Google just introduced new features to their search results that brings a dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web.  Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before.  When they are relevant, Google will show the most recent posts towards the top of the search results page.

Where do the feeds come from? Google announced official partnerships with the following web entities; Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca to power their aggregate real-time feeds.

Get a first look at the new search interface and some sample searches.

So the big, very big question is what does this mean?  More spam unfortunately. More attempts by affiliate marketers to skew the system in their favor and more automated recycling of posts to always have a presence in real time results. It’s not going to be a bed of roses while the search engines get to grips with reputation management of the contributors that author content on these new partners. We know that Twitter’s user profile management is basic at best. Silly algorithms that weight banal factors as negatives or positives can easily be circumvented and before you know it you’re being stuffed with affiliate cookies and pimped malware for having clicked on what you thought was a legitimate real-time search result from your ‘trusted’, favorite search engine Google.

Moving away from the pessimistic side of what will happen, there will be advantages. More so for mobile search’s integration of real-time results. That’s another post however.

Anyway, real-time is  rolling out over the next few days and when you have it, you’ll see it just happening withing your search results.

Charlotte, NC — Screen Pilot, a digital marketing and technology firm, has several simple steps for marketing professionals to realize the benefits of understanding what is occurring in their online marketing world. If you don’t have analysts to decipher your company’s Internet marketing results, there are five easy ways to add clout to your marketing budgets. You might just be surprised at how underutilized your existing web reporting tools are.

1. Uncover Hidden Potential:
Marketing professionals need to customize the way they track their digital marketing campaigns. They should take a look at what kind of measuring tools they currently use. Are the goals that have been set for a web reporting platform meeting the needs of the company? By creating a list of must-haves, it’ll be easier to narrow down what the needs are and how they can be fulfilled and by which products.

2. Add Tracking To Your E-mail Campaigns:
You can add tracking parameters to your e-mail marketing activity that enables marketers to start tracking visitors and their actions once in your web site that are driven by e-mail efforts. Setting up to measure conversions, from shopping carts or other areas of your site that are important to you, will enable you to see which e-mail campaigns have higher returns on investment (ROI) than others. With this tip, you can now test scientifically based on the ROI and not solely on the click-through rates and engagement factors.

3. Are Your PPC Campaigns Set-Up Correctly?
If you have potential customers click on your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads and immediately leave your site, your advertising money spent is wasted. You could be missing opportunities if your web statistics aren’t giving you the whole picture about the visitors you get from paid search channels like Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Reporting from search engines only goes halfway in educating you on how effective your PPC actually is. Set up your reporting to measure key performance indicators from paid channels. It can help you increase ROI and make intelligent decisions about how and where to spend your marketing dollars.

4. Don’t Rely on 3rd Party Reporting:
It is very common that the amount of clicks the advertisers say you have is different than what you receive. Countless times we are requested to create audit trails for costly marketing channels that report higher numbers of clicks from their networks than you actually receive. Using your web statistics platform correctly will tell you exactly what traffic you received from a specific campaign and the value of that traffic.

5. Track Calls from Campaigns:
If you sell product offline then you need to track the call volumes that are generated from each specific digital campaign and types. This will easily tell you how effective a campaign’s response is when people go online but don’t convert. Quickly what channels such as PPC, email, banner ads and other create calls and which don’t. By adding this new dimension it might make you adjust some efforts for best returns.

If your current tracking and measurement tools aren’t producing results, you may need to reconsider the platform.

It’s not been long since we started working the Riviera Resort & Spa in Palm Springs. An amazing place, you really need to check it out if you ever need to stay in the Palm Springs area. So we started working with them on their search marketing and as with any new domain, had a pretty hefty uphill struggle and knew that things were going to happen overnight. With persistence, patience and quite a bit of our ‘know-how’, we’re happy to say that Riviera has now penetrated the top ten organic results for Palm Springs hotel and resort phrases. What does that mean, well YoY, it’s a 1,546% increase in traffic for ‘palm springs hotels’ alone and we all know what qualified traffic turns into.

By the way, they’re actually celebrating their 50th Anniversay so if you’re looking for a Palm Springs escape, maybe a spa weekend with the girls for Christmas to prep for all that shopping, then check out their 50th Anniversary deals.

Riviera Resort & Spa

Google Social Search is an experimental feature that allows you to do searches that find relevant public web content from people in your social circle.

When you join the Social Search experiment Google will bring up results from your friends and contacts. These special results appear at the bottom of the search results page. Your social circle consists of contacts from your Gmail and sites listed in your Google Profile.

The following people make up your social circle:

• People you’re connected to through social services that you’ve listed in your Google profile, such as Twitter and FriendFeed.
• People in your Gmail (or Google Talk) chat list.
• People in your Friends, Family, and Coworkers contact groups for Google.

If someone you don’t know shows up in your social search results, it’s likely that they’re connected to someone you do know. For example, if you’re following someone on Twitter, and that person is following five other people, those five other people are also included in your social circle.

We all know that a picture is worth a thousand words so we’ve included a video from Google explaining in more detail what Google Social Search is all about. Enjoy!

Collaborating through Google Docs just got easier!

You can now share entire folders with your team. Google also has plans to allow the upload of multiple files at the same time some time soon which will be a huge time-saver if you have lots of files you need to share!

If you have a set of files you need to share with a group of people, sharing a folder will now make the process much easier. You can share the entire folder with the team with the same level of permissions for all the documents. In the past you would have to go into each file to share permissions with a team.

You can learn more about Google Docs shared folders at Google Docs Blog

Matching Yahoo’s local ad unit model, Google is finally rolling out its own version of short ad listings for local businesses. These Local Listing Ads will contain only basic information about a business, such as contact info and a link, and will display in regular search results pages as well as Google Maps listings.

The ads are not intended to compete with Google AdWords and will be more or less self-serve for business owners.

To participate though, businesses need to first be listed and verified in Google’s Local Business Center. The ads will be free of creative (artwork and images), with results also linking to Google’s version of Yelp, Place Pages.

Formal pricing has not been released, but it’s believed to start around $20 per month and possibly go as high as $200, with the first month being free. Pricing may also vary depending on what market a business is in.

Currently, the program is only being tested in San Francisco and San Diego.