This morning I received an email about Google’s update to their social search results, a feature Google has been experimenting visibly with for the last year.

While I was impressed with the technology back then it was really nothing to write home about. To Google’s defense, they have been determined to understand the value of integrating social within the framework of search. I made a short video clip back in January, when the Toyota domino recalls were happening – this is what it looked like nearly a year ago.

Since then, Google has made vast improvements and beneficial enhancements to how they have integrated social into search. It is less intrusive. They show the real-time updates subtly instead of the constant scrolling updates.

If you do choose to click on the recent social updates below the news results, you’ll be taken to a real-time search results update page, a trending timeline and the – pièce de résistance – top links! See video clip below.

Initially, I looked at this page and said, “Okay, this is pretty cool but who cares?” So I took a closer look and came up with a few good ways all of us marketers may be able to take advantage of this new offering from Google:

Trending

• Share Something New: The majority of people who are RTing on Twitter, commenting/sharing on Facebook and other social platforms are most likely saying the same thing over and over and over again. This is your chance to share something new. Join in the banter, but offer a fresh perspective, valuable piece of information or other. Something that out of all 585 comments yours will standout because you are offering a new sound into the noise. Incidentally, at the time when I looked on Wordloo.com this morning to get the top trending search, the most popular item was “Beyonce Pregnant” – just in case you are curious about the title of this post – we thought we would play along in the trend and offer up some new information to be shared (highly irrelevant to the folks that care about Beyonce’s pregnancy, by the way, Beyonce congratulations).
• Profile Audiences: Without going into too much detail on this, clearly the folks commenting on Beyonce being pregnant are not the same folks commenting on Virginia Thomas, but it is a good way to understand what your target audience is most interested in (if you don’t know this already).

Top Links

• Early Bird Gets the Worm: If you can’t be the first to create the news, you can be the first to comment on it, and quite possibly get a link from it. If you can watch (obsessively) for trending topics in your industry, Google will show you who is the most authoritative for that trend – get a comment on there – maybe with your link and you’ve got exposure.
• Identify Authority Sites: If you aren’t the early bird, you may still be able to get the worm. By observing which sites are visible for your target topics, you will discover new opportunities for SEO, such as who to interview or be interviewed by, guest write for and comment on.

These are just a few ways Google’s new social search can benefit you, there are several more.

What is your take on social search results?

Link building can get a bad rap sometimes. Often people think it’s just spam, but really link building is a very beneficial component of a successful SEO campaign. Some companies buy links or hire companies to post automated links (which is heavily frowned upon by search engines and degrades the Internet experience, in my opinion). Why would you want a computer to do your work, when you can get better results by posting legitimate quality links?

Here are four pieces of advice to getting your comments and links approved:

1. Be real. I find the most successful way to get your back links approved is to be your authentic self. Go ahead, state your opinion on the topic, as long as you can tie it to the topic of your link or keyword. This way you’re posting a real comment as if there was no link there. Saying “Great Post, I will bookmark your site and read more.” is not a real comment, it’s spam.

2. Be relevant and respectful. Always make sure that the blog or article you’re posting a comment to is related to the link you’re posting. Once you find a relevant site, read the article and leave comments that reference something that was mentioned in the article.

3. Be a social non-spammer. If you think of link building as providing the author and readers with helpful information or added value in your commenting versus trying to get a link, you will likely see an increase in the number of approved comments. In my experience, being myself has worked to my advantage when link building. Occasionally my efforts are misinterpreted as spam since I’m including a link. On the other hand, there are occasions when people comment back and a conversation begins, which to me is very valuable because you are building a trust with the individual whose blog or news source you are leaving a comment on. They know you are leaving a legitimate comment and the fact that there is a link there is fine by them because they either like that your comment was real and related to their post or know that you may be working an angle by link building, but they are okay with that since you are adding value.

4. Don’t take it personally. It will get frustrating at times when your comments and links are not approved. Experiences like these can teach you about your link building approach and technique. For instance, you may find that you need to shorten your comment or try another approach, or maybe the topics don’t relate like you thought they did. There are so many factors that can determine if your link gets approved or not, but the bottom line is to not get discouraged and to keep it real.

photo love to: seattleclouds.com

Photo by bb_mattWhile it may seem that the entire social ecosystem has been thinking that Twitter is floundering in their business plan (how in the world will they make money), especially after important documents were leaked back in July of 2009. Twitter is proving quite the contrary.

This month, Twitter sent out an email to API users stating that over the coming weeks they would be making two important updates that will impact how users interact with Twitter applications. (Update 1: Starting August 31, new authorization rules for applications and Update 2: t.co URL wrapping (long URL will display with t.co)).

And just last week we saw vast improvement to the user interface with regard to the account setup process and next steps to additional features and functions on twitter.com.

While these updates seem harmless and almost predictable, are they indications of how Twitter is positioning for the future? And what is that future?

The release of their iPhone/Android apps and ad platform earlier this year coupled with new UI changes and new API technology updates has led me to make either a “very bold” prediction or “very insightful” prediction as I look into the crystal ball of Twitter’s future.

Twitter to Require Payment for API Use
There I said it, and with good reason. There are currently over 250,000 applications built using the Twitter API – some are free and some are paid. Why should everyone else (Radian6, CoTweet, etc.) make money off Twitter’s technology and userbase except Twitter? Does it not seem reasonable, that now that so many have built a business on Twitter’s platform, Twitter should start building a business on it?

If this actually comes to fruition, imagine the effect it will have on paid applications or those that are VC-funded and rely solely on the Twitter platform. For those third-party applications with a large user base their entire business could go by the wayside if they don’t cough up dollars to keep themselves in business. Especially if Twitter sees profit potential in that application’s niche.

With 145 million registered users (roughly 20% are highly active tweeters) it may not make sense to just shut off their API entirely to third party apps; this would only frustrate and cause friction amongst the current user base who use one or multiple third-party Twitter applications, but why not monetize the asset that has been built. It looks like it is going to be a reverse of the Facebook business model (Facebook built the user base on their platform then opened it up to developers).

Supporting Evidence Keeps Mounding
CB Insights reported a 50% decline in VC funding from June 2009 to May 2010 in early-stage investment of Twitter startups. Mashable’s Jolie O’Dell said that “While third-party apps have drifted toward the shallow end of the investment pool, Twitter itself has been raising healthy rounds to continue growing its staff and infrastructure.” Last Fall, Twitter raised $100 million and just six months later closed another round of funding. This has to be an indication that something big and magical is happening under the Twitter birdcage.

Do you agree and what are your favorite third-party Twitter apps and if they go away will you go directly to the source?