When Santa Claus comes to town, the rules are simple. You watch out, you don’t cry and you don’t pout.

I put to you that in 2009 the social media marketeers ignored every single one of these rules, pedalling Christmas campaigns that involved risks, made people cry and yes, made them pout. For this reason, I propose last year’s social media marketeers did not want Santa Claus to come to town.

The offending articles

Item One

In 2009 Essex couple Jon and Tracy Morter diced with fire when they attempted to topple Simon Cowell’s UK Christmas Number One monopoly.

The couple used Twitter and Facebook to build a groundswell around shunning X Factor winner Joe McElderry’s single, The Climb, for Rage Against the Machine’s 1992 release, Killing in the Name.

The result? More than one million fans joined the Facebook page and Killing in the Name reached the top of the download chart just in time for Christmas.

Item Two

US blogger Jill Kocher wasn’t worried about bringing tears to ours eyes when she launched a campaign to bring SEO to the charities that needed it most.

Kocher, SEO Manager at Groupon by day and blogger for WebPieRat by night, found local-level charities had little knowledge of SEO and optimisation.

Following her findings, she set out on a mission to provide back links to charities in featured posts in the first instance, followed by arming them with the skills to embed optimised terms into their sites in time for Christmas 2010.

Item Three

Fashionista definitely wanted you to pout. Last year the augmented reality tool was developed for fashion retail sites to help shoppers virtually try on their Christmas party outfits and share the pictures with friends via Facebook.

I think the evidence is clear, social media marketeers do not want Santa Claus to come to town.

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Because we’re slightly geeky and we like to spot a trend, we’ve been keeping an eye on a few key Christmas search terms over on our Christmas dashboard page.

Amongst other things (like kids’ presents and favourite Christmas puddings), we’ve been monitoring Google searches for “Christmas presents.” For the past few days, “presents for men” has been forging ahead. This suggests that, as we predicted, shopping for men can prove to be a bit of a headache.

An interesting anomaly emerged today.

It appears that men might be struggling even more than women – it’s just that they don’t use the same words.

The table below shows Google searches relating to “Christmas gifts.” A slight turn in phrase and the picture is entirely different.

There’s a lesson there in semantics and making sure that the search terms are right….

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Research from Ofcom this week shows that we are all getting better at multi-tasking. This evolution has been spurred by our need to juggle various communications devices and channels.

Rory Cellan-Jones in his BBC blog asks if there should be a moral panic about the way we are all spending our time. With so much multi-tasking there is clearly an overlap in how we use multiple devices together. But, surely you can’t be concentrating on different things on the TV, while surfing a web site, while texting a friend? I know I couldn’t.

Ofcom’s report shows that TV and radio (let’s not forget that) remains the main focus of our attention, whether it is recorded and watched later or watched live. So when sat in front of the same episode of Friends for the 23^rd time, smartphone, iPad or netbook in hand, connected to the web, I would suggest – partly because I actually do this quite regularly myself – that when something catches our eye on the TV we go online and look for more information. I know the broadcasters would be keen for us to hit the “red button” but the speed at which that works is just such a turn off.

This clearly suggests that TV content is influencing the way we search the web, and surely those sites striving for natural SEO success must, just must, include broadcast PR in any optimisation strategy. Another example of where the PR consultant can bring real value to an organic SEO campaign as suggested in my post last week.

Search is changing and the variety of on and off-line channels influencing it are growing all the time.  As digital PR specialists we now need to work out how to truly measure the effect of these different influences on search and site traffic and distance ourselves from traditional PR’s historical evaluation offering.

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The lines between PR and SEO are becoming ever more blurred. Back in February, Matt on his InfluenceFinder blog asked “Is PR the next SEO or SEO the next PR?” Yesterday I came across a new eConsultancy Q&A with John Straw – thanks to the power of Twitter – that again looks at the merging of these disciplines.

To a certain extent I agree with the views in these posts. SEO is definitely a natural extension of the digital PR skill set. That said, there is more a PR consultant offers than just relationships. When it comes to how PR can influence natural search rankings, these relationships are important and at the heart of a PRO’s ability to do his/her job. But, more important in delivering greater click throughs from natural search, is a PR professional’s ability to deliver the right message, in the right format, at the right time to the right influencer. A process and skill set that I am sure a SEO marketer can identify with.

Having the right relationships certainly makes this process easier as it provides the insight into which influencer is best placed to deliver your chosen message to the audience you wish to reach. But without the right pitch you will just be spamming that poor blogger or journalist, damaging any existing relationship you may have had.

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You might have heard a lot of chatter about real-time search recently, with Facebook buying Friendfeed (a microblogging service with some strong real-time search technology) and Google unveiling Caffeine, a more real-time focused version of its own search technology. Although real-time search is currently more hype than reality, it seems likely we’ll see the technology being used a lot more over the next 12-18 months, so online PR and marketing people should be paying attention.

What is real-time search?

In conventional web search, results are influenced by the authority of a page – well established websites with a high number of links from other trusted sites tend to rank highly. Real-time search is much more focused on what’s hot right now – what are people currently talking about on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

If you searched on the word “Pie” using a conventional search engine, you would expect to see some websites of big pie manufacturers, pie recipes from big cookery sites, the Wikipedia page about pies, and so on.

Real-time search, would be more likely to show you a current news story about the Prime Minister being hit in the face with a custard pie, a popular viral video of puppy stealing a pie, or some reviews of a new American Pie movie -anything related to pies that is currently generating a lot of buzz.

This is all very exciting, so it’s led a few people to declare that old-search is dead and real-time search is the future. This is nonsense. While real-time search is certainly going to get bigger, conventional search isn’t going away – if anything, the two will simply merge to provide blended results of high authority content alongside real-time results.

What does this mean for brands?

We know what we want from conventional search – our clients should be at the top of the page for relevant keywords, and the rest of the page should be filled with authoritative third party recommendations. This is what SEO and online PR is all about.

But what’s the goal with real-time search? If you want to consistently appear at the top of real-time search results, your brand is going to have to consistently be interesting enough to get people talking. This, I would suggest, requires a kick-ass online PR strategy.

What should you do about it?

Brands need to get a lot better at monitoring what’s happening online, to stay informed about what the rising trends are in their key markets and what subjects are generating online buzz. Forget monthly or even weekly reports – too slow, you lose.

Second, reaction times need to improve. If it takes you a week to get anything approved, you’re wasting your time. As real-time search becomes more important, comms teams will need the flexibility to respond to issues quickly, while the public is still interested. When one of those funny complaint letters about your company goes viral, nobody will care that you responded brilliantly if it doesn’t happen until a week or two later.

Take a look at your crisis comms plan and consider updating it for the real-time comms environment.

It’s not just about responding quickly to the bad stuff. Keeping on top of trending topics will help you to spot opportunities for positive conversations that your brand can be a part of, although this doesn’t mean you have to pounce on every new meme and beat it to death with corporate messaging.

The essence of all this is reaction time. If your brand wants to be involved in fast moving online conversations, you will have to find ways of keeping up or risk being left behind.

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