With offerings from just about every major social networking company or search engine, real-time search is reaching an inflection point: it is increasingly being used not just with online marketing efforts but in wholly unrelated endeavors.

Consider:

• A new effort at Gatorade is charting social media comments about its brand in real time - and using the results to craft new campaigns on the fly. The company recently created the Gatorade Mission Control Center inside of its Chicago headquarters - a room from where it monitors its real-time social media comments, Mashable reports. It contains six big monitors to track a number of data visualizations of tweets relevant to Gatorade and competitors, as well as sports nutrition-related topics. It uses this data in day-to-day decision making, such as the time that it noticed that commercials featuring a song by rap artist David Banner was being heavily discussed in social media. “Within 24 hours, they had worked with Banner to put out a full-length version of the song and distribute it to Gatorade followers and fans on Twitter and Facebook, respectively,” according to Mashable.

• Researchers at Lockheed Martin's Advanced Technology Lab in Cherry Hill are planning to track the 2010 hurricane season - not through weather maps and TV reports - but through photos and messages on social-media websites. (via the Philadelphia Inquirer). It is studying posts on Twitter and YouTube during disasters and political conflicts as part of a growing field of research on the intersection of disaster relief and ever-evolving social media.

Most companies, though, don’t fit in either extreme - cutting edge marketing research or scientific study. Instead they are grappling with more practical and mundane issues - such as turning real-time content into SEO-friendly material, according to SEOMoz.  “If you don't somehow reclaim those couple thousand tweets you've made, all of that content stays with Twitter and gets lost in their archives - which don't rank,” it writes. “However, if you figure out how to turn that content into topic-related pages on your own site, then it becomes useful to you.”