Nextweek, the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization NY will present the panel: Real Time! Search Meets Social in New York City.

Invoke’s Dario Meli will be speaking on the panel and weighing in on the burgeoning relationship between real time search and social media. Twitter’s partnership with Yahoo!, Bing and Google may demonstrate that the integration between real time search and social media is well underway, but what are the implications? How will it affect users behaviours, search engines, and search marketing alike? And what does the future of real time search have on our society and culture?

These questions will be tackled by this panel of experts, which include Invoke’s partner and business strategist Dario Meli, as well as:
* Alex Mann, director of Trendrr, a business intelligence platform for digital and social media
* Phil Pearlman, head of market research and community development at StockTwits.com
* Greg Galant, founder of SawHorse Media

SEMPO is a global non-profit organization serving the search engine marketing industry and marketing professionals engaged in it. Their purpose is to provide a foundation for industry growth through building stronger relationships, fostering awareness, providing education, promoting the industry, generating research, and creating a better understanding of search and its role in marketing.

Come by and say hi, or join the discussion online.

What: SEMPO NY Presents: Real Time! Search meets Social
When: Thursday, February 4, 6:30-9:30
Where: Conductor, 230 Park Avenue South, Floor 12
RSVP: Guests must RSVP for this event here: http://www.meetup.com/SEMPONewYork/calendar/12367430/
Cost: Attendees pay $10 at the door to cover event costs.

For Christmas, employees at Invoke received a welcome gift: Kindles. While some of us were skeptical about this new-fangled contraption, a few weeks of use have made converts of us all… and we aren’t the only ones. Due to the Kindle, Amazon sold more e-books during Christmas than print books.

Apple’s pending iSlate promises to encourage further adoption of tablet PCs — and may even signal a shift away from netbooks. As Apple is one of the few computer manufacturers that has not hopped onto the netbook bandwagon, this may be the product that bridges the gap between the iPhone and the MacBook. We will not speculate on how the iSlate may be a “game changer”, but we do think, based on our experience with the Kindle, that tablets are here to stay.

We can’t help but wonder how tablets could change social media. Whenever a disruptive technology disturbs the media status quo, it also changes how people interact with each other. Here’s how we think tablets could impact social media.

How the Form Complements the Function

There’s a reason the average blog post is less than 500 words: reading text on a monitor is hard on the eyes. While many of us do that for 8 hours a day (and sometimes longer), few find the experience more pleasurable than a book, thanks to glare, flicker, and other maladies of the back-lit screen. Moreover, 16:9 widescreen format has always lent itself better to movies than text. On smartphones, messages must be shorter. An iPhone’s small screen means lots of scrolling for big blocks of text.

Tablets hit the sweet spot for reading. They are small enough to make for easy scanning, yet large enough for making scrolling (or “page-turning”) a snap. Most of them use a technology called “e-ink” to make reading easier, and take away notorious flicker that plagues back-lit monitors.

In addition to the publishing sector, education will be the first industry profoundly affected by tablets. Tablets will cut students’ costs and dramatically reduce their physical load. And one can only begin to imagine the impact on libraries, which will move increasingly online. These examples just scratch the surface. Who knows how tablets could affect hospitals, law offices, or any profession that requires massive consumption of text?

Where does social media fit in?

The tablet form factor is an obvious boon for long-form content. It would therefore find an appreciative userbase among professionals who use many documents. However, since most tablets will be equipped with wireless Internet, there’s no reason users should remain passive readers.

Imagine students being able to send study notes to each others’ kindles, and then be able to provide further insight. Picture chefs not only perusing recipes, but adding their own critiques: “This one’s good, but too much salt.” Because tablets complement text so well, this may strengthen online dialogue — and may even improve well known social sites like Wikipedia that are already text-heavy.

Finally, if the Kindle is indicative of a broad trend, future tablets will probably implement an iPhone-style app store. What this means is that developers will inevitably build social media apps that complement a tablet’s function. Just as apps like Foursquare are built specifically for mobile phones, so this will be the case for tablets. Want to organize a virtual book club? It could be just a social media app away.

