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Social Media Tips for the End of the World

May 18, 2011
by Jennifer Grappone

The world is ending this weekend, in case you haven’t heard. Presumably some of us will be still hanging around waiting for some sort of apocalyptic event while others will be plucked away to, I don’t know, eat Hot Pockets and play Angry Birds with the Almighty.

We’d hate for something like the end of the world to inconvenience your social marketing efforts, so here are a few things you can do to make this transition a little easier on your organization.

If you’re planning to be whisked away, good for you! We’ll certainly miss you, especially if you are considerate enough to make things a little easier for your customers in the following ways:

Schedule your farewell messages. There are many tools out there for scheduling tweets. We use free and cheap services like Postling, Sprout Social, and Tweetdeck for this purpose. If you’ve got a lot to say and you feel like splurging (hey, what’s a little money when all forms of commerce are useless anyway?) you can pay for a Pro account on a tool such as SocialOomph that allows you to bulk upload scheduled tweets.

Open up your LinkedIn group. Nothing is more annoying than being blocked out of a sweet LinkedIn discussion because the group administrator has been raptured. Do us left-behinds a favor and take advantage of LinkedIn’s newer group feature: set your group to “open” so anyone can join.

Give the looters a place to check in. Transition your happy customers to end-of-the-world looters* in tech-savvy style. Make sure to claim your Foursquare venue or Facebook Place for your business, so that your check-ins will show up on your official account.

* Important Note: Gravity Search Marketing does not endorse looting, even when the end of the world is nigh.

If, like me, you’re not going anywhere, and you may find yourself a little bored with your newly-deserted Twitter experience. So you’ll want to find some new friends to chat with. Try Listorious to find interesting and influential Twitter users that other people have listed. For the kind of company I’ll be keeping after the end of the world, I’m thinking my best bet would be to find experts in booze or irreverant humor. But you can also find listed social media experts, too.

In case the end of the world isn’t happening this weekend after all, I hope you’ll find these social media tips helpful, anyway.

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Google Images and the Osama Bin Laden News

May 2, 2011
by Jennifer Grappone

When big news breaks, people flock to the search engines, and the search engines work hard to deliver timely search results and useful updates. Forward-thinking SEOs tend to take advantage of these really big news events by monitoring the search results closely, with the goal of getting a glimpse into the search algorithms. We don’t get to pick these opportunities; they just happen. And so last night, while most people were watching or surfing the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death, I chose to monitor Google Image results for the search phrase “osama bin laden dead.”

Of course, Google’s search results are personalized, so your results may differ from mine. As I suspected he would, Danny Sullivan monitored Google Suggest, and announced that it took approximately 2 hours for Google to start suggesting search phrases related to the news of the evening. Here’s what I saw at 8:54pm, approximately 20 minutes after Obama’s speech:

And here’s what the Google suggest box looks like now:

After searching for “osama bin laden dead,” one of these suggested search phrases, I was struck by the image results, which were fanciful/fictional representations of this topic, and were clearly not posted in conjunction with the evening’s big news. Here’s a rundown of what I observed.

9:11pm – No top image results are tied to current news stories:

9:29pm – 2nd page of Google image results shows some recent images. These are time-stamped by Google. (I took the liberty of censoring the profanity on the final image on the first page of results.)

9:40pm – I noted that an image from the site talkingpointsmemo.com was taking the lead, on the low first page of Google image results.

Today, it appears that a page on Digital Trends has the highest-ranking recent image related to this search, but it has not out-ranked the top images that were in place previously. I am seeing it intermittently on the first page of Universal search results, but consistently in the first page of the Google images vertical search results.

I’m no longer seeing the image from talkingpointsmemo.com on the first 5 pages of image results.

I look forward to keeping an eye on Google image results to see how this develops.

Social Media Tips for the End of the World

Google Images and the Osama Bin Laden News

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