Digital 180, Compete’s online “TV” series, spoke with Marta Kagan, who leads Espresso’s growing Boston office.   As the outspoken voice behind The Secret Diary of a Bonafide Marketing Genius, Marta writes and speaks frequently about branding and advertising in the digital channel.  Her viral hit What the F**k is Social Media? has been translated into seven languages.

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What terms drove the greatest query volume spike? Let’s take a look at some of the fastest growing terms since this time last year to get a better idea of the trend in consumer search interest.

Findings:

• The upward trend in search as a means of navigation continues. Social networking sites Facebook and Twitter account for a large portion of this growth.
• Yahoo! mail, AOL Mail, Gmail, Hotmail all make it onto the top movers list
• Netflix, ask.com, Comcast.net, TMZ, and Capital One have all at least doubled their query volume over the last year
• Michael Jackson is still on everyone’s mind still receiving over 2 million queries last month
• The fastest growing term was windows live, having less than 80,000 searches last year, last month there were 4.5 million (5588% increase)

Findings:

• With no election this year, queries for presidential candidates Barack Obama, and Sarah Palin have taken a back seat.
• Circuit City’s bankruptcy/liquidation and the subsequent closing all of its stores to exclusively become an online store has resulted in a significant drop in its search power. Surprisingly it still received over 200,000 queries.
• Evidently, Tramadol is no longer the narcotic hot topic.

Social networks are still becoming more and more popular. Based on an announcement this past Tuesday, Facebook has become the worlds largest social networking site with over 300 million worldwide users and is now financially viable, generating enough cash flow to cover all expenses plus the capital to continue expanding. Is Twitter next?

Microsoft Live has experienced considerable growth over the last year and their recent launch of the Bing brand looks to propel them even further.

The next few months should shape up to give an interesting look at the shopping habits of consumers as we near the Christmas season. Will the recession force price conscious consumers to rely on search as a bargain hunting tool? What will be the hottest toys compared with last year? Check back over the next few months to see.

Let’s face it. At this point, if you’re not somehow plugged into Twitter, you’re either asleep at the wheel, in complete denial, or my mother. For most people, the allure of real time news, spicy celebrity gossip, and an endless flow of whimsical trivialities from the Twitter pipe is simply irresistible. For marketers, however, Twitter is not all fun and games – especially when dollars, customer relationships, and brand credibility are on the line.

The month of August has been a rough one for Twitter, replete with major outages, security issues, and intermittent downtime. With the rocky road has been troubling to folks at Twitter, it has also spread serious waves throughout the Twitter ecosystem, inevitably impacting the numerous entities who rely on the resource on a regular basis. Close to home, the compete.com team experienced some of this pain during the heat of a Datanugget Friday session on August 7th (For those unfamiliar with Compete Datanugget Fridays, the idea is “Tweet us a domain and we’ll tweet you back a tasty datanugget for that site”). With nugget requests from our followers steadily flowing in, suddenly things screeched to a halt. Twitter outage straight up killed our Datanugget Frida¬¬¬y and all those positive brand interactions.

Using Daily metrics from Compete PRO, I took a look at the August outages to understand how they impacted the biggest sites directly dependent upon Twitter. Checking out Daily Reach for Twitter’s own status page, status.twitter.com, we’re able to easily identify the specific dates when Twitter was down by traffic to the page, as people sought answers and updates on August 6-7 and again on August 11th.

So with Twitter down and out, which sites took the fall? The Daily Attention data below show that time spent on popular sites twitpic.com, bit.ly, ow.ly on these days was way down from normal levels.

If you’re a marketer married to Twitter, or a site that feeds off the service, how do you avoid getting dragged into the mire? It’s sort of like learning to live without electricity for a little while. No perfect solution right now, but fire up the generator and get creative with some other channels. If all else fails, light some candles, grab a blanket, and wait for the lights to go back on.

