YiGit GuЯSoY

Social media has come of age. Marketers now have the ability to augment their traditional marketing approaches with rich behavioral and activity-based targeting that should increase marketing ROI significantly.

However, businesses are facing an uncomfortable truth: There are no “best practices” for measuring a successful social media campaign. Crowd behavior is dynamic and context-specific, and it is difficult, if not impossible, to build a “one size fits all” solution.

A structured approach to capturing, measuring, analyzing and refining marketing strategies in near real time is essential to executing a successful social campaign. Initially, however, companies need to invest in infrastructure to make such a learning cycle possible.

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Google started rolling out a major overhaul to its familiar homepage. Now, you’ll see instant search results that are generated with each key that you type. These results will be shown in addition to the search suggestions that were previously available.

The new feature is known as Google Instant. It’s based on the idea that people type more slowly than they read. Because you’ll be able to scan for results while you type, Google hopes you’ll find the right content more quickly than before because you won’t have to finish typing a search term or even press search to find the result you want.

Well, Google has taken the next step in its world domination plan, banning Microsoft Windows from internal use.

Employees will be given the choice between Apple’s Mac OS and Linux.

Adding insult to injury, Google is also publicly citing Windows security problems for the decision and blaming Windows vulnerabilities for the China hacking incident.

So that’s 20,000+ Windows licenses that won’t be sold and renewed at Google in future years.

Given that Google is in the process of introducing a competitive platform and operating system (Android/Chrome), this move isn’t surprising.  The important question for Microsoft is whether other companies will follow suit.

Google is developing a system that will enable web publishers of any size to automatically submit new content to Google for indexing within seconds of that content being published. Search industry analyst Danny Sullivan told us today that this could be “the next chapter” for Google.

Last Fall we were told by Google’s Brett Slatkin, lead developer on the PubSubHubbub (PuSH) real time syndication protocol, that he hoped Google would some day use PuSH for indexing the web instead of the crawling of links that has been the way search engines have indexed the web for years.

Google senior product manager Dylan Casey said yesterday at Sullivan’s Search Marketing Expo in Santa Clara, California that the company plans to soon publish a standard way for site owners to participate in a program much like that.

How The System Might Work

PuSH is a syndication system based on the ATOM format where a publisher tells the world about a Hub that it will notify every time new content is published. Subscribers then tell the Hub “when this Publisher posts new content, please deliver it to me right away.” So instead of the Subscriber checking back with the Publisher all the time to see if there’s new content, they just sit and wait to be told that there is by the Hub. The Publisher publishes something, then tells the Hub that it’s available, then the Hub goes and delivers it to all the Subscribers. This can take as little as a few seconds.

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Google is kicking off the new year with two improvements based on Google Squared and Rich Snippets technologies. First, they are applying the research behind Google Squared to add a new “answer-highlighting” feature to search, and second they are expanding Rich Snippets to include events.

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