As you’d expect from an savvy social media monitoring organization like Radian6, their homepage has all the social bookmarking icons that have become de riguer for any website in this space.

However, they have something interesting going on over on the right hand side of the current homepage layout:

Well, it’s not unusual for companies to play up their customer testimonials to help build trust for visiting prospects. However if you click through on one of the testimonials, you are taken to a page listing all the props they have received on Twitter:

What a fascinating approach! Talk about portraying trust. These obviously aren’t testimonials extracted under duress by a demanding marketing team five years ago. Just real people providing unsolicited tributes and recommendations. If you so desire you can even click on their profiles and go through and see who they are. Oh, and look at the timestamps: praise flows on a daily basis.

Could this work for you? If you have a lively customer base on Twitter, and products they are all singing about, why not highlight this on your website?

Setting up Twitter customer testimonials

The first step is to favorite all those positive posts. Radian6 has done that here:

The next step is to take the RSS feed from this page and build a page on your site that displays this in a tidy Twitter format. If you are non-technical, ask your IT team to knock something up or look into modules that can do this for you. If you have a site built in PHP, you can try adapting this script from Lylo.

And that is pretty much it.

I’d suggest this as a great example of how social media can supplement a web marketing strategy. Any other examples? Let me know…

You probably have seen the latest incarnation of Google search, unless you live in a cave. The Google hype machine swung into operation with a ballsy approach to a teaser followed by the Google Instant announcement and launch in the US the following day.

Since the Big G did such a good job of explaining this, I’ll let them do the talking courtesy of YouTube:

It remains to be seen what users make of this, but one expected behavior, is the use of more complex search terms as users can amend their query instantly based on the results they see. Merissa Meyer, Google’s VP of search products and user experience elaborates here. Let’s say I start looking for ‘android phones’, I can instantly see results for this term, and also derivatives. I can instantly go in the direction of telephony providers, such as ‘android phones t-mobile’ or ‘android phones verizon’. Actually, I notice there is a comparison link with an iPhone on the first page, so I could go in the direction of ‘android phones iphone’ and check out the relative merits.

For users that take to this new way of searching (there are apparently those who don’t), there are potential behavioral shifts that could affect what search results are shown, and, more importantly for us online marketers, what search results are clicked.

A couple of examples:

As noted earlier, search terms are expected to become more complex. This means we could see more traffic coming into our sites from the long tail of search: terms that could be four or more words in length. When we think of what keywords to promote and optimize, we may be able to find traffic even when we widen our portfolio into quite specific niches.

The navigational buttons that take you on to additional pages of results are that much further away. When using Google Instant, most of the clicking and typing happens around the query box at the top of the results. Don’t like what you see on your initial query? Instant makes it much easier to refine that search and see if the follow-up is more successful. This means less time flicking through the second and third page of results in search of relevant links. For marketers, this could well put additional pressure on taking that coveted spot on the first page of results.

It’s early days for this service and user adoption and behavior patterns are by no means set, but Google Instant has the potential to have a significant affect on the field of search marketing.

What the pundits are saying:

• Craig Danuloff questions the algorithm used to power Instant
• SearchEngineWatch list the top 10 things marketers need to know
• Matt Cutts on how users can get information faster as Google helps formulate the query

If you’ve ever had a problem losing a blog post to an errant web-based WYSIWYG editor, or have struggled cutting and pasting from an MS Word document into a blog post, then you might want to take Windows Live Writer for a spin.

This small Windows desktop client plays nicely with all the major blog platforms out there and offers more formatting options than you may get with your standard blogging interface (eg. tables for starters). 

Go ahead and download Windows Live Writer or read my post over on IBM developerWorks for more information on this nifty little app.

I'd venture to say the hard part in blogging is coming up with good ideas and finding the time to turn them into attractive blog posts. However, that final stage of laying the post out in your blogging platform can add some friction to the process.

Most blogging platforms have some form of web-based WYSIWYG editor, however these do have some limitations:

• Being web-based there is a danger you can lose your work if you lose your connection or your browser craps out
• Functionality can be limited, eg. that table you’ve spent an hour constructing may show up as little more than garbled text
• The editor may not deal well with formatting from a word processing document, such as MS Word
• If you want to share your content in multiple locations, you will have to login to many different pages

Here’s where Windows Live Writer can come in. This small desktop client from Microsoft functions as a stripped down version of MS Word optimized for creating blog posts.

You can use it directly to file your thoughts and save them locally as drafts for later publishing. You can get funky with your layouts by adding pictures, tables, video,  and even maps! Being a Microsoft product, it plays nicely with Word and does a great job of stripping out all those annoying formatting tags you see when copying Word content into most editors. For the power blogger, it supports multiple accounts and makes it easy to take a post written for one location and instantly publish it elsewhere.

Sold? Want to get started?

Here’s a cheat sheet for those of you blogging on developerWorks. BTW, if you aren’t blogging here, but would like to, sign up now to see if your blog idea is accepted. If you are using another platform (such as Wordpress or Blogger), most of this still applies, although you will need to alter the URL for your blog.

Setup

Download Windows Live Writer

Once installed, it will start a wizard to connect to your blog.

Use the following settings:

What blog service do you use? Select ‘'Other blog service'

Web address of your blog: Enter ‘https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/?lang=en’

Username/Password: (same combination you use to login to developerWorks)

At this stage it should automatically find the blog. If it doesn’t and asks you for a blogging service, use the following details:

Type of blog: Select ‘Atom’

Remote posting URL: Enter ‘https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/?lang=en’

You will then be asked whether the client can make a temporary post so it can detect the publishing formatting settings. Select 'Yes'.

That’s it! You will be dropped into the editor and you are now ready to post.

Posting

You’ll notice that the editor is very close to MS Word and you can do most standard formatting using the top toolbars. You will also there find options to add images, video, tables, etc.

A word of warning about images: if you want to upload local files (rather than link to images already on the web), you may want to upload your post as a draft and add these from within your web editor. Sometimes Windows Live Writer can struggle to upload images directly to your blog.

Remember to specify categories (at the bottom of the post editor) to help you organize your content.

If everything looks good, go ahead and hit ‘Publish’! If you’re squemish by nature or have any doubts, you may want to go ‘Save Draft’ > ‘Post Draft to Blog’ just to make sure all looks fine before going live.

Happy blogging! 

(BTW, in case you are wondering, this post was created in Windows Live Writer!)