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7 ecommerce strategies for standing out in a digital world

By Jan Riley in Featured

Even in a dismal economy internet sales are growing. As people become more confident with ecommerce transactions and savvy with search, selling online just makes good business sense. The drawback is that more and more businesses are vying for a piece of the pie.  As your customer reach expands so does the level of competition. The internet is gigantic and your customers are an impatient bunch.

Be unique or go home

That is why it is so important for web marketplaces and ecommerce stores to differentiate themselves from the crowd. It’s no longer sufficient to declare you have the best prices or selection, because the fact is, your visitors can compare these statements faster than you can spell them out on the page. The good news it that technology and creativity now make it easier than ever for small web stores to offer a shopping experience second to none.

Here are 7 ecommerce strategies for standing out in a digital world.

1. Use expanded descriptions, multiple product views to convey the real value of your products. You wouldn’t nail down shirts in a clothing store so why would you only offer one view of your products? This doesn’t have to use elaborate or expensive technology, multiple views, close-ups and live use photos can provide a lot of information other stores don’t bother to share.

2. Invite customer opinion with customer product reviews and real life testimonials. Consider adding customer comments as audio clips. Adding customers audio testimonials can be a simple as taping a phone conversation. (With permission of course) Using audio clips is simple, inexpensive and does not require technical expertise or expensive online tools. By itself an audio testimonial may not make the sale but it is a very effective tipping tool, helping to nudge reticent buyers over their hesitation and into a sale.

3. Offer relevant information that doesn’t sell. You heard me right, give people information for free without trying to sell them anything.  Remember that the main reason people are online is to get information -period. That is the primary goal especially before they buy. Statistics show that the longer people stay on your website the more likely they are to buy from your store (even if they decide to buy at a brick and mortar store) Use an irresistible giveaway to capture emails of people not yet ready to buy and use your content to keep them engaged until they are ready.

You can write articles, give teleclasses, offer whitepapers, provide downloads, share interviews, recipes or helpful hints.  Make sure the information is informative, entertaining and relevant to your customers rather than a veiled attempt to sell.  People can smell hype a mile away and this is the kiss of death online. Always remember your competitors are only a click away.

4. Get into video. A brief welcome message that shares your value proposition can give s a call to action can engage visitors and move them down the buying path. Use videos to educate your visitors on product uses or assembly. Create a short comparing product features or demonstrate the product in use.  Keep your videos short (under 3 minutes) and clear.  Host your videos on public sites like Viddler or Youtube and post them on your website.  Here are a few examples talking about connecting with your website visitors.

It might seem that video clips within product descriptions are a luxury but I foresee video product descriptions as being the norm within 5 years.  According to Internet tracking firm comScore’s Video Metrix, Americans watched about 14.8 billion videos in January 2009, or roughly 101 videos per U.S. Internet user. Todays online shoppers are using alternate avenues like YouTube to research product. Get a jump on the competition by giving your online shoppers a bigger experience, not by lowering your prices.

5. Put a face on your store – people buy form people not computers. Yes they use the computer to do it but they want to know there are real people who will back up their purchases, especially with higher ticket items, or products they are not sure they need. This will become increasingly important in a slow economy because buyers are not as willing to risk a purchase if they feel their concerns will get lost in cyberspace.

Consider adding human pictures to your about us page. Include staff picks or reviews and encourage your employees to write on the blog, social media sites and to contribute articles. After all these are the people your virtual customers will interact with. Don’t hide behind a virtual storefront – don’t be afraid to let your customers get to know the people they are buying from.

6. Make sure your online store has a clear value proposition that speaks to your target market. This value statement must answer the question that is on your best  customers mind; “Why should I buy form you over the other guys?” If your website cannot convey this critical piece of information then your visitors will definitely miss it.  Your ideal customer should immediately recognize that they are in the perfect place when they land on your ecommerce site.

