Mayday – a distress signal used to signify an emergency and need for help

Caffeine – something I use to give myself a boost quite regularly

Seem like harmless words that have nothing in the world to do with B2B social media and content marketing, right? Think again.

In recent weeks, Google completed two rather significant changes; one, Mayday, is related to how Google handles search queries and the other, Caffeine, deals with how Google indexes the web. If you are outside the world of search engines, the only Google changes you may have noticed over the past couple of weeks were either the Google Pacman doodle or the day Google choose to be like Bing.

However, Mayday and Caffeine have meaningful impacts on search results, both from a relevance and real-time perspective that in my mind further solidify the need for you to begin participating in B2B social media and content marketing.

The question is no longer, “if we should get started?” but, “when will our B2B social media and content marketing strategy be completed and ready for execution?”

Without getting technical, I’ll do my best to highlight the changes and why this is important to you as a B2B marketer, who may be either struggling with the B2B social media decision yourself, or working to gain executive buy-in for your B2B social media strategy.

MAYDAY

Think; search quality. Think; provide users a better search experience by improving results through better matching of websites with user’s search queries.

The project was completed by Google’s search quality team and is independent of Caffeine. A wee bit of technical talk – it is a change to Google’s algorithm – i.e. the code that determines the relevance and ranking of a page. It was rolled out April 28^th – May 3^rd (around May 1^st – hence the name – credit to Webmasterworld).

It’s been tested, and there is no turning back. This is a permanent change.

Here’s Google’s Matt Cutts with an explanation:

CAFFIENE

Think; search timeliness. Think; provide users a better search experience by improving results through providing the freshest, most recently published content about the user’s search query.

This project was completed in an effort to better enable Google to handle the increasing amount of content (video, images, news, blog posts, etc) that is being published every minute and make more of it available as close to possible when it is published.

An excerpt, from the June 8^th article, Our new search index: Caffeine on The Official Google Blog.

Today, we’re announcing the completion of a new web indexing system called Caffeine. Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it’s the largest collection of web content we’ve offered. Whether it’s a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before.

Why it matters to you as a B2B marketer

Mayday and Caffeine is Google’s way of telling us that quality, relevant, real-time content is what matters to their users (and your buyers) and content published today is far more meaningful to their users (and your buyers) then content published months if not years ago.

Kinda makes you think about your static HTML website that was last updated a few years ago, no? Adds a bunch of weight to the need to be producing regular, ongoing content too, right?

If or When

That’s the question. I think you know my answer, what’s yours?

The thinking for this post came from my response to a question posed by Hubspot via Google buzz: How will Google buzz affect your inbound marketing strategy? So I will start with that answer.

“Due to the sheer size of the GMAIL user base, Google buzz will force me to 1. begin using buzz to promote and drive traffic to www.b2bloggers.com and 2. monitor its evolution as I learn how to make appropriate recommendations for my consulting clients on the ways in which they should be utilizing Google buzz in their social media efforts.“

This answer provoked some deeper thinking though. It led me to think of it representing something bigger. For as much stumbling Google may have done coming out of the blocks and the total sidestepping of their traditional Google Labs and “BETA” launch tactics, millions upon millions of people, who are not on Twitter, will now begin to experience the “stream” as a media form.

The little buzz icon will be there with its (counter) (124 for me right now) – every time one logs into GMAIL. Some may choose to ignore it (for now). The social media purists may be crying foul (and continue to). But that icon will be there – just waiting to be clicked. And it will be clicked, especially by the people who don’t even know the social media purists exist. That’s the point – Google buzz reaches the masses – immediately.

We’ve moved one giant step closer to the general acceptance of the “stream” as media – that is the real significance of what is happening right now. This new, fascinating form of media – our combined thoughts, feelings, and perspectives interconnected into one network of communication, discovery, and engagement.

This is all much bigger than the social media purists with their privacy flags waving. Google will resolve that and improve the user experience.

What matters is that Twitter has changed the communications and information network landscape so dramatically that as its gained widespread adoption, Facebook, LinkedIn, myYearbook, and now Google have made the “stream” the single most important element of the user experience.

So to me the success or failure of Google buzz is irrelevant at this point (though my money is that it will become tremendously popular and useful). The fact that can not be ignored, and should not be overshadowed by all the “failure” fanfare, is that the introduction of Google buzz has tightly woven the “stream” into the fabric of how we will communicate today, tomorrow and beyond.

Now that’s buzzworthy. What do you think?

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I think I first heard Charlene Li say it at last year’s SXSWi in Austin: Web search will continue to move toward real time. Google made it a reality with the announcement of Real Time Search.

Just one of the many tectonic shifts continuing to happen in communications. Everything is integrated and the Google fellows give more detail on their blog than I can ever hope to explain here.

Real time search: it’s exciting. It’s cool. It’s amazing. But I do have 2 gnawing questions:

1. How do we develop filters for this amount of information? Unfortunately for some, real productivity just took it in the shorts-again. Just imagine doing a search and getting caught up in the scrolling, real time input from billions of pages of information. Mind boggling.
2. Fact checking vs crowdsourcing. Specifically, Google Real Time Search will include information from a myriad of “sources.” As one comment on Mashable wrote: Yahoo! Answers search results are like dog turds in a grassy field of useful search results. So people are already beginning to wonder if there are ways to set domain exclusions to get information from the sources you trust the most and exclude those you don’t.

In an unrelated article on Saturday’s Seattle Times, Ellen Goodman columnists had a comment that I think is particularly relevant to this topic:

“There is a sense that we don’t need science or editing or fact-checking as long as we have crowd-sourcing. We don’t have to build opinions on facts; we can build facts on opinions.”

Reading about the launch of Real Time Search left me wondering:

• If enough content gets RTd, Diggd, Facebooked, Stumbled and Tumbled will we just have turds polished to a pleasing sheen? Rather than correct nuggets of information, will we just be left with piles of opinion? This is not a criticism of crowdsourcing so please don’t take it that way. Perhaps Clay Shirky or another crowdsourcing expert will address this. Clay?
• Will speed become the metric by which people measure who or what is right? She who tweets first wins! Or is it last? Or most? I don’t know. Maybe a new measure of success will be how good of a bullshit filter you are.

One blogger said that Google real time search levels the field and allows everyone to have their moment in the sun at the top of Google’s search rankings. This same blogger raises interesting questions for what live search does to SEO. Could Google be harming themselves monetarily and cutting off their nose to spite their face, in the race to keep up with Twitter?

The answer is, nobody knows the answer. But if you’ve got some opinions, let’s hear ‘em!

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About the BtoBblogger – David Wiggs is founder of Hitch, an agency search consultancy based on the west coast. David earned his B.A in History in Virginia—which makes him a real geek in the advertising world. In the mid 90s he got a break in advertising, which changed his life.

A passionate musician, David is among the few rock drummers who know the entire Rush catalog, note by note. Well, almost. David’s writing can be read here and on his blog Hitch: Connecting Marketing Innovators, but he’d much rather be jamming than writing bios or blog posts.