Guest blog post today on Crosspollinate from Chase McMichael, CEO of InfiniGraph. You can find his great blog at http://socialmediadvertising.blogspot.com/.

With all the hype over on Facebook launch of Like and Open Graph, it is time for me to highlight areas that marketers have to consider besides just dropping in a widget or a plug-in on their pages. Facebook has opened big opportunities in information discovery, consumer opt-in, expanding Social CRM (SCRM) and increasing Social Density around your brand. SCRM has now expanded beyond social listening and seeing your consumer overlaps with vertical products to a whole new level. Below is a great example of how to identify consumers that match other brand preferences and expand reach through loyalty.

With Open Graph, users now don't just become a "fan" of a brand, band, sport, or style of music. They will simply decide whether they "Like" something. By using the "Like" button or making a “comment” on a site, users automatically authorize Facebook to publish this information on their profiles or their friend's news feeds. Below are examples of categories listed in the Facebook Open Graph API. Plug-ins provided by Facebook allow the segmenting of friends who "Like" something by publisher.

Facebook Object types currently supported:

This provides much greater access to user information, but the majority of companies don’t really know what to do to enhance the social velocity of their brands. Since greater access carries greater responsibility in consumer privacy protection, brands must offer a level of transparency to assure integrity.

As of last check, Facebook has added nearly 300 website "Like" buttons per hour and now over 100K. Marketers are salivating over Facebook's 500+ million users but without a clear way to comprehend what is information is available and how to maximize their conversational presence. The publishers are organized by top level categories enabling network based content interaction across many publishers.

The vision here is to build a network of discovery tools and information that operates at a higher level than search. The goals are to answer questions for users. What are my friends doing? Where are they eating? What do they recommend? This clearly doesn’t eliminate the need for search, but it does represent an alternative way in which to discover information. For This will make it easier for marketing professionals, who will have yet another set of content connections to manage, to make sense of the new services.

The mountain of data that Facebook will gain is going to improve the site's search capabilities as well as integration of Bing. For example, if Facebook knows the most “Liked” Caribbean restaurants in Miami and my friends like these same restaurants, the site can show that information in my search results. This hypothetically makes Facebook search much more social, turning the site into more of a "recommendation engine” than Google in its current state.

This is all speculation for the moment. Since Facebook doesn’t have a really good search experience, it remains less useful than Google. However, it is possible to imagine much improved Bing integration combined with data and metadata gleaned from millions of profiles and “Likes” across the internet — making Facebook a more personal, more social and much better “discovery engine” than it is today.
This social discovery also applies to Brands and consumers sharing links about where they are or what they are Twittering about is a bonanza for smart marketers who want to be more in tuned to the audience they service.

Viral link sharing in the context of social density of who is sharing what provides a much better discovery experience for Brands that want to understand their social ecosystem and the relationship between consumers who want to find people interested in the same topics. This radically different approach disrupts old ways of searching over a massive web-based indexes welded to link structure. By zeroing in on collective group movement, viral link sharing provides greater relevance to all parties. Twitter and Facebook reflect what’s resonating among the community affinity matrix right now.

I’m working on this real-time aspect of leveraging brand ranking and social preferences to understand social resonance and relevancy of a particular fan page and linked content that a key audience is collectively resonating around. We now have the ability to determine relevance of a page beyond the number of links it has.

Influencers are interacting with content and sharing links all the time. The Social Syndication Acceleration is based on the number of shared and the influence Rank of the person sharing the links. Google-style search is based on web links and document content where as real-time search is linked to what people are talking about now and provides radically different search results for users who are linked to brands/tribes.

Crosspollinate is happy to introduce their new Real Time Content Widget, allowing web site owners and bloggers to now display real time content on their site, based on a set of criteria they can define through the Widget Builder page. The Crosspollinate widget will find and aggregate real time content from micro-blogging services such as Twitter, Identi.ca, or Friendfeed. More over, the widget will also provide web news articles or blog posts relevant to the topic of interest defined through the widget builder, filtering out noise and extracting the essential substance to display through the widget.

This is version 1.0 of the new widget. Next versions will feature Real Time Vertical Content for Crosspollinate Pro users, and will provide a Facebook real time news feed based on the newly released Open Graph API unveiled today at Facebook F8.