Update: Apple has announced their tablet today — and controversially have called it the iPad. As expected, major publishers have signed on. And it is confirmed the iPad uses the same app store as the iPhone.

Ryan Holmes, CEO of HootSuite, announced the finalization of $1.9 million USD of venture financing. The announcement comes on the heels of two significant releases including a HootSuite version for Apple iPhone and an update adding WordPress to the supported publishing platforms which already include Facebook, LinkedIn, Ping.fm and of course, Twitter.

The financing came from a high profile syndicate including Hearst Interactive Media, Blumberg Capital and prominent angel investors Social Concepts, and Geoff Entress.

CEO Ryan Holmes says, “This funding keeps HootSuite on track towards becoming the ultimate social media dashboard. We look forward to reaching wider audiences, and helping all manner of on-line projects and personalities communicate better with their audiences.”

HootSuite was created by Invoke in November of 2008 as a Twitter solution for our social media department and quickly evolved to provide brand monitoring, file-sharing, and social network integration. After only one year on the market, HootSuite has built a reputation as an essential tool for new marketers and consumers. Its more than 300,000 users include Whitehouse.gov, Disney, Time, Martha Stewart Media and SXSW.

Dear Friends,

It’s been an absolutely stupendous year for us over at Invoke — an incredible time of growth and change — and we’d like to share just a few of the highlights with you!

In February, our popular invention, HootSuite won a Shorty Award for Best Application at the tender age of three months old. (More than 50,000 public nominations and votes were tweeted to determine the winners.) Then, in May, memelabs, the original contest platform got even better–we unveiled photo contesting. Built on the award-winning platform used by Fortune 500 companies, memelabs photo contests delivered a flawless user experience to clients like Cellular South and ParkLane Homes.

By summer we were thinking about drinking, so it was a perfect time to launch the Sponsor me Spring video contest with Okanagan Spring Brewery. Meanwhile, HootSuite had grown some wings, and in July we released HootSuite 2.0. Major updates coupled with a bang-on upgrade campaign saw HootSuite trend on Twitter for the first time. (Yeah, we said first.)

The heat continued into the fall, when HootSuite was selected as a finalist in the prestigious Groundswell Awards, and then picked up a Canadian New Media Award for Best use of Social Media. Invoke debuted memesuite, an agency toolkit with solutions for audio-visual delivery, contesting and client database management. Memesuite’s arsenal combines memelabs with memeserver, a robust professional video server, and minimeme, a turnkey contest solution with rapid deployment and client-friendly CMS.

In October, Invoke teamed up with Vision Critical to kick off a social marketing campaign — and subsequently saw a 200% increase in site traffic in November. We were also honoured to be the social marketing agency of choice for the Vancouver International Film Festival, which saw a massive increase in ticket sales over last year.

The rains of November arrived just as our moustaches sprouted. Memelabs hosted the official Movember video contest, in support of men’s health research. Around the same time, Old Navy’s One in a Million memelabs campaign inspired communities to give back to their local charities.

HootSuite celebrated its first birthday by morphing from Twitter client into social media dashboard, and rolling out the much anticipated HootSuite iPhone application. The team was thrilled to be honoured as Best Twitter Application in Mashable’s Open Web Awards. As if all this weren’t enough, Invoke announced a new product in development, Vidrollr, an online conversation space — expect more about this hot property in the New Year.

If you’re still with us, thank you for reading. We can’t wait to see what 2010 brings!

The results are in! HootSuite has won Mashable’s 2009 Open Web Award for Best Twitter App. We’re incredibly honoured by the vote of confidence Twitter users have shown us through the OWAs.

This award is a crowning achievement that caps off a whirlwind year for us. HootSuite has also won Shorty and Canadian New Media Awards, and was selected as a finalist in the prestigious Groundswell Awards.

A year after launching, HootSuite has become the most used Twitter web client after Twitter itself. In November, HootSuite also added Facebook and LinkedIn functionality. This month, we’ve released our iPhone app to much fanfare. Through all this, our goal is to be your go-to professional social media dashboard.

Thank you to Mashable for hosting this award, to everybody who voted for us, and to users such as yourselves for inspiring us to make the Best Twitter App!