Many online stores resist crafting a clear value proposition that targets a particular type of customer for fear of alienating other visitors. Look at your statistics and you might see that you make most of your money from a niche group or groups. A clear value proposition targets these customers and tells them exactly why you are the best solution to their problem.

7. Use social media to establish relationships and get feedback. Believe it or not your customers are hanging out in communities online. No, you may not visit Facebook or Linked in but social media sites are doubling every year. They aren’t just for teenagers anymore.  The purpose of social media sites is to share opinions and interests. Connect with target market through blogs, twitter, linked in, Facebook, Stumbleupon or any of the dozens of niche social media sites.

Your customers are having conversations with or without you so schedule in an hour a week to schmooze online. This is a way to make connections, not sales – keep it authentic , informative and reap the benefits of worldwide word of mouth referrals.

The way people buy has changed forever with internet ecommerce. The world is literally your marketplace and customers can live just about anywhere. Using just one of these suggestions could immediately increase your ecommerce store profits. Now imagine what implementing all 7 could do!

These simple ecommerce strategies can help your online store stand out in a digital world.

Jan Riley is the CEO and founder of LeadMastersUSA, a website marketing company founded in 2004 and based in Atlanta, Ga. Her entrepreneurial spirit and internet experience along with a talented staff has made LeadMastersUSA synonymous with innovative marketing tactics, increased ecommerce profits and business websites that build relationships. We believe that the true power of the internet is NOT technology – it is communication. People buy from people. Discover how your website can connect, capture and convert visitors into customers with our 3 minute weekly video series at www.LeadMastersUSA.com You can contact Jan at jan@LeadMastersUSA.com or call 678 318 7515.

Marketing Without Faking It – A Case Study

By Jason Falls in Featured

Case studies always present the best inspiration. It’s not that we’re necessarily an imitation society but knowing that something worked once makes us more confident in trying it ourselves. On Friday, I was presented with a powerful example of how one person, who readily admitted she was new to social media and feels, “half of the things on Twitter I don’t understand,” not only used Twitter to reach a potential customer, but won a brand enthusiast.

How to Tell If Facebook Is Worthwhile For Your Business or a Waste of Time

By Tinu AbayomiPaul in Featured

Social media is here to stay. There. I said it. It will be around in some form for years to come. Do you really see Facebook, Twitter and Web videos going somewhere?

Or do you just see them evolving and becoming part of a larger system the same way business blogs did? Great. Then we can start figuring out how to use social media to our benefit.

Now that we’re past this issue of whether we are in love with MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook, Ning, etc., and we realize that we’re focusing on whether these tools are useful or not, (not on whether or not they give us the warm fuzzies), there’s still a fundamental question. This goes for whether you’re using Facebook pages, Facebook ads, or a regular Facebook profile.

How do you know if sites like Facebook are for YOU? How can you tell if a social networking site can help YOUR company?

It boils down to three things.

1- Are There Enough People on the Site in Your Interest Area for it to Be Worth Your While?

You have to think about business connections too, not just clients.

You can connect with people who send you business. Think about what the value of a new client is too, whether you think can get one out of 100, and how long it takes. When people come to your profile, are they visiting your site? If not, is your profile set up correctly?

Experiment. There are several very subtle things you can do that maximize your exposure, not just daily clicks through to your site.

To find out if there are enough people on Facebook who need your plumbing services, search for home improvement groups. Check your regional network and look on the Marketplace page. See if you can find people in your local area to befriend who would need your services – but for heaven’s sake, don’t be aggressive in your promotion.

Instead, create a Facebook page, run an ad, or have the type of networking conversations where “so, what do you do?” will naturally come up. And you can take it from there.

Networking at Facebook can be like hanging out at a neighborhood mixer. Yeah, you might want to mention that you’re a handyman, or that you work at the bank, and give someone your card, but you don’t want to turn those first few getting-to-know-you conversations into a sales pitch.