You can get your widget at http://www.crosspollinate.org/getwidget

A major shift has been taking place for a few years on the web with the rise of user generated content, and businesses now have hard evidence that the "social web" has become undeniably what constitutes their quintessential source of traffic, leads and sales, alongside with traffic referred through SEO and SEM. See how the main sources of traffic for some of these major sites have turned to become social-web driven:

Forward-thinking marketers have started to engage in social media and this has become part of their overall marketing strategy. New approaches to online marketing are emerging constantly and require a quick adaptation to concepts such as "earned media" (the additional unpaid exposure a brand gets when consumers engage in conversations around brands online), local social advertising, social search or social ad networks.

If you’re in charge of marketing your business, there is no doubt that you have already heard about the new marketing gold rush that is taking place in social media.  The low cost to entry of generating marketing content through the social media scene has created an opportunity for marketers to expand their brand reach by encouraging and monitoring engagement in social communities.  Although the marketing means in social media are more subtle and require more context understanding than in online advertising, the prospects are great for marketers to increase brand exposure and generate leads and sales. For those still in doubt that social media and real time marketing are worth the time spent, here are 8 good reasons why you should start to take it seriously.

1 - Reaches a better targeted audience

Social media networks require user authentication and as such, provide ways (called APIs) for marketers tapping in those social ecosystems to better target their audience. By leveraging behavioral targeting, marketers can pinpoint their targeted audiences and engage in conversations or advertise on pages that are more likely to be contextually relevant to the nature of the product being advertised. This has obvious repercussions on the resulting engagement and consequently on the likelihood that users will have a positive interaction with the product or brand being marketed.

2 - Reaches a connected audience in real time

The Web 2.0 revolution has mainly been the revolution of user generated content. The consequence of this for marketers is that content is created non-stop, and so are opportunities for brand exposure and user engagement.  This requires marketers to get the proper tools for

• Monitoring and assessing online conversations and plugging into each opportunity to leverage the ongoing stream
• Defining a business workflow allowing them to manage the process of handling those branding and conversion opportunities (and automating what can be)
• Measuring the success of those actions, allowing for repeatable cycles of successful marketing opportunities
• Amplifying the positive brand exposure by spreading it across all possible channels

3 - Generates exposure for you business

Marketers have a great opportunity to generate exposure by providing information about their company and product updates. This can start as simply as creating a Twitter account and Facebook Fan Page, and linking those pages from their web site. Most marketers report a positive outcome from marketing their business on social media.

4 - Generates qualified leads

Although requiring a high level of engagement, social media can help generating qualified leads given the highly targeted nature of the possible interactions with prospective clients. That is becoming a major potential source of savings for businesses, as it drastically reduces customer acquisition costs.

5 - Creates new opportunities for business partnerships

By engaging with people similar industries and having complementary business goals, social media can help businesses get new partnership opportunities and grow their business reach as a result. This particularly applies to sole proprietors tending to engage in social media under their own name (realtors, lawyers etc)

6 - Increases site traffic and subscribers

Well conducted social media campaign will leverage link building strategies in order to drive traffic to their site and increase conversion if coupled with targeted and optimized landing pages. This part should be coupled with A-B testing and can be easily automated and measured for optimization.

7- Helps your Search Engine Optimization

Since content of many of the social networks, social discovery and social bookmarking sites are indexed by search engines, having a presence on those networks will positively help with your SEO efforts. Automation is again is key, as spreading every piece of positive content can help amplify the effects of re-posting/re-blogging and provide opportunities for viral content distribution.

8 – Reduces overall expenses in web marketing and advertising

Social Media Marketing is projected to grow to a $3.1 billion market by 2014 (Forrester),
the highest area of growth in all marketing areas, ahead of mobile (+27%):

As stated by Sequoia partner Mark Kvamme (GigaOM, 03/17/10), “if you can harness social media marketing, you don’t have to pay for advertising any more”. The Social Web still is in its early phases but has the enabling characteristics of a transforming phenomenon for the
marketing industry, and Crosspollinate is ideally positioned to become a leader and innovator in that disrupting phase of evolution, the era of Social Media Optimization.

