Blog Marketing and Search Engine Relevancy

[disclosure] Thrivepoint is receiving a free t-shirt for posting the following

Today, we received an email from Powerset, the much anticipated semantic search engine, asking us if we wanted a free t-shirt. Who doesn’t? All we needed to do was use the Factz feature on www.powerset.com and post our thoughts in our blog. What a great marketing idea. Reach influencers. Make it fun. Get the word out virally. Nice SEO bump. All for the cost of a t-shirt ($10) and postage ($1). Brilliant.

We typed in the query, “powerset” at www.powerset.com and received the following Factz:

included: pet and taunt.
opened: community and Powerlabs.
displayed advertise.
attracted range.
collected technologies.
searched language.
released applications.
sold advertise.
set Trick Arrow.

Confusing? Yes, but if you happen to click on one of those words, the selection expands into a complete sentence. For example, if you click on ‘advertise’ the selection expands to say, “Powerset is not currently selling or displaying any advertising.”

This is a great feature that needs some more tuning to make it user friendly. It certainly proves the point that relevant results are only part of the search equation — a logical display of the content is just as important.

UPDATE: Powerset already read this post and sent us some feedback. Now that is truly conversational marketing. We did some more digging and found that with topics that received more discussion, the results are much more user friendly. Here are some great ones (complete with bonus anchor text to help their SEO):

Case in point, the keyword ‘conversational marketing‘ offers a good glimpse at how Powerset takes a different approach perhaps when more data is available. In this instance, the Factz are automatically expanded for the user. The added bonus is the description from Freebase and all the links from Wikipedia.

‘Search engine marketing‘ offered similar results as ‘powerset’ and ‘search engine optimization‘ did not offer any Factz but did offer a decent definition.

We decided to try some more mainstream consumer-oriented topics and had a lot of fun playing with the results… the Boston Celtics beat the LA Lakers; Barack Obama received the endorsement of Marion Barry; Hillary Clinton won the primary, votes, states, nomination and delegates (that was her argument too!); and Barry Bonds hit home runs and broke records (that was a pretty good search result); Saturday Night Live is a sketch comedy that spoofs other shows and people.

By the way, Powerset reached out to us personally and created a great customer interaction and customer experience. With this personal interaction, we were interested in trying the service out more and left more impressed. Nice job, guys!