Twitter continues to capture the attention and imagination of marketers; the site has posted twenty consecutive months of all time highs in site traffic. Its 23M+ monthly user base (as of July) provides a huge opportunity for brand marketers to directly engage customers, drive brand awareness, and drive revenue. Jetblue, Southwest and United are the most active airline brands on Twitter with approximately 1M, 460K & 30K ‘followers’ respectively (at the time of writing). Leveraging its ability to track consumer behavior across the internet, Compete measured the directional potential for twitter traffic to drive airline business by quantifying the extent to which shoppers of these airlines also visited Twitter.

At a high level:

• Airline site visitors’ propensity to visit Twitter is up nearly six-fold year-over-year
• Moreover, there is a positive correlation between airlines on Twitter than promote low rates and airlines’ booking success

Visitors to Twitter

Approximately 1 in 5 visitors to each of the three airline websites in July 2009 also visited Twitter.com that month (not accounting for those using mobile clients or other software applications). That figure is up a staggering 562% on average from a year ago. The gains are relatively consistent across the three airlines assessed.

Connecting Twitter to Revenue

Overlap is only part of the story however; the real end-game is evaluating the impact on business. A key challenge for marketers is to employ the right metrics to measure progress. To do that, Compete indexed the July conversion rate of airline supplier shoppers who visited Twitter against those who did not (conversion meaning visiting the airline site and booking a trip on-site). The higher the index, the higher the relationship between Twitter and revenue.

While all three airline sites have similar Twitter.com visitation rates (first chart), there are clear differences in the Twitter conversion lift experienced.

• United & JetBlue visitors who also visited Twitter in July 2009 were more likely to complete a booking than visitors who did not visit Twitter (10% and 35% more likely, respectively)
• Southwest visitors who also visited Twitter were 7% less likely to complete a booking that those who did not

Findings could indicate that Twitter played an important role in driving business for United and Jet Blue, but had a negative effect on Southwest bookings. But there is more to the story: United and JetBlue use Twitter not primarily to engage and inform customers (as Southwest & other brands do) but to heavily promote very low airfares. In fact, JetBlue launched a Twitter page dedicated to these low fare promotions or “Cheeps” on July 6th, while United has been promoting Twitter-only “Twares” since May 20th. Given that each airline’s visitors posted a similar growth in Twitter overlap and given the difference in the index results, it is possible that some Southwest visitors booked on JetBlue or United after seeing the low-fare Twitter promotions.

Implications

Travel industry insiders agree that Twitter holds transformative potential for deal publishers, big and small. And given Twitter’s explosive growth, airline & other travel marketers will undoubtedly be lured into using it to engage current customers, influence prospects and execute promotions. As with any media, the richest success comes from employing the soundest strategy and the best intelligence, but at the same time implementing quickly and dynamically. Given social media’s widespread reach, missteps will become public quickly, and a sound strategy is needed to mitigate blowback from well-publicized consumer complaints.

On the flip side, the best social media intelligence will allow marketers to understand where to find customers and prospects, to measure success in engaging those consumers, and to connect to ROI on an ongoing basis (just as Armano alludes to in his fifth point in the Harvard Business Review). Connecting social media efforts directly to ROI, while challenging, will allow for quick identification of innovative successes (including those of rivals) and for early detection of when the space becomes so saturated with a technique that it loses its effectiveness. This will help players in the travel industry optimize their efforts to integrate with and participate meaningfully on Twitter and other social networks.

July search term biggest movers are here! What terms drove the greatest query volume spike? Let’s take a look at some of the fastest growing terms since this time last year to get a better idea of the trend in consumer search interest.

