Google recently made big news by combining state of the art search with social networking to launch Social Search. The basic idea is that, if someone in your social circle has ever commented about the topic you are searching on, that content will appear on the first page of results. Imagine what this could mean for ad agency new business prospecting!
The meteoric rise of social media taps into our desire to share our thoughts and perspectives with the world. The trouble, of course, is that most of that information is highly disorganized. That is, even if your best friend tweets their opinion about the movie you’re thinking about seeing tonight, if you’re not online at the moment of the Tweet, you probably won’t see it.
According to a recent article written by Gary Stein of Click Z, this disorganization of information is precisely the problem that Web search was invented to take on. And, now that there is a significant amount of content here, it seems like we are finally going to see the merging of social networking and search.
The implication of this is that, you’re no longer dealing with content nearly as much as you’re dealing with people. You need to pull together a plan that will give marketers experiences and then drive toward a very new and unique conversion: from someone who believes something to someone who talks about what they believe.
This is remarkable because there is, of course, a humongous industry built around trying to work both content and networks in such a way as to push your page to the top of search engine results. To say that the ability to get there via someone’s friend/connection is disruptive is to say the least. It means that optimizing for search absolutely means engaging in social marketing. Social Search is in beta now, but not for long. When it rolls out, you will need to include a social marketing plan in your search plans.
The New Conversion Metric: Knower to Advocate
The article goes on to that we will see a new generation of online marketing focused on getting people to post something to their networks. We have this already, but it is in its absolute infancy. We have seen buttons that allow people to share content become ubiquitous as a part of page layout. But this is information architecture, not marketing. Sharing content seemed like a good way to increase page views and drive traffic. But now, it’s more important. You need to get people to say positive things about your brand because that content will soon be the most valuable element returned from a search.
Just imagine how powerful this could be for agency new business prospecting.
Clive Maclean Consulting 