Sohaib Athar, an IT expert with a touching knack for mixing cynicism with a dry turn of phrase, lives in Abbottabad, Pakistan. He unwittingly became embroiled in a media storm when he live-tweeted (Storify curation here) the assault on fugitive Osama Bin Laden’s abode.

More than 100,000 followers later, ReallyVirtual is the social web’s newest if unwilling amateur star.

Over in the US, a pro – Lauren Young – works for Reuters. She recounted her experience that same evening:

I was sitting in my home office, helping my husband file our, um, overdue taxes when I noticed a Tweet from Reuters at 21:54 ET that the president would “make a statement shortly.”

I’m not sure if Reuters was first, but we were definitely early. Other news organizations began reporting an Obama statement. Within 10 minutes, the Twittersphere was in a tizzy. Musings included the death of Libyan leader Muammar Gadaffi or something “relating to national security.” Others joked that the president was making an announcement simply to interrupt Donald Trump’s show “The Apprentice.”

But plenty of folks predicted that Osama bin Laden was dead. The first reliable report came from Keith Urbahn, Donald Rumsfeld’s spokesman. It took more than an hour for President Obama to speak to nation, well past the reported 22:30 ET address. But, by then, we all knew the news.

Hot damn!

This is THE Keith Urbahn Tweet. “Hot damn!”

This Tweet came a good 20 minutes or so before the first news organisation, ABC News, made the claim. Like many other organisations Reuters’ Lauren Young went on to describe this as Twitter’s “defining moment”.

In London the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones agrees. He got up at 7:00 that morning and heard the news the traditional way. He immediately Tweeted it but…

“…only to be bombarded with messages saying this was now very old news. In the age of Twitter you have to be online all night to keep up with events.”

Rory speculated as to why:

“So Twitter was first with the news, partly because it has become the medium now used by people in the know to spread information.”

What is the wider significance of all this for communication professionals?

So Twitter is a really significant platform. Perhaps more so than Facebook? No. They are very different beasts allowing for things to be done in different ways. In Egypt we saw revolutionary leaders organise on Twitter, but the platform where the masses were mobilised towards action was Facebook.

Unlike Twitter, Facebook is far less real time. If you miss something significant on Facebook, you can always catch up with it later. On the other hand, it is very easy to miss something because of Facebook’s Edgerank Algorithm. You will only pick up on it when and if the story has reached critical mass. And because Facebook is a series of often closed networks, how information spreads is more opaque and uneven.

You Tweet therefor you are

As we explained Twitter is not a mass platform like Facebook is. You don’t have a nice big profile page on Twitter. On Twitter it’s hard to just be, you need to say something interesting or you become invisible. And because of this we think that in its current form, Twitter is unlikely to ever have the scale of Facebook.

It is the place for people that have something to say. And because of this Twitter is also the place for people that like to be in the know.

But what are the key insights into Twitter’s particular real time power?

The power of real time

Emily Bell has written an excellent blog pos, which makes a good start at explaining our brave new world. She muses that:

“…The rise of the realtime social web has changed everything. The network effect now means that people with connectivity and curiosity really do live where news breaks…

…stories are most engaging when they are happening, and that the level of interest and engagement for big stories is only increased when they are supplemented with context, new facts and conversation also in real time…

…New audiences now assess quality through immediacy and relevance. You fail to register a story when it breaks, you lose an opportunity…”

If you want to grow your relevance and network on Twitter fast, one sure way is to be talking about and curating information about real time events. That is when people are most engaged.

If you know the subject, and if you can add context. So much better.

That is what Andy Carvin and Sultan Al Qassemi did throughout the Arab Spring: curating and annotating Tweets, and, particularly in the case of Qassemi, providing context and a fuller picture. RWW has shown how Carvin’s curating has made his Twitter followers grow.

Andy Carvin Twitter Growth

I can talk from personal experience. As you may have deduced from this and this blog post, during January, I got particularly into events unfolding in Tunisia and Egypt and how social media was playing a role. I followed it closely, and reported all I could find, and ReTweeted a lot. Look at my follower graph during that period.

