1. BlackBerry, PepsiCo Look To Real-Time, Relevant Content
By Karl Greenberg on MediaPost

When it comes to marketing in any form, it’s all about the content. In this piece for MediaPost, Karl Greenberg discusses how major brands are using real time, highly relevant content to drive engagement and revenue among their customers and their hopes for the future.

Takeaway: While the article features some pretty heavy topics – Lady Gaga as a spontaneous spokesperson, the use of content and engagement studios to manage content curated in real time – there are takeaways that apply to just about all companies large and small. The biggest takeaway is that no matter your industry or marketing budget, there is an opportunity to leverage content from a broad range of channels to market your product in real time, whether it’s created internally or by customers via social networks. The content is likely already everywhere – from message boards and Facebook pages to event surveys – you just need a way to curate and distribute it. This doesn’t need to immediately become a daunting task. Start small, but scalable and you’ll already be ahead of the curve.

Jessica Shieh, Digital Strategist

How Will Google Instant Change the SEO Game?

As of right now, the launch of Google Instant does not change search rankings dramatically. So in the narrow sense of SEO being about staying on top of the search result list, it does not have a significant impact.

However, if you define SEO in the broader sense, as Avichal Garg put it “capturing user attention for your site/brand as the user is in the information/search/buying flow,” then yes, this is a game changing technology. Some potential effects may include:

• The top rankings will get even more valuable since the query result changes as users type, they are less likely to scroll down unless they identify content of interest; also, lower ranking content will have even less visibility.
• Pages titles are more important because that will be the first place users look for information as they type in the search terms.
• Understanding user search behavior becomes essential. As users adapt to the search suggestion, they may start to type in only part of a query to fish for suggestions. As a result, sites and domains that mirror how users construct queries will benefit most from Google Instant.

Jessica Shieh, Digital Strategist

When Google announced Google Instant in early September, tech blogs, forums and social media channels exploded with buzz about this change to the popular search engine.

If you’re looking for a basic primer, Matt McGee provides a great overview on the Search Engine Land blog, but in this two-part blog series, I’m going to skip over the basics and talk about Google Instant’s potential impact on user behavior and consequently, how it changes the SEO game.