Crosspollinate.org soft-launched this month the first version of its real time search and marketing service for Real Estate professionals. Although real-time search engines have proliferated over the last few months, this is the first offering of this kind available for the Real Estate industry.

Real time search is a new kind of service which lets individuals and businesses know what is happening around the world within a matter of seconds, by leveraging the power of blogs, micro-blogs, social imaging, video search engines, social networks and social bookmarking sites. This type of service makes is relevant to the real estate industry, a very time sensitive and highly transactional space with a definite edge for competition and networking. The participants to the ecosystems are many, be they home buyers, sellers,agents, lenders, mortgage or insurance brokers. Those players have high interest in getting first hand information as new properties or buyers are listed on the real time web. Buyers monitor interest rates, new listings, while sellers or agents compete for new buyers getting listed on services such as the Buyer Listing Service.

(download)

Click here to download:

Real_Estate_is_a_Real_Time_Bus.zip (316 KB)

Crosspollinate for Real Estate introduces its first offering of a real time search engine for Real Estate. It aggregates the most relevant live information sources in the real estate industry:

• Craigslist
• Trulia
• Zillow
• The National Buyer Listing Service
• Inman News
• Active Rain
• Realtytrac
• Syndication of the major sources of real estate blogs and online media
• Youtube marketing channels for real estate

It also leverages the power of micro-blogs, social bookmarking services such as Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, Identi.ca or delicio.us in order to find the latest and freshest information spread through the Internet in real-time. The information displayed is also geo-located, allowing users to pinpoint search information per area, and features an integration with Google Maps.

Crosspollinate: A social marketing hub for real estate professionals

Crosspollinate for Real Estate is more than a simple search engine. Its deep integration with Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz or other social networking sites makes it a cutting edge tool for gathering and spreading information in 1 mouse click. Crosspollinate becomes a base camp  from which to start building a comprehensive social media marketing strategies. Its powerful real time search engine is a natural starting point for marketers to perform brand monitoring activities and engage with customers and followers around their products and activities on line. Saved searches and alerts make it very easy to stay in touch with what is being said about your topics of interests in real time, without having to monitor feeds permanently.

Social Media and Marketing Automation for Real Estate

Crosspollinate fully automated service creates can leverage your business feeds, find and filter relevant content and automatically broadcast postings through your social feeds media channels. Crosspollinate can increase your blog or web site's traffic by helping you spread your business-critical content across the real-time web, then help you collect comments and conversation data. This process can enable real estate marketers and PR professionals to no only earn recognition from their community for great content, but also use this as the basis for great debate and exchange of thoughts with their customer base and audience, therefore shortening cycles of customer feedback while increasing authority and credibility in their area of expertise.

New doors are opening to job seekers today with the introduction of a next generation real-time job search engine called Crosspollinate Real Time Seach. Real time seach a powerful concept that’s redefining the web and has been pioneered by Twitter and Twitter-like microblogging services. Whether you're looking for a new job, looking to recruit, looking for opportunities in a new region, Crosspollinate offers instant access to all job-related posts aggregated in real-time from all the best employment web services out there.

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Click here to download:

Job_Searching_in_Real_Time_Cro.zip (349 KB)

Many companies nowadays use Twitter to post over 230,000 new jobs per month. Crosspollinate aggregates Twitter feeds along with all the major services providing instant job posting to job seekers, such as:

• Carrerbuilder
• Hotjobs
• Craigslist Jobs
• Dice.com
• Monster.com
• Startuply.com
• Juju.com

Crosspollinate allows user to log in with their Facebook and Twitter credential to instantly reply to job posters, save or re-share their findings across their network of friends. Once authenticated, users can also save and reply their search queries at will.

Crosspollinate for Job Search is in early beta. So please feel free to send feedback and suggestion to the team at feedback [@] crosspollinate [.] org, and stay tunned for many more features to come...

Crosspollinate is soft-launching a new version of its site today and features a special edition for the Super Bowl 2010, which allows football fans to get real time news updates and live conversations on the event, days before the show gets started.

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Click here to download:

Untitled.zip (421 KB)

Simply go to http://superbowl.crosspollinate.org/search and enjoy the show!