Let them know who you are, what you do, and after a few conversations, send them a no-strings coupon for them or a friend “just in case you ever need it buddy” and go on being friends.

They’ll remember you if you keep in touch, and are a nice enough guy.

2- Does your company have an RSS-capable site that updates frequently?

If it does, a profile on Facebook gives you another place to share your RSS link. You can import your blog posts going forward, or summaries. There are also applications like NetworkedBlogs that will help your blog posts get exposure from interested readers.

3- Do you already have clients, friends, associates, whose signal you can isolate, or whose noise you can penetrate, using Facebook?

This has to be the most underestimated use of Facebook. My first month at Facebook I had direct interactions with ten influential people I admire. Some of them I look up to for personal reasons, others are greats in some aspect of search, the internet or technology. One actually sent me a client.

Instead of installing hundreds of applications and super-poking someone or posting spam to their Super Wall, you can be the smart person who sends a letter and gets a response, the one who sends a private message and is sent a gift in return, or just get the wonderful feeling of having a world famous personality you admire not only acknowledge you, but contact you directly.

One of the greatest things about Facebook is how it can help cement relationships between you and people you know but didn’t think you had much in common with. You know how sometimes, you want to write to say hello to someone, but at the same time, you don’t want to waste their time?

Or when you think about some great author or celebrity you admire, and what you’d say to them if you could meet them? Maybe you just want to compliment a more famous colleague and not sound like a dork.

Facebook can help with this when it functions as an automatic ice-breaker, facilitating an intial contact between you and someone you wish you had more reason to interact with, then another, and another, until you become friends who call each other on the phone and plan to visit or meet at conferences.

Those are the reasons. It’s not a matter of time because you can block all the nuisance requests and there are ways around the irritating app requests.

It’s not a matter of just traffic because first, you can set up a profile in 15 minutes to automatically send you traffic and never mess with it again if you like. Or you can go in and meet people every day and it can be a major traffic source.

And it’s not a matter of whether you can get anything out of it – it’s more a matter of whether you’re willing and whether the available traffic is targeted to your topic. It’s not for everyone, because let’s face it, not everyone wants to do the work, or even use Facebook that’s way.

And that’s okay! For some people, it’s a nice little escape, like a mental, online Starbucks. For some it’s a bother, and the pain of learning a new way to do things isn’t worth the time. I don’t mean that sarcastically – if you’re functioning as a CEO, you may not want to focus on Facebook.

With a little research, you can find out what kind of role it will play in your life.

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Tinu AbayomiPaul – Confused about how to get clients, joint venture partners or more blog traffic from Facebook without violating their terms with traditional online marketing techniques? Go to http://freetraffictip.com/1-facebook to learn the advanced secrets of Facebook Marketing.

Google Adsense Income: The Three Keys

By Mike Adams in Featured

Many people put together numerous (even hundreds) of niche websites to make Google Adsense income. You may have heard that a good target is earning $1/day from each web site, and you may have wondered if this is possible. Yes, it is, if you understand the three keys to Google Adsense income: click-through rate, earnings per click, and traffic.

You can improve the Adsense click-through rate by modifying your web site design. Observe which changes increase or decrease the Adsense click-through rate. It may sound funny, but you want a site that is good enough that it gets indexed by search engines and attracts visitors, but that is incomplete enough so that people want to leave in search of something more. And you want all of the obvious exit links to be Adsense ad links that seem to offer people what they are looking for.

Earnings per click depend on getting the content on a page (especially targeted keywords) to trigger Adsense ads that many advertisers are bidding on. One keyword might only make you $0.05 per click. Another keyword might make you several dollars per click. You want to target your page content around keywords that have many advertisers competing.

This is actually the opposite of what you want for search engine optimization. In general, you will be able to rank higher in the search engines for keywords with less competition. So how do you do this without destroying your search engine rankings? The secret is called “long tail” keywords.

