MySpace Joins Twitter in Googles Real-Time Search

Earlier today, Google launched the social media platform MySpace into the real-time search world alongside Twitter, allowing MySpace status updates to be instantly cataloged and served back to viewers when they are relevant to the search terms.  Although both MySpace and Facebook signed agreements in December of ’09 to “go live” with Google, MySpace is leading the way.

Could this be a much-needed boost for the site, which has steadily lost international market share to Facebook since 2007?  Or is it a way to “work out the kinks” before giving Facebook the finished product (and more time to plan for seemingly inevitable privacy blowbacks)?

The most important question to those of us looking to make a living in the brave new social media world — how will this impact my business?

If you haven’t seen a real-time search result, indulge yourself by “Googling” a current event: Olympics, Oscars, or any other Twitter Trending Topic.  You’ll see news items, Twitter updates posted “seconds ago”, and shortly MySpace updates in similar fashion.

When it comes to real-time results, it can seem like more opinion than fact — and this is precisely why it matters for small businesses.  Although we haven’t gotten wind of any “small business success stories” resulting from real-time search, we’ve seen a few business “bashing sessions” arise (whenever a large cable or phone company has sweeping outages in service, for instance).

One thing is for certain, especially as more platforms are included and as the real-time search functionality gets increasingly refined — you WILL need to be found among the real time search results for what your clients are searching, and found for the right reasons — not the wrong ones.This may mean creating profiles for your business on sites like Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook, and any site that becomes part of real-time search — and contributing to that profile and monitoring your presence in real-time search constantly.  It will become more important than ever for your company to get “talked about” on the web for what you do, what you are best at, what people love about you, why others should buy — and equally important not to be the subject of any “bashing sessions,” to be prepared in case it happens, and to know how to put any issue to rest quickly.

Watch Clearly Marketing as Google’s real-time search functionality continues to develop for news & updates on what is most relevant to your small business as well as strategies and tactics for incorporating this and other web technologies into your small business marketing.