BlogTalkRadio Podcast – Small Businesses, Marketing 2.0 and Social Media Stats

Earlier this month, I had an opportunity to be a guest at Caleb Barlow‘s Small Business Podcast over at the BlogTalkRadio.com. As some of you know, I’ve had the pleasure to work with Caleb for past couple of years and I’ve always been inspired and impressed by not only his energy but insights on the challenges faced by the average small business.

As you know, he is the master mind behind IBM’s play in the real small business market and hosts a non-biased regular LIVE podcast on small business related topics. This recent podcast, specifically, was around Social Media, Social Networking and Web Marketing for Small businesses. I was also joined by the CEO of BlogTalkRadio, Alan Levy on this podcast. BlogTalkRadio is a special podcast platform which allows listeners to engage live with the podcaster during the show. Finally podcasting meets Web 2.0.

We went through the latest social media trends, studies and tips on how to market efficiently on limited budgets.

Many IT resellers got their start in the late 90′s helping businesses build their first web presence. More than a decade later and a similar opportunity is emerging with social networking and social media. As effective marketing plans are becoming more and more digital the need for social content and a social presence is becoming increasingly important but it is not easy for a small business to get started. In this podcast Caleb is joined by Bilal Jaffery, IBM Worldwide Social Media and Competitive Marketing Leader and Alan Levy the CEO of BlogTalkRadio, the social media platform we are utilizing for this podcast. Caleb, Alan and Bilal will discuss the opportunity along with tools for a reseller to get started with social media.

Have a listen at BlogTalkRadio.com: http://goo.gl/8S3l

Real Time Search Debate

Everyone knows that Real-time Search is hot. Ever since Twitter came along, real time search has proven its worth. Twitter is taking full advantage of their network and its potential.

So, the question becomes — Can Google keep up with them or not? Will Twitter beat Google at its core? Is it beneficial for twitter to keep their data away from search engines to compete, much like how facebook keeps most of their network closed to search engine spiders? Or is Twitter gaining momentum due to their open concept?

Google into real-time search more than ever

Of course Twitter still has a valuable database of tweets and conversations which Google and other search engines do not have. But do not make the mistake thinking that Google has lost the real-time search game. They’re into it more than ever.

Yesterday the Omgili blog highlighted how you can tweak Google’s new Search Options to filter results by minutes and even seconds. That seems close to real-time search?

Check out the rest of the discussion at SearchCowboys “Can we stop the real-time search debate now?“.