Technologies Do Not Make Communities

Importance of communities is increasing in life of common man as well as marketers. Popularity of communities has created a virtual worlds were people are more frank in sharing their opinion about product, services, need and solutions.

Every marketer wants to harness the power of online community for client acquisition as well as product development. There are so many free and paid solutions available in market and a marketer can easily make a community around her product and service offerings. But apart from technologies and features there are some other dimension for community and those are participation and feasibility. Following are some of important points must be considered to make successful communities.

1.       Set and manage clear business objectives for your community. Whether you want to collect customer response or you want to run a promotional campaign etc.

2.       Implement a strategy a strategy in sync with your business objective.

3.       Any initiative need sustained effort hence we should try to instill collaboration and feedback into the culture.

4.       There is difference between data and information .We should make a mechanism for information management.

5.       Integrate "social" throughout existing channels like CRM, Email Marketing, Recruitment and Sales etc and there should be metrics to measure the ROI as well.

Google Launches Separate Page for Real Time Search

With increased use of Social Media it became a platform of knowledge sharing and interaction. People started relying on peer group for product and service review or even basic information search. Information through web 2.0 was more timely and customized. Google realized that its search engine would lose its importance without inclusion of real time search and few month back Google included real time search in their search result. Since then users were demanding a separate interface for their real time search.

Google has now moved its Real-time search to a dedicated location, separate from the "Updates" section of the regular search. The new emphasis comes with several new features like the ability to filter results by location as well as see the entire messages ion a conversation. You can check Real-time search at www.google.com/reatime

"Today we’re making our most significant enhancements to date, giving real-time information its own home and more powerful tools to help you find what you need," Dylan Casey, Product Manager at Google, wrote. “Now you can access Google Realtime Search at its own address, www.google.com/realtime," he announced. 

"On the new homepage you’ll find some great tools to help you refine and understand your results. First, you can use geographic refinements to find updates and news near you, or in a region you specify," he explained."In addition, we’ve added a conversations view, making it easy to follow a discussion on the real-time web," he added.