“Tens of millions of people search the Internet and still have a hard time finding what they are looking for,”
Posted by Joe Lichtenberg on Mon, Jul 30, 2007 @ 01:26 PM
notes Chris Shipley, executive producer and host of DEMO, and cofounder and chairman of market intelligence firm Guidewire Group, June 25, 2007. http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=3313692&page=1
Just starting to get your head around how to deal with Web 2.0? Look out, because now social search is gaining momentum (see the recent NY Times article). Just as Web 2.0 spawned the democratization of the web, social search has now extended the same phenomenon to search. And as a result, marketers have a lot more to consider than just SEO as they plan their search engine strategies.
Although not a replacement for the algorithmic search engines like Google, social search is certainly an important complement, for a number of reasons. Two big ones that immediately come to mind...
(1) Social search can't be gamed by marketers. Marketers have become experts at SEO. Is the first Google search result there because it's really the best, or because the company behind that URL has really good search engine marketers?! With social search, by contrast, the most valuable results naturally rise to the top.
(2) Google, et. al., is not sufficient. It's unusual to find a complete, comprehensive set of data on a particular topic from any one Google search result, or even from an entire results page in Google. Compare this with social search, where the best results combine relevant, meaningful information from a variety of sources that provide a full perspective on the topic.
Social search is definitely here to stay, in much the same way that Web 2.0 is here to stay.
So what's the impact on marketers? Just as Web 2.0 created a new set of challenges and opportunities for marketers, the same is true for social search. That's not to suggest that you should give up on your SEO investments, but do think about which social search networks you want to participate in, and find ways to add real value on the topics that are relevant to your brand. Because in the world of social search, you can't rise to the top via clever SEO. But you can by building interesting, useful collections of information that provide real value to searchers.