Social search has everyone’s attention, well nearly
Social search was the key topic across the big search conference of the year, Search Engine Strategies (SES London).
And of course, I wasn’t any the less effusive on the subject. After all we have just launched our social search report where we demonstrate how essential search is to the evolution of social and SEO.
Presentation below, but I really only wanted to get across three points:
- Social search doesn’t really belong to one discipline. It is a mashup of SEO , customer service and PR at the very least. And these skills need to be blended if we are going to master the impact peoples’ social graph is having on their search behaviours
- Threading search through social requires more than churning out masses of beautifully tagged and coded content. Firstly Google is increasingly filtering out what it considers low quality content. Secondly you want your customer / advocate to work with you to spread your content. It is stories that come first in social search. Good stories spread. Good stories jump networks and devices. Good stories filter into the social graph
- Integration. Yup, I said it. It is the ‘big thing’ for 2011. It isn’t just a case getting all your marketing communications to work together. Social search brings them together whether you want it to or not – so you might as well join the consumer passion for sharing. They see your communications and one single voice – and social search is going to make that so much more obvious
Although as a social media agency we are a blend of different skills and capabilities, many of us have a PR heritage and it was sad to see not a single PR in such a crowded room of marketers and search people. In my view, this year, social search is going to be the heartbeat of successful social media. And PRs need to get on board to add their voices as the master story makers: creating stories that by their nature are designed to be shared.
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February 25th, 2011 at 8:48 am
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Katy Howell and Niall Fagan, immediate future. immediate future said: Search, PR and the social butterfly presentation now available at http://bit.ly/gYXe0x #sesuk [...]
February 25th, 2011 at 11:09 am
It’s a fair point you make here Katy – but I also think that anything short of full job re-training actually oversimplifies this situation. I spent over a decade grew in Tech PR agencies, and now sits outside both Tech and agency but still in PR. All that time was spent honing a very specific set of skills that taught me what PR is really about.
Amongst others, this included the one you mention above – stories: what makes a good story; how can I make ‘this’ into a good story; how can I make sure my message is threaded into that story without being too obvious. When you’ve been through that process and have a result that you’re pleased with – to then have to review for SEO purposes feels a little like raising a baby lamb as a pet, and then sending it off for slaughter. OK – that’s over-stating it somewhat, but it gets to the crux of the matter – the gap between what a decent PR does and what a decent SEO specialist does. One begins in a highly emotional, creative and human based place, the other has its roots in coding, machine operated search and logic. Two opposite sides of the coin.
So surely – because the web still seems so far from being genuinely semantic – this isn’t simply about ‘integration. In fact, the question has to be, ‘how do we get people to think in two opposite ways at the same time?’
February 25th, 2011 at 12:51 pm
Alex
I think you are spot on. I agree, I don’t think this is easy. Social media requires a new blended skill set that can hang on to the emotional and creative, whilst deftly weaving in the coding and analytics. But it is also not quite that difficult. Why, because the search engines and powerhouse algorithms are now turning to the social graph to rank and prioritise content. And it will be the ones own network that will play an increasingly significant role. It is why google is filtering out low quality content
February 25th, 2011 at 8:29 pm
Hi Katy,
Eddie Smith here with Topsy Labs. It’s interesting to see all the buzz going on about “social search” now. People are starting to define social search as results shared within your social graph, but I think this definition is too limiting.
Isn’t social search about understanding what people in general are sharing, with your social graph and all the degrees represented, simply one dimension to how you view results?
I ask this question because it seems the first level of valid social search is to be able to query what all people have shared about a search term, say for “social search”. Here is an example using Topsy http://topsy.com/s/social+search?window=d, which pulls all social results using twitter. You could then refine this search to only include results from influencers on the topic “social search” or to only include results within people you follow.
There are a number of commercial uses for these ways to slice dimensions of social search data with your friend graph being only one. Would love to hear your thoughts of this.
-eddie
February 27th, 2011 at 9:32 am
oh Yes Eddie you are absolutely correct. in fact you will see in the slide share that show a similar example from Bing’s own beta search. One that collates shares and likes in the same way as the example you show. As you suggest it is not just about ones own social graph that can impact results, but the social graphs of others that can be collated and used to validate / offer credibility / identify the popular. Hence a large part of our social search model is about tapping into motivations for sharing.