The Importance of Social Search

My friends at Overdrive Interactive recently issues an ebook on social search. It does an excellent job of laying out the ways social media marketing can improve search rankings on the two largest search engines, Google and Bing. They also did an interesting test on the subject which highlights the differences.

The graphic highlights the closed-loop process. It supports the value of the effort put into SMM. At the same time, it suggests that tying this activity to business outcomes will often be difficult. In the case of sales leads, as long as their source is identified, they can be tracked through to conversion, verifying the importance of leads that come in from social media. Increases and fans and followers can be tracked, but remember that's a “so what?” Appearances in social search and the impressions created are going to be more difficult to track and especially to link to sales. Tools are improving and that time will come also. In the meantime, good landing pages that encourage people to register an provide contact information are essential.

Two recent studies highlight the importance of search in the purchase process and thereby provide indirect support for social search. GroupM called it “The Virtuous Circle”—wish I’d thought of that first. Their study early in the year found that 58% of potential purchasers started with search while only 24% started with the company site. 51% of the searches converted compared to 48% for search and social combined in the purchase process (which they found to generally be 15 days) but only 1% for search alone. A followup study by GroupM, reported in Media Post, showed 86% of shoppers using generic search terms before the shopping trip and 90% clicking on the generic results when compared with branded search.

It suggests that we should all be following social search best practices because search is still key in the purchase process. Some of those, according to Overdrive are:

• Create compelling content that is worthy of being shared and use sharing tools to encourage your visitors to share.
• Keep your social profile updated.
• Be sure your website and blog are socially enabled. Overdrive also has an excellent ebook on the use of chicklets.
• Understand how your content looks on the various platforms.
• Keep up to date. The controversy surrounding Google’s ‘Panda’ update is a good example.

The wheels of social media marketing continue to spin, and social search is one thing driving them!

Article first published as The Importance of Social Search on Technorati.

Glue Yourself to Your Friends

I found Get Glue by way of a mention on Jeremiah Owyang’s blog—thanks, Jeremiah! It’s an interesting concept, and I did a bit of exploring.

The basic idea is that you can share reviews, opinions etc. with your friends without interrupting your web browsing. Here’s what they say:

Developed by AdaptiveBlue, Glue enables you to connect with your friends on the web around the things you visit online. Glue is powered by semantic recognition technology that automatically identifies books, music, movies, wines, stocks, movie stars, recording artists, and more. Glue works hard to make it easy for you to find out what your friends think about things you're visiting online.

They have a brief video on their home page that says what they do, but not much about how it actually works. I explored as much as I could without signing up. What I found is interesting. Here’s a capture of the Glue Stream. As you can see by the pull-down, you can get streams specifically for books, movies or music. You can just let the stream scroll by or you can pause it, presumably to follow follow the link in the stream item.

I found the most interesting function to be the spider. It has the same choices—books, movies and music and adds specific users. I choose books because the new book Free by Chris Anderson, which I’m thinking about buying, was there. When I clicked on it, I was shown the users who had commented on it, and where. That’s useful if I want to find reviews beyond the ones I normally look at on Amazon. When I clicked on a specific user I was taken to a view of that person’s reviews, comments, etc. Cool! I went to the “popular users,” clicked on Glue Classic, and one of them turned out to be a restaurant I know. Four people had reviewed the restaurant. Hum—this is beginning to sound both interesting and useful!

I couldn’t get into any of the specific reviews because I haven’t signed up yet. However, I’m fascinated. It looks like a user can get a lot of useful peer reviews and comments here. We’re well aware that peer reviews are a prerequisite for purchasing for a lot of us these days, so that’s good.

Is it also a way for monitoring content about your own book, restaurant, whatever? It seems obvious that it is. It also looks like