Collaborative or Social Search
A question that I hear sometimes is “Why should I concern myself with social media sites? I am ranked highly on Google. Isn’t that enough?
The answer simply is “NO.” It isn’t enough anymore. There are some compelling reasons why that I’ll go over.
Search is moving away from “web site” search to “digital search”. . Frederick Marckini, the founder of iProspect spoke recently at SEMNE.org (SEMNE is a search marketing organization in New England) and during his speech he made this comment:
“all media, all advertising, lead consumers to search …but not only at traditional “search engines…”
Think of search as not being platform specific. Think of it as a behavior that is being made more ubiquitous as search moves off the PC and into everyday appliances, like blackberries, iPods, televisions and phones.
If you’re focusing on Google and Yahoo – you’re limiting yourself! Be to be in front of your audience every time they search, every place they search, every search. Not everyone uses Google or Yahoo for every “type” of search. Search now includes places like YouTube, Netflix, Tivo and Del.icio.us.
Should I take it one step further? Search has moved from individuals to groups using “collaborative” search. What is collaborative search? A great example of collaborative search is Netflix. Today over 60% of NetFlicks rentals are now generated by collaborative search. “People who liked this movie, also liked this other movie…”
Collaborative search is community based search. It’s where your search results include results from other people in your community. Again Frederick Marckini reports that social search is:
“enabling a social network to analyze, evaluate, and refine or create search results.””
Social search is exponentially more powerful because the search engines take notice of what people are saying in different communities about brands. It used to be that brands would rank simply because they are a brand. That is no longer true. Now the brands who can get their customers to talk about them online will be the ones that win.
Social search means that search engines have began to listen to what your customers are saying about you via blogs, how they are voting for you on Digg, sharing pictures on Flickr, videos on YouTube and bookmarking your site in places like del.icio.us.
What does this mean to marketers?
You need to appear in front of your audience every time they search, every place they search, every search. Your neighborhood is larger than your web site. It includes all the social networking sites!
If your search marketing company is not focused on collaborative or social search, you might want to ask them why not?
Filed under Brand Marketing, SEO, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (3) : Mar 29th, 2007
March 31st, 2007 at 5:14 pm
David, let me say first you are right that companies have to be concerned about appearing in other web 2.0 locations. However, it requires that your audience uses search tools to find you. I think companies should also be concerned with social media because people will find out about your company if you are involved with social media communities. This means you might not be found through search but you might be found because everyone in the community is talking about you, or you are talking with them.
April 3rd, 2007 at 10:20 pm
John, the point I was trying to make was that search tools are an integral part of everything we do now. YouTube, Netflix, and Tivo are in essence large search engines. The only difference between them and Google is that YouTube hosts the content that your search finds, where as Google needs to send to the content.
April 6th, 2007 at 12:57 pm
I think you are right there David, search is important.