This fall I was invited to speak to local business leaders about Social Media Strategy and how they could use it to help their companies. We looked at Facebook, Twitter and how these were helpful for communication and engagement with their clients and customers. With the recent changes to Google, businesses will need to reevaluate their social media strategies again.

Twitter content has been indexed by Google for some time now, but they generally included only a link to your Twitter profile on the first page of search results, and it was almost always lower down on the page than the link to your own website. That’s changed today and for many searches Twitter is now shown at the top of the page.

This means that if you are doing any sort of business online a potential client or customer’s first impression of your company could depend entirely on the most recent thing you’ve posted on Twitter – or even the most recent thing someone said about your company.

Jennifer Leggio at ZDNet provides a good example of why Google’s new preferential treatment for Twitter is a big change for brands:

Most people tend to Google a location to pop up a Google Map rather than going to the brand of choice and tediously searching for the “find a location” page… What if someone is ranting about Starbucks on Twitter? In the past a brand manager might respond with “Oh, that person only has 50 followers” and not be too concerned. Not so fast anymore, brand manager. That tweet will now be picked up on Google real-time search right above the location search.

Google is continuing to adjust their new system, with a focus on preventing search engine spam. Some companies had their Twitter feeds included in searches for their company name earlier today, but now they don’t. There also seems to be some variance depending on where you like and which Google data centers you’re accessing. This makes it a bit early for us to know exactly what the new Twitter/Google best practices should be, but we can start thinking about some important questions:

Is it still a good idea to have your Twitter username closely match your company name? Do you want your Twitter feed, and everyone chatting with that account to appear in search results before your own homepage?

If you’re doing any sort of business online, is it now a good idea to post a lot of @replies, and RTs of other people’s links with your business Twitter account?

Is having a large number of Twitter followers and people @replying to you still an asset, or has it become a potential liability?

Do you want a lot of people RTing your posts and @replying to you, or would you rather search results featured a higher ratio of your own posts?

Does posting “fun” links and participating in hashtag games like #FollowFriday show the personable, human-side of your business, or is it just an opportunity for bad first-impressions?

It will certainly be interesting to see how Google responds to the concerns people are raising about real-time search and it’s potential for abuse. In the absence of significant changes to Google’s new search system I think there will be a lot of people rethinking how (and perhaps if) they continue to use Twitter for business, or if it’s better to just use it for socializing and talking about celebrities.

SideWiki is a service hosted by Google that allows users to leave comments about any website they are visiting for other SideWiki users to view. This isn’t a new idea, and other companies have tried to introduce similar services in the past. What makes SideWiki more likely to succeed is it’s ease of use by being integrated into Google’s search toolbar and the large number of established users that represents.

Despite this you may not be using Google Toolbar, or otherwise not want to install it just to check into what people are saying about a particular website. In that case you can still get the SideWiki information through Google’s new SideWiki API.

SideWinder is a simple implementation of this API letting you add a bookmarklet to your browser and click it to load SideWiki data for any website you might be visiting.

Drag this link to your browser bookmarks toolbar: SideWinder

Click on the SideWinder bookmark to load SideWiki info.

Note: I put this script together this afternoon, and as I only heard about SideWiki this morning, and the API this afternoon it’s entirely possible I’ll be able to update this script to make it more user-friendly and useful over the next few days.

I’ve had almost 40,000 people view the first DreamWeaver tutorial I posted on YouTube and have had a lot of requests to continue posting more, so this fall I’m hoping to make more of the topics covered in class available as video tutorials that anyone can follow along with.

If you’re one of my students, or would just like to check out the books I’m going to be using in class the course textbooks we’ll be using are:

Creating a Web Site in Dreamweaver CS4: Visual QuickProject Guide by Nolan Hester

It’s similar to the book I’ve used in previous years but more focused on DreamWeaver which should be more helpful for the later section of the course where some students had challenges in the past. It’s a relatively small + inexpensive book.

Photoshop CS4, Volume 1: Visual QuickStart Guide by Elaine Weinmann and Peter Loureka

I’ve had numerous students ask for an additional book to help with PhotoShop. This one is a bit more expensive, but still not nearly as much as many University textbooks.

Both books should be available at the Guelph-Humber bookstore in early September. They’re for the current versions of DreamWeaver + PhotoShop (CS4) which is what students would be downloading from Adobe and/or buying from any stores. That should be the version we have in the labs as well.