Long tail keywords are longer keyword phrases that have searches yet have little competition in the search engine results. Be sure the phrases contain keywords that have high advertising competition. Google makes their money from advertising, so they will display the highest price ads that match the content on the page. But since you made sure you have one of the few pages targeted for the long-tail keyword phrase, you should also be able to rank well in the search engine results for the long tail phrase.

Once you improve your click-through rate and your earnings per click, it’s simply a matter of increasing traffic to your site. Getting traffic generally takes the most effort, in my experience. Basically, there are two ways to get traffic: You can buy advertising or you can get traffic through links and search engine results.

You could easily get traffic by buying Adwords ads. But it isn’t always easy to make more income than you spend on advertising. For an Adsense site, that generally means that you cannot profitably advertise it, so you need to get it listed in the search engines and get as many links as possible with a reasonable amount of effort. The two easiest ways to achieve this currently are article marketing and social networking.

Article marketing, sometimes called “bum marketing,” is pretty simple. You write one or more short articles (about 500 words or so) and submit them to article directories on the Web. You get to include an author’s resource box that links to your site at the end of the article. There are even services such as iSnare or Article Marketer that will submit your article to hundreds of article directories for you.

The more articles you do for a given site, the more links and traffic you get and the higher you get in search engine results. And you can get article ideas from anywhere. For example, this article started out as a response to one of my customers about how to do this. Since it was a long response, it was logical to also turn it into an article and publish it!

In social networking, you get your link on various social networking sites. Be sure to look through each site first and see what other people are doing and fit in with the community. Social networking sites have their own community rules, and you don’t want to get banned for spam.

These techniques will usually get your website indexed by the search engines within days. You will also get traffic from them, so don’t just do it for links, do it for traffic also.

Now that you know the three keys to Google Adsense income, click-through rate, earnings per click, and traffic, it’s time to start creating your Adsense empire!

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Mike Adams – There is one more resource you need to create your Adsense empire: content! Creating numerous web sites takes a lot of content. Want a shortcut? Check out Mike Adams’s PLR-Content.com for all of the content you will ever need: http://www.plr-content.com/

Blogs, WordPress and Google

By Scott Van Achte in Featured

It’s no secret that a continually updated website with new content being added regularly stands a good chance of doing well in Google. One of the long standing methods to regularly expand a site’s content is through the use of a blog.

While there are numerous platforms to choose from for managing a blog, few can compare with the immense flexibility offered with WordPress, and at a cost of free, the price can’t be beat either.

Google likes fresh new content, and setting up a blog on your site, assuming it is updated often with interesting and relevant material, can be one of the best things you can do to help out your search rankings. The beauty behind WordPress is that there is a wide array of totally free plug-ins you can easily install that will make your blog totally search engine friendly.

Is Twitter Testing Ads?

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

A new feature appearing on Twitter has everyone.. well… Twittering today. A short time after Twitter posted about un-scheduled maintenance this morning, people started noticing in-line text *notices* appearing below their Twitter stats when they logged into the web based application (see example pictured).

For now, the so-called notices simply define a couple of Twitter services including Twitter Search and Twitter Widgets. The notices include a linked headline that takes people to the service being defined.

To my eyes, the notices looked very similar to AdWords style ads and I  immediately tweeted asking if anyone else was thinking what I was:

“Has Twitter decided to achieve monetization via Pay Per Click advertising?”

A quick Twitter search for *twitter ads* and *twitter monetization* confirmed others were thinking the same thing.

One by one, people began to notice the changes and started to tweet about them:

Twitter users and industry pundits have been predicting for months now that Twitter will roll out a monetization model. It looks like this is a sneak preview of that model, although there is nothing on the Twitter Blog announcing such a move. If they really are testing a PPC model, I think it’s a wise move.

