Social media, SEO, marketing and writingSocial Search: It’s A Channel, It’s a Plane, It’s a Super Opportunity!
Unless you’ve had your head buried in a hole for the past few months you have probably stumbled upon a blog post or two touting Google’s interest in purchasing Twitter as a way to leapfrog forward (and dominate) the real-time search market. Whether or not Google is actually interested in acquiring Twitter is not as important as what is says about the prospect of social search as the next big thing. Move over SEO, SEM and social media. Social search (as its own channel) has arrived!
Social search is an emerging new marketing channel. It’s not paid search, nor organic search, and it’s not social media either. It may be a close cousin to each but it’s a channel in its own right–and it is growing at a fantastic clip.
Trust is the Linchpin
As many of you have already heard in popular search marketing presentations, Google currently functions as every company’s home page. Seventy-two percent of all U.S. searches are done using Google, and people tend to type in branded URL’s even though they could just type it into the address bar to get to the site directly.
Most people trust Google but if you asked these same users if they trust Google’s results, you might elicit a difference response. For many, trusting Google’s results depends on what they’re searching for compared to what’s presented on the results page.
A recent search for the branded term, Allstate Insurance, for example, yielded 3,210,00 results. Something tells me the majority of these results are bogus, spam, or at least, somewhat insignificant on the relevance scale. So does a Google user trust only the results that appear on page one or should all 3 million+ results be trusted as well?
Compare Google with your own person social network. Most people trust their social network. And this trust seems to be manifesting into actions.
Take a look at these recent statistics that showcase social media’s impact on the retail purchase decision and consumption process:
“60% of consumers are actively involved in generating and sharing buzz.”
- Forrester Research
“80% of consumers say recommendations are the best sources of information.”
- Universal McCann
“Over 90% of consumers say WOM influenced their purchases”
- DoubleClick
Social Search Is Not Paid Search *
- Community is at the heart of the web experience, hence the rise of social media
- Hundreds of these communities are emerging
- And there are thousands of services that help connect these communities and share data amongst these communities
- Brands haven’t been invited into these communities, it’s about individuals
- Brands are trying to figure out how to become part of these communities because they know that effective listening is critical to business success
- Social media advertising is an oxymoron. You can’t buy your way into this club
- Social is not about advertising at all
Social Search Is Not Natural Search
- The big search engines are already playing a role in social search
- Most engines are morphing their algorithms and business models to account social content (Microsoft’s Bing comes to mind)
- Some social networks, like Twitter, have built in search (and user love it)
- New vertical search engines and social listening services are emerging to help people tap into this mountain of real-time, word-of-mouth content that can appear in many formats
- But is social search similar to natural search optimization?
- It’s not about tweaking a web site’s content & code
- It’s not about adding localized content pages to a website
- It’s not link building
- Social is not really about optimization at all
Social Search Is Not Social Media
- Social media is more about testing, influencing and monitoring
- It’s about user-centric conversations
- For companies, activities inlcude actively monitoring brand, reputation, and threats
- It’s also about tracking sentiment and buzz volume over time
- And its also about customer service outreach
- For some companies it’s about sales & promotions too
- But social media is not social search
The Social Web (of Opportunity) Is Huge
From a size & scope standpoint, the social web is already huge (and it’s growing!). It’s made up of content that lives as DATA, which does not necessarily reside on a single, traditional website. Consumers are publishing unprecedented quantities of data across all types of networks, sites, services, and feeds.
And the scary part is that the social web is already impacting opinions, brand perceptions, purchase decisions, along with the public psyche.
Social search can be thought of as the mechanisms used to tap into this emerging mass of trusted knowledge. These mechanisms are a combination of popular search technologies we already know and use today (Google, Bing, etc), new platforms (Hunch, Collecta, Cha Cha, etc.) and intra-search tools that help users navigate the popular social platforms (Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, etc).
New types of search engines are entering the fray, allowing users to:
- Conduct real-time searches
- Review conversations, reviews, comments, ratings & tags
- Helps find multimedia content, RSS feeds, blogs, and other web 2.0 content
The big takeaway around social search is the enormous opportunity–and challenge–it presents to companies around the globe. To be successful in social search, businesses must formulate a proactive strategy that directly influences and impacts who, what, where and why certain results are FOUND whenever, wherever, and however a social search is performed.
That’s no easy task. The good news is that nobody has mastered it yet and it will be years before the rules of engagement and optimization best practices are etched into stone.
* Several of the bullet points in the ‘Social Search Is Not Paid Search’ section of this post can be attributed to Rob Key, a panelist at SES NY, March 2008.
