Since the emergence of social media, people have been positively vibrating about its potential. The possibility for growth is endless. But, until there’s a tangible benefit to its application, it’s understandably hard to justify investment in this sort of promotion. With a distinct formula developing for social media success, the question is not ‘Will it work?’ but rather ‘What’s it worth?’ Oliver Blanchard of The BrandBuilder Blog breaks it down into simple terms, giving citizens of the realtime web something to chew on.

From Blanchard’s presentation and Mashable’s elaboration on the idea of measuring ROI of social media, it’s clear that the end goal is to justify the profitability of social media. Metrics for popularity laid over a corresponding increase in, say, online sales is pretty good proof that it’s working. (more…)

Since the turn of the century, personal computing has gone Brady: it’s all about Apple, Apple, Apple. Even yesterday, the announcement of a new iMac—and more astoundingly, its accompanying mouse—took the social web by storm, surpassing even the omnipresent trend suggesting that there is No God.

But today, fair citizens of the interweb, is a different day. For the first time since the launch of its much-discussed Vista platform, Microsoft is making big waves with a new operating system, both socially and in terms of sales. The official preorder of Windows 7 has become the highest-selling preorder item on Amazon UK in history, surpassing even the most recent of the zeitgeist-inducing Harry Potter books. The most astonishing fact, however, is that in the first eight hours of its availability, Windows 7 recorded more sales in the United Kingdom than Vista has in total. To paraphrase Engadget/Paris Hilton…this product is hot.  And as a Windows 7 user, this editor can vouch for its much-improved interface (and the speed…oh, the speed).

While there’s no denying the Snow Leopard-challenging power of Microsoft’s new O/S, we can assure you this product will not stop He Who Shall Not Be Named from wreaking havoc all over Hogwarts this winter.

There’s a ton of news this morning about Bing now incorporating tweets in search results. And you can see why they would want to, using Kanye West’s rumored demise as an example. Celebrity deaths – or rumors of celebrity deaths – always generate a surge in search volumes. Users want to know what’s going on right now and turn to their favorite search engine to find out. As we’ve stated before, traditional search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing struggle in these scenarios. They find it hard to surface the buzzing results that are relevant right now. That’s a hole – and it’s a big one – that is being filled by realtime search engines. But it’s also instructive to look at the differences between realtime search approaches. The two screen shots below show search results pages for the query “RIP Kanye” on Twitter and OneRiot.

Twitter Search

OneRiot Realtime Search

Twitter search – which we love – shows you the flood of conversation from across the globe about the rapper. Most conversational snippets are funny and harmless, some are from “hashtag hoggers” (i.e. users jumping on the hashtag to appear in certain search results, but tweeting about another topic). Some tweeters claim Kayne is definitely dead, some realize it’s a hoax. And because the results appear as they are tweeted it’s hard to keep up with the absolute firehose of new comments (more than 460 new results emerged just in the time it took us to create the screen shot!)

OneRiot search – which we also love, obviously – shows you the buzz on the web right now about the same topic. You find the news, blogs and videos that are most relevant right now - trusted information from sites like MTV.com and NME.com. As we’ve explained before, these results are definitely influenced by the buzz on Twitter. We’ve developed a sophisticated realtime search infrastructure that uncovers the content fueling the conversations happening on the social web. Then, using PulseRank, our realtime ranking algorithm, we process the “signals” coming from Twitter (and other services) to rank and deliver that content among our search results - which all happens in under a second! The end result is that OneRiot helps you filter through the firehose of the realtime web to find the most relevant content right now – the very pages that people need to see to determine if that notoriously cocky rapper really kicked the bucket.

This Thursday, October 15, ReadWriteWeb is hosting their first realtime web summit in Mountain View, California. Being a realtime search engine and all, we figured we should go, so we’re sending Tobias Peggs (OneRiot’s GM) and Robert Reich (Co-Founder and head of our developer network) on down to chat search, sharing, social web, and all the stuff in between.

If you’re going, be sure to keep an eye out for our boys. They love talking realtime - and they’ll love you if you’ve already read this.

Stalk ‘em: