February 25, 2011
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.