Growth of my Twitter account during the Egyptian uprising

There is an easy way for people to get into this kind of journalism. By opening up their reporting process. Bell again:

“Carvin’s skill is in being timely, and diligent. He tweeted up to 500 times a day at the height of the Egyptian revolution, yet he never left Washington. Of course some would argue this is not ‘proper reporting’ although fewer and fewer people would actually contest that it doesn’t bear the hallmarks of the highest quality reporting. But every news organisation has desk editors don’t they? And desk editors follow stories through back channels, conversations, reading, watching and listening to material relevat to their field. Most desk editors will be totally engaged on every story of this magnitude to the same kind of sleepless depth as Andy Carvin, yet almost no desk editors expose this work in the way Carvin does. Why not?”

Yes, why not?

In the meantime, a massive debate has broken out whether what ReallyVirtual did was journalism. The Poyntner Institute points out that regardless of your view, ReallyVirtual now can use his new-found distribution network anyway he likes. And what has he been up to? Says Poyntner:

And in the days after the raid, he decided to use it to act like a journalist,posting photos of the compound and of the media covering the story.

But for some time now I have wondered about the added value of traditional SEO practices, and whether in fact SEO as a discipline is not in terminal decline.

SEO is being being replaced by another practice. Let me explain why SEO is in decline and what will replace it.

The SEOBOOK blog also recently wondered about the future of SEO:

SEO came about soon after the advent of the web crawler. The commercial imperative was obvious – where there was web traffic, there was money to be made. Positioning a page first in the engines was pretty much a licence to print money.

Still is, of course.

But they continued:

“In 2009, SEO plays fall into three distinct categories.

* Agency model: people offer services to others for a fee.
* Affiliate model: people gather traffic and funnel it somewhere else for a performance fee.
* Content model: people generate content and make money off advertising.

The last model is, I’m guessing, is one a lot of SEOs will pursue. Many do so now. “

That most SEOs will make their money from content may come as a startling prediction. But not if you consider these three developments killing traditional SEO:

1. Many platforms and frameworks for web development currently come out of the box SEO primed;
2. Some activity does not happen on the open web – take Facebook – and when it does, the page and the link is not its primary unit (yet). Take Twitter as another example.
3. The most successful long term SEO technique is called Linkbait and it’s got little to do with SEO.

Many platforms and frameworks for web development currently come out of the box SEO primed

Are you doing eCommerce? Magento is one of the great new eCommerce platforms and it does what you would want SEO wise. Each product has its own page and link and the Title, Headings,… tags are sorted in accordance with SEO best practise.

Matt Cutts, head of search quality at Google reckons WordPress is the best search engine optimised blog platform and in a video he tells exactly why it is a fantastic SEO choice. WordPress is of course now the platform of choice for much more than just blogs.

What about other web publishing platforms? I’m no Joomla expert, but as far as I can tell it is also SEO-ready without too much additional effort.

Put frankly, anybody building such a CMS, blogging or eCommerce platform that does not integrate SEO best practice is foolish. See how the mighty Flash is struggling for survival today. There’s only one reason. Search engines can’t make sense of Flash in spite of lots of people trying to make it SEO friendly.

It is fair to say that only when building a completely bespoke website or when significant mods to existing frameworks are done that SEO expertise needs to be on hand.

Some activity does not happen on the open web and when it does, the page and the link is not its primary unit (yet)

Facebook is huge. Facebook wants its members to be more open and expose their users’ Walls, Status Updates and Photo Albums to the open Web.

But it is a tall order to get users to change their habits when part of Facebook’s success was the exclusivity of interacting only with your crowd.

The majority of activity on Facebook is still hidden from Google and despite Facebook’s best intentions this is unlikely to change soon.

And outside Facebook there are other problems for search engines. Says the SEOBOOK:

Consider social media. Is a page the basic unit of Twitter? No, it’s the sentence. How about Youtube? The video. Social networks? The person. All can be extracted, re-purposed and dis-intermediated without losing meaning.

And then there’s the problem of the real time web.

When Michael Jackson died, Google was beaten to the punch by Twitter and Wikipedia for a couple of hours. So far the real time web remains out of SEO’s reach. Yes, Google now integrates Tweets into its results, but are they ranked? No. Then it’s outside the domain of SEO.

