Session 2 Day 1 – SES – Real Time Search and SEO for the TV?

Firstly @aaronkahlow started off with an interesting and super quick presentation with some very interesting facts, figures and trends.

A few highlights:

• Most people think Twitter and Facebook when they thing social media contribution but these two only amount for 40% of all the social media content out there.
• Real time search is important because there is an additional 230 million pieces of new content per day, 40% of all searches now have a real time component making it a multi billion dollar market.
• The big guys are still struggling because their technology is based on content that has longevity vs the immediacy of real time content

Some misconception

• It is not as widespread as previously thought with 74% of all Twitter content created by 5% of users
• It is estimated that 90% of all social media content is created by 10% of users
• The second speaker was Rob Walk from @novarising who went through an interesting presentation of a social search project they have been working on to develop a top 1000 music chart from social media mentions. He discussed some of the challenges facing their tech team in creating a real time search engine, the number of data points being a consistent challenge.

SEO for TV

Bill Scott from EaselTV discussed the new platform for TV in the UK which is going to transform on- demand viewing. For £200 you will be able to buy a unit that will enable you to browse the on-demand offering.

The relevance for search being how content could creep up a very list-based environment. The initial engines look like they will rely heavily on meta data and multimedia SEO practise to get to the top of that list. It looks as if it is quite a closed market in terms of search and browser choice as he mentioned the average user will not find it easy to change search provider within the system initially.

He coined a phrase called “suggestive discovery” which would use behavioural trends to suggest content that could be relevant to the user. The Interactive TV service would profile you and show you more that you liked and less that you didn’t, sounds like a good idea although I assume a key challenge would be profiling me in my viewing times and not when my kids watch. I’m sure it’s a big future growth area and a possible new market for search marketers.

Finally

Bill Fisher (@williamfischer) from twitterjobsearch.com discussed the opportunities within real time within the job search sector which is a massive industry in the UK. There are now over 6000 job boards not taking into account major brands’ direct initiatives. Twitter job posting seems a trend that is here to stay and their technology is effectively a semantic search engine that determines if a tweet is a job offering and uses related links to map meta data against it. It geo-locates it if possible and allows real time search against the constant stream of opportunities.