In time for the holiday season, we now support rich snippets for shopping (e-commerce) sites. As many of you know, rich snippets are search results that have been enhanced using structured data from your web pages. Our new format shows price, availability, and product reviews on pages offering a product for sale. Here’s a result for [office lava lamp]:

As a webmaster, there are two ways that you can provide the information needed for product rich snippets to show up for your site, both described on the Product rich snippets help page:

Option 1: Provide a Merchant Center feed.

Many sites already provide Merchant Center feeds for use in Google Product Search, which means that most of the work needed for rich snippets is already done. For Google to make use of Merchant Center feeds for rich snippets, you should also use the rel=”canonical” link element on your product pages. By adding rel=”canonical” to your pages, Google can match the URLs in your feed to the pages found by our crawler.

Option 2: Add markup to your site.

If prices for your products tend to change only infrequently, then adding markup is an alternative method to provide product data for rich snippets. We’ve updated our product markup format to allow a variety of different types of shopping sites to participate. In addition to the Google format, we support two other standards: the hProduct microformat and GoodRelations. You can use therich snippets testing tool to test your markup and make sure it’s being parsed correctly.

This feature is currently available to merchants located in the US, but we will be rolling it out in more markets soon. Additionally, there are a number of rich snippets formats that can be used world-wide in various languages—make your snippets compelling and useful! Should you have any questions about the use of rich snippets, check out our FAQs and feel free to post in our Webmaster Help Forum.

Q&A

Which should I provide — a Merchant Center feed or markup?

For most merchants, providing a Merchant Center feed is the best bet. That way your product prices and availability are updated quickly, and the data can be shown in rich snippets as well as in other applications like Google Shopping and Product Ads. If prices and availability change only infrequently, and you don’t want to set up a feed, then adding markup is also a valid option.

If I add markup to my site, will Google show product rich snippets for my pages?

We can’t guarantee that providing a feed or adding markup will result in rich snippets being shown. Note also that it may take a few weeks after providing data for rich snippets to be shown. If you mark up your pages, we encourage you to make sure that the data is parsed correctly by Google by using the rich snippets testing tool. The testing tool updates are rolling out over the next few days, so in this interim period the testing tool may not show previews for some types of markup.

I’ve already done reviews markup for my product offer pages. Should I add product/offer markup as well?

Yes, absolutely. Rich snippets are shown if the information provided accurately represents the main focus of the page. Therefore, for product pages you should add markup using the relevant offer/product fields which can include nested reviews.

Add the glory of social media measurement to the mix, and you have a recipe for going beyond mindless repetitive tactical execution, and establishing a social media data-driven revenue-making machine. Although opportunities are ripe and plentiful if you know where to look, determining and prioritizing actionable insights from an enormous data store of information is a constant challenge.

Brand Management

One of the first things you do as a social media marketing manager is set up alerts related to mentions of your brand, products, partners, or affiliations. Social media is less about who yells loudest, and more about engaging in conversation.

If you’re just starting out, one of your first duties is to assume the identity of “online spokesperson” for your brand. The easiest place to start engaging with your community is on your home turf: speaking about your company.

• Take action: Search engines and free tools such as Google Alerts can help you find brand mentions quite easily, but may not afford you the ability to filter results based on influence, authority, sentiment, or reach. This is where paid social media monitoring tools such as Sysomos or Radian6 come in handy. When dealing with larger brands and thousands of mentions, it helps to begin your outreach with negative sentiment from the highest authorities in social media, and then slowly whittle down the list.
• Example: if I worked for Southwest Airlines, and I wanted to monitor negative (or positive) comments on new routes opened up to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and I knew I was going after the lucrative young professional crowd competing with youth-oriented carriers like Virgin, my weekly alert filters might look something like this:

Lead Generation

Social media monitoring tools are a lot like pay-per-click advertising platforms. Sometimes it’s as easy as selecting the keywords you know will generate leads and tracing mentions of those words back to interested members of the social media community. When purchase intent isn’t obvious, you’ll want to hone in on conversion funnel keywords that communities may use en route to a purchasing decision.

• Take action: Monitor core business-related keyword mentions across social media platforms and engage communities with conversation and information, but hold the outright sales pitch, unless asked/appropriate. Introduce yourself or your brand to those individuals high up in the decision-making process, and attempt to pitch those who are ready to buy. Remember, more individuals will mention non-specific terms; ensure your efforts are aligned to your brand’s specific goals (sales support vs. lead generation).
• Insider tip: filter on “anyone know” or “ne1 know” plus your keywords and you should find a slew of people that could use your help.

• Example: If I worked for Verizon or AT&T, and wanted to engage people interested in finding the right cell phone, I might approach users who ask questions or mention the word “cell phone” and help with their purchasing decision. Because “cell phone” is very high in the conversion funnel, I wouldn’t bother pitching a specific phone to anyone using that term, but I would be honest and helpful so that when they were ready, trust in my brand would have been already established. However, people mentioning descriptive and specific keywords such as “smart phone” and “android phone” are probably much further down the decision-making process, and more easily pitched, if approached courteously and professionally.

Business Development

Depending on your level of comfort in social media measurement, you may find yourself applying what you learn online to develop your business, especially if you already offer products or services related to advertising or marketing, public relations, investor relations, or creative agency. Almost every tool, free or paid, will offer some data portability via API that you can weave into sophisticated applications and reporting capabilities to enrich your brand’s value proposition.

• Take action: Apply context to web analytics reporting by including social media measurement metrics such as mentions, reach, percentage sentiment, and share of voice. Go one step beyond data puking and attempt to correlate positive brand mentions, community engagement, and total reach with revenue numbers. Compare your analytics to your competition’s brand and show how much smarter/cooler/successful you are.
• Example: If I worked for an agency and already offered clients a number of kickass web analytics reports relating to their digital assets, I could potentially win additional business or upsell more robust reporting and consulting services related to social media engagement with the help of social media monitoring tools. At the very minimum, tools such as Sysomos Heartbeat can be white-labeled and resold.

Customer Service

If your brand is in a B2C vertical, reserving a Twitter handle is probably all that’s required to start generating a few negative customer service comments pointed directly at you. Very few brands do a stellar job of traditional customer service, but many brands have started jumping on the social media bandwagon to reduce costs.

Brands that take customer service to the next level, such as General Motors (@GM_joe) and Adobe Omniture (@omniturecare and once @benjamingaines), do their best to not only engage individuals that call out their brands directly, but participate in events and shared interests to further the knowledge base and communication of their community and industry.

• Take action: Use social media monitoring tools to determine your key social media demographics. Are most of your brand enthusiasts located in distinct regions in the U.S. and Canada? Do your followers attend tradeshows, tweetups, virtual summits, or Twitter chats? Find out, meet people, be social, and engage your customer service team with their community. Connect with influencers in those communities, and build advocates that may relieve your team of some of the burden of reaching the entire community on it’s own.

These are just a handful of potential applications that can help you make the most of social media monitoring tools. As always, we’re interested to hear how you use social media measurement and monitoring tools to complement your analytics reporting and provide actionable insights, so feel free to leave me a comment below.