I’m not sure how effective a single ad unit will be, but perhaps they will test and rollout multiple ad units in time. As for the ad channel content, no word yet whether the advertising will come from one of the major PPC providers or be a network of Twitter’s own making (although the former would be much more viable and less costly to implement). Perhaps Twitter is close to an announcement of a partnership with Google, Yahoo or MSN. I’ll be keeping a close eye on developments.

Update: A little birdie told me that Twitter Japan already displayed ads so I went digging and found this TechCrunch article confirming this little nugget of information. But I wanted to know if Twitter Japan was displaying the new information notices AS WELL AS the display ads. To check, I had to change my default language to Japanese and login to Twitter again. Voila! proof positive that Twitter Japan is publishing display ads in addition to these new notices. So perhaps Twitter.com will use display ads in the near future and leave the new text blurbs as information notices. It’s all speculation at this point.

In the meantime, what do YOU think? Do you think Twitter should be monetized? Is pay per click advertising a viable method for Twitter monetization? Please comment below.

2 Tips To Avoid Costly Liability For Visitors’ Posts To Your Interactive Website

By Chip Cooper in Featured

Many sites these days are interactive — they permit site visitors to post to the site.

Forums and blogs would be at the top of most of our lists for types of interactive sites. However, different kinds of sites are also permitting owners to post, such as classified ad sites.

What happens if a visitor posts a defamatory statement ‘- or statements that are in violation of specific statutes — on your blog, forum, or in a classified ad on your site? Are you liable?

The Communications Decency Act

Congress came to the rescue of “interactive computer services” in 1996 with subsection (c) of the Communications Decency Act which provides: “No provider or user of any interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” 47 USCA Sec. 230(c) (referred to below as “Section 230″). Section 230 was intended to overrule prior case law which routinely held that online providers were liable as publishers and speakers for third party content. Now, under Section 230, interactive websites have a shield against liability for visitor’s posts. However, two recent cases show that the Section 230 shield from liability has its limits.

The Craigslist.com Case Upholds Section 230 As Liability Shield

In November 2006, a US District Court held that Craigslist.com, an online classified ad site, was not liable for discriminatory practices of its users.

The suit had been brought by the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law which alleged that Craigslist.com had a series of rental housing ads containing discriminatory statements. Examples of discriminatory statements by users included “no minorities” and “no children”.

In March 2008, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the District Court’s decision. Essentially, the 7th Circuit held that Craigslist.com was just a “messenger” and is shielded from liability by Section 230 for the discriminatory ads posted by its users.

The Roommates.com Case Goes The Other Way

In April 2008, the 9th Circuit reversed a District Court’s ruling and held that Section 230 did not shield Roommates.com from certain portions of the site that gave users limited choices for expressing their beliefs. On the other hand portions of the site that allowed free-form text were held to be shielded by Section 230. Similar to the Craigslist.com case, the users’ statements were alleged to be discriminatory and in violation of fair housing statutes.

The key distinguishing factor noted by the 7th Circuit was the structure imposed by Roommates.com. For example:

• questions were posed to users asking for racial preferences; and
• pull-down menus for user’s profile answers required answers before the user could proceed

Does Roommates.com Case Signal a Major Shift?

The question arises: does the Roommates.com decision signal a major shift away from the protections of Section 230? The decision indicated that a major shift was not intended.

The opinion indicated that the ruling should only apply narrowly to a limited number of sites: “The message is clear: If you don’t encourage illegal content, or design your website to require users to input illegal content, you will be immune.”

In addition, the opinion contained clear language that a major shift away from Section 230 was not intended. “Websites are complicated enterprises, and there will always be close cases where a clever lawyer could argue that something the website operator did encouraged the illegality. Such close cases, we believe, must be resolved in favor of immunity, lest we cut the heart out of section 230 by forcing websites to face death by ten thousand duck-bites, fighting off claims that they promoted or encouraged — or at least tacitly assented to — the illegality of third parties.”

