know!

I wrote a post cautioning you against ignoring the giants - like email, Facebook, Twitter, etc when choosing tactics for your social strategy. But now I have to caution the major giants from ignoring the David’s of the world.

@Copyblogger sent a tweet out linking to this post about Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt’s, position on Twitter:

“Speaking as a computer scientist, I view all of these as sort of poor man’s email systems,”

“In other words, they have aspects of an email system, but they don’t have a full offering. To me, the question about companies like Twitter is: Do they fundamentally evolve as sort of a note phenomenon, or do they fundamentally evolve to have storage, revocation, identity, and all the other aspects that traditional email systems have? Or do email systems themselves broaden what they do to take on some of that characteristic?

I think the innovation is great. In Google’s case, we have a very successful instant messaging product, and that’s what most people end up using.

Twitter’s success is wonderful, and I think it shows you that there are many, many new ways to reach and communicate, especially if you are willing to do so publicly.”

It has the ring of “famous last words” if you ask me. To think that Google’s instant message is equal to Twitter is a little over the top in my opinion. They serve very different purposes and really aren’t comparable. Email, also, serves a different purpose than Twitter. Twitter allows you to communicate to a broad network of people, start dialogues with them, join into conversations already in progress and share the wealth of the results of these interactions with the world. When I “reply all” on my email I doubt that has the same type of reach.

I’m not saying email is dead. I’m not saying IM is useless. I’m saying that all three things are separate, individual things that serve different purposes and for Eric Schmidt to categorically dismiss Twitter as something that will either evolve into email/IM or fade away as a novelty is extremely short sighted in my opinion.

Enough about my opinion, what about yours? Leave a comment!

My coworker, Andrew, attended a Digital Summit with Google where they gave the attendees the following quiz to test how digitally immersed everyone is. He created this quiz for Sitewire’s blog but I wanted to repost it here as well. He scored a 92. I got an 88 – where do you rank?