Conclusion? SEO is still very important but its reach does no longer cover everything.

The success of Linkbait – Linkbait is not SEO

The highly respected SEOMoz blog recently evaluated the continued significance of Linkbait as an SEO strategy even when other techniques are failing or changing.

“There have been more than a few debates and suppositions over the years about the potential value of linkbait/viral content strategies and whether search engines will always reward these practices. Today (actually, it’s late at night here in Oslo), I wanted to tackle this debate and succinctly present reasons why I believe this methodology will remain powerful and effective in the long run.”

But hang on – what the hell is Linkbait? If you’re thinking it’s some uber-complicated strategy requiring sophisticated technical know-how you’re very wrong.

British SEO expert Patrick Altoft explains what Linkbait is:

Linkbait is the practise of adding content to websites with the aim of attracting links from other sites. The content can take various forms, from a unique tool, or a breaking news story, to a well written article to a controversial image.

This simple definition should send bells ringing. No, the definition is not wrong. But what kind of people do you want to hire to create so-called Linkbait? SEO experts?

A good journalist smells of Linkbait. A film director reeks of it. Calling Linkbait an SEO strategy is like calling war a kind of politics. Perhaps it is a kind of politics, but it does not describe the kind of things that happen in a war effectively. In a war you need a different set of skills and mindset than in vanilla politics.

Why does Google like Linkbait?

Because it follows the model of how Google’s search works. Namely that it’s a meritocratic selection engine, which treats links likes votes. Not unlike Digg if you think about it. In short, search is a social form of voting and good Linkbait respects that model.

In this video – which we have posted before – Matt Cutts, head of Search Quality at Google explains Linkbait and how effective and cheap it can be to use.

Linkbait encourages creativity

What kind of Linkbait has proven to be successful? A recent SEOMoz study asked this question in the context of blogs. This is what they found:

* Content is the most important thing to a post, but posts with extra visual content attract extra links.
* Adding simple visual content, like lists and images, can increase the number of (Independent Linking Domains) ILDs by good percent.
* Posts with videos will attract almost 3 times more ILDs than a plain text post.
* Posts with all three media types (videos, images, and lists) will attract almost 6 times more ILDs than a plain text post.
* Contrary to common beliefs, large posts seem to attract more links than posts with 900 words or less.
* Posts with between 1800 and 3000 words will attract more than 15 times more ILDs than a post with less than 600 words.

To summarise it. Content attracts links. And content that’s well organized attracts even more links.

If you want to play the Linkbait game really well you’re going to look to hire copywriters, journalists, photographers, editors, animators, videographers and yes even media-savvy programmers – the so-called creative technologists. (The New York Times recently laid off staff and hired two dozen programmers.)

In short, Linkbait requires content skills, not search engine optimization skills.

But is SEO’d content itself really all it is cracked up to be?

I’m going to – reluctantly – drive one more stake through SEO’s heart. Pay special attention if you are in the business of publishing.

The Guardian recently featured an interesting article on why SEO should not be the only driver in site design. It featured the opinion of Matt Kelly, the associate editor of the Mirror, responsible for their recent successful forays online.

According to Kelly, “users” are people who discover content through Google, devour it, and then return to their search engine to look for more elsewhere.

“Often they have no idea which website it was they found the content on. Result? Users don’t care about the websites they visit, and as a consequence, advertisers are less willing to spend their cash to be associated with our content.
–
“We are to blame for allowing ourselves to be talked into believing that search engine optimisation is the be-all and end-all of successful website design.”

But, said Kelly, accumulating increasing numbers of unique users is of no long-term value. It is an “absurd metric that values one visit from one random Google News user as highly as daily visits, for an hour a time, from someone who treasures the content we produce.”

He argued that the “quest for a gazillion unique users from wherever, and for however little engagement, has been responsible for denuding many of our newspaper sites of the great brand and value and character that actually differentiates what we do, from all the aggregators and cheap, worthless news sites out there.”

Yes, an SEO’d site can drive users that don’t know your service or business. But you need to make sure they love what they find.