Beware of “Obligation To Monitor” Pitfall

A word of warning about another pitfall — be careful in assuming an obligation to monitor messages, email, or posts contributed by your site visitors or in exercising editorial control over them. If you assume an obligation to monitor, or if you maintain editorial control, and if you fail to screen out defamatory statements, you may be liable, despite the protections of Section 230.

For this reason, your Terms of Use should clearly state the extent to which you exercise editorial control, if at all, over messages, email, or posts of site visitors. And it’s always best to reserve the right to monitor postings, but not the obligation to monitor.

Conclusion

In summary, there are 2 basic lessons regarding visitors’ posts to your site:

• beware of placing structure on user’s posts in classified ad sites; there is safety in free-form text, and
• be careful to avoid an obligation to monitor visitors’ posts.

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Chip Cooper is a leading intellectual property, software, and Internet attorney who’s advised software and online businesses nationwide for 25+ years. Visit Chip’s http://www.digicontracts.com site for his online contract drafting service, and download his FREE newsletter and Special Reports: “Determine Which Legal Documents Your Website Really Needs”, “Draft Your Own Privacy Policy”, and “Write Your Own Website Marketing Copy — Legally”.

The Quick And Easy Way To Really Understand Long Tail Keywords

By James Gladwin in Featured

Have you heard of the 80-20 rule? Well, an Italian economist called Pareto noticed that 80% of land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. His work was taken up by others until it entered mainstream thinking. You’ve probably heard variations of what’s now become known as the 80-20 rule, or the Pareto principle. They go like this: we spend 80% of our time with 20% of our friends, or we wear 20% of our favorite clothes 80% of the time.

More generally, of course, it is a common rule of thumb in business: e.g., “80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients.” In business, for example, Microsoft noted that by fixing the top 20% of the most reported bugs, 80% percent of the errors and crashes would be eliminated.

No-Cost Marketing: 5 Benefits of Social Networking

By Lauren Hobson in Featured

Most small businesses appreciate marketing strategies that are low-cost or no-cost, especially in today’s unpredictable economy. Online marketing channels such as web sites, e-newsletters, email campaigns, and internet advertising are already being used by small businesses to save money on marketing, since these tend to be much less expensive than some older, more traditional methods. But with the popularity of sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn, small businesses are finding yet another marketing strategy that not only saves them money, but is also very effective in getting the attention of customers and the search engines alike – and that strategy is social networking.

1.       Keep Customer Mindshare
It used to be that small businesses purchased newspaper or magazine ads, and used billboards, radio ads, or direct mail campaigns to keep their name in front of customers and potential customers. But today, these methods have not only become very expensive, they also lack the flexibility necessary to target audiences with a message meant exclusively for them.

Today, customers are using the web everyday. They use Google to find information, Facebook to share information with their friends, Twitter to stay in touch with others during the day, and they listen to downloaded podcasts on their iPods. By having a solid social networking presence, a small business can easily meet the needs of its customers; whether it’s announcing relevant news in a Facebook profile, broadcasting special offers to followers on Twitter, or showing up at the top of the search engine listings so customers click on their web site link first (before visiting any competitors’ sites!).

2.       Develop Customer Relationships (and Loyalty!)
Today’s customers really do expect some level of online interaction with your company; whether they are using your company’s blog (or other related blogs), following your Tweets (on Twitter), writing product reviews on sites like Amazon.com, or posting questions and information on sites like LinkedIn. The more you can provide customers with a way to interact with your business, the more supported they feel, and the more positive their experience and attitude becomes. Be sure to also follow the “conversation” by using tools like Google Alerts to monitor how your business is being presented and talked about on the web.

3.       Build Inbound Links
Building organic inbound links to your web site is the most effective way to improve your rankings in the search engines, especially in Google. Most social networking profiles allow you to include links to your web site, which then become new inbound links that point to your site. Depending on the social networking site, you can sometimes use your keywords as anchor text in your profile, and direct these links to specific (optimized) landing pages on your web site. Not only will these organic links help you gain points with the search engines, they can also help drive sales and boost conversion rates by bringing users directly to the landing pages on your web site.

