Would you be impressed if an ecommerce search engine knew what you wanted because it was all the rage on Twitter?

If just by typing the first couple of letters you got a direct link to the product everyone's talking about?

If it did this instantly, dynamically, within minutes of social chatter about a particular item?

Our software labs have been building a product to do just that.

The tool, sbSocial Links, can be plugged into the Action Station of SearchBroker and will listen to the social media buzz and associate what people are saying with your catalogue documents.

It is powered by our EmpathyAPI (you can read more about The Empathy Project here).

Using the data mined from resources such as Twitter, sbSocial Links adds a value for social notoriety to catalogue items as they are mentioned in social media. This value is continuously updated as the conversation moves on, meaning the your catalogue reflects a near real-time view of what's hot and what's not.

There are many ways to take advantage of this technology, here are the top five:

1. The hottest items showing in a promotional area on the front page. This means customers don't even need to search as the most talked about items are promoted in the site's most valuable positions.
2. Have alerts sent to your catalogue manager so they can manually choose how to respond.
3. Rank results according to social notoriety. The hottest items showing at the top of the list
4. Plug in to AutoComplete or AutoSuggest so that customers see either the suggested term or an actual link in the search box as they search, taking them directly to the right product.
5. Create a Landing Page with the top social links. These pages are indexed by search engines and valuable to SEO strategies.

These are some of the ways that sbSocial Links can be used, but the challenge is for each business to find its own way to take full advantage of the technology to maximize the potential of each site.