Findings:

• Facebook, Craigslist, Twitter, and YouTube have seen explosive traffic growth in the past year and to follow suit their query volumes have grown substantially
• While portal properties Yahoo! (141MM Uvs) and AOL (55MM Uvs) haven’t significantly grown in traffic, they have seen 50%+ increase in brand queries since last year
• No sharp traffic trends in webmail properties Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail, but brand terms for both of these properties have risen sharply

Overall, brand term use is on the rise. Why, might you ask? One answer is that consumers are becoming more dependent on search for navigation (typing a brand into the search bar instead of navigating directly to the brands website). It’s not that consumers don’t know the names of these brands – they’re using the exact brand name as their search query as you can see below.

Taking a quick look at the top 5 keyword referrals (data taken from site profiles on compete.com) to some of the domains mentioned above, we see that navigational search nearly always encompases the top 5 keyword referrals to the sites (and a large portion of search referral traffic).

Search (as a means of navigation) is on the rise, at least in terms of traffic to some of these big online brands. Did internet surfer laziness take over (‘www.’ and ‘.com’ became too hard to type)? Are consumers showing more engine loyalty/trust in their engine’s results? I’ll admit I’m one of them.

Check back next month to see how this trend continues to take shape.

Earlier this summer, there were several reports that Dell has made $3M thanks to its use of Twitter, mainly to notify people about outlet deals on dell.com. The microblogging service that garnered media attention with reports on things as trivial as celebrity feuds and as serious as protest of the Iranian election results also had a tangible dollar amount associated with its use. The Dell announcement also provided a benchmark of sorts for marketers looking to measure the monetary impact of their social media use.

But where does Dell stand when it comes to getting referral traffic from Twitter, relative to other sites that sell products to customers? To find out, I looked Compete’s referral analytics data, which shows us what site people went to right after they were on Twitter. Although this doesn’t include referrals from mobile devices or Twitter clients (e.g. Tweetdeck, Tweetie, and Twitterific), it does give us an idea of how traffic from the site is flowing to other parts of the web.

To do this analysis, I compared Dell.com to the sites that sell products to consumers online (let’s call them “selling sites”) that got the biggest percentage of referrals from twitter.com. I also looked at the percentage of each site’s overall traffic that was made up of referrals from twitter.com, to gauge how big of an impact the microblogging site was having for them in the grand scheme of things.

The data is shown in the chart below. Each site’s rank in terms of getting referral traffic from Twitter’s website is in brackets, which you would read as “across all sites on the web, eBay ranked 15th in getting share of referral traffic from twitter.com.” The bars show the percentage of each site’s referral traffic that comes from Twitter referrals, which you would read as, “a tenth of one percent of craigslist’s referral traffic is made up of referrals from twitter.com.”

A couple of interesting points to note here:

• Among these selling sites, eBay is getting the largest percentage of the referral traffic from Twitter.com, even though those referrals make up about the same proportion of eBay.com’s overall traffic as they do for Dell’s site
• Etsy, a site where people can sell handmade and vintage items, saw the largest percentage of their traffic from Twitter.com in this group, at just over 2%
• In terms of getting Twitter referral share, Dell ranks 205th, and only about 0.1% of its site traffic comes from twitter.com

What does this mean? A couple of implications come to mind.

First, there is still an opportunity for these selling sites to increase their traffic from Twitter.com to make up a larger portion of their traffic, and take advantage of Twitter’s strength of delivering simple information quickly to a designated audience.

Second, a little seems to go a long way. Dell was able to make money using Twitter without garnering a large percentage of twitter.com referral traffic, and without a big chunk of their overall traffic coming from Twitter. Again, this data doesn’t include traffic that came from Twitter clients or mobile devices, but it does give us an insight into the traffic patterns from the website.

Third, a couple of the sites ahead of Dell in this analysis are places where people can buy, but also post their own items. It could be that people are using Twitter to promote what they are personally trying to sell. Although sites like Dell probably won’t (and shouldn’t) enable the average person to sell on its site, encouraging the audience’s participation through retweets could help boost traffic.

Twitter may be enigmatic, but it has potential for marketers. Typing 140 characters isn’t hard, but figuring out how much, and how to tap into it, is the true challenge.