4.       Increase Visits to Your Web Site
It’s pretty logical – the more exposure your business has on social networking sites, the more customers and potential customers have an opportunity to click on links to your web site. If you can also provide good quality content, useful information, and other helpful resources in your profiles, you can often create enough interest (or maybe curiosity) to get users to visit your web site – users who would not have otherwise had any exposure to your business. Just make sure that you create specific landing pages on your web site that are relevant to your social networking visitors, rather than just sending them to your home page.

5.       Rank Higher in the Search Engines

By providing multiple sources of quality, indexable content on various social networking sites on the web, your online visibility is expanded, giving the search engines more content to discover. Search engines routinely index not just web pages, but also blogs, images and photos, video, wiki entries, podcasts, and social networking profiles. When you provide great content in a variety of forms and in a variety of places, you improve your chances of getting noticed (and ranked higher) by the search engines.

As social networking continues to gain in popularity, small businesses are finding ways to take advantage of it to connect and communicate with customers. In the past, reaching customers was often an interruption – a commercial on TV, an ad in the middle of a magazine story, or a billboard on the side of the highway. But social networking provides a way to interact with customers and engage in a two-way conversation with them. Of all the marketing strategies available to small businesses today, social networking seems to provide some impressive benefits for little or no cost, which may be the greatest benefit of all.

Lauren Hobson, President of Five Sparrows, LLC, has more than 16 years of experience in small business technology writing, marketing, and web site design and development. Five Sparrows provides professional web site and marketing services to small businesses and non-profit organizations, giving them access to high-quality services at affordable prices. To read articles or subscribe to Biz Talk, please visit www.FiveSparrows.com/biztalk.htm.

More Google Killers on the Horizon

By admin in Featured

In the past few weeks speculation has run rampant on the future of search and whether Google might be supplanted by Twitter real-time social search  or by Wolfram Alpha, the still to be launched search engine that is billed as a true computational knowledge engine.

Wolfram Alpha (http://www.wolframalpha.com/) is scheduled to launch in May and could very well be a major advance in search technology. In brief, ask Wolfram Alpha a question and it supposedly will deliver a specific and accurate response as opposed to a list of related results.  Stephen Wolfram outlines  Wolfram Alpha’s technological foundation in his blog post at: http://blog.wolfram.com/2009/03/05/wolframalpha-is-coming/ .

Will Wolfram Alpha supplant Google? Not in the short term. Google has become a synonym for search, like Xerox became for copying. But Wolfram Alpha and the search technologies that follow could very well begin to undermine Google’s dominance. Wolfram appears to be a largely scientific endeavor, but with the proper funding, promotion and innovation, it could rapidly find an audience. Search has always been about finding answers.  A hundred million search results to a query are impressive, but one specific, accurate and correct result is really all that’s needed for many queries. It might be simpler for Wolfram Alpha to backfill their accurate answer results with related search results than for Google to duplicate Wolfram’s “millions of lines of algorithms”. Then again, success in the marketplace is not always about what’s “best”. Assuming Wolfram does what it claims it can and takes a competitive stance,  the search industry could dramatically change in 5 years.

Then, there’s Twitter. Does anyone seriously believe that Twitter search could be a Google killer? Indexing the micro-blogging sphere is not exactly a major technological feat for a search giant like Google. If Google search results can be supplemented with Twitter results using a GreaseMonkey script, how difficult would it be for Google to supplement their own search results with real-time social search results. Then there’s the question of exactly how useful Twitter results are. Mini blog posts are interesting but hardly a resevoir of accuracy and reliability. Tweets have their place – good for rapid communication, breaking news, marketing blurbs, networking, tips, etc. – but they are unlikely to ever be the basis for search results that put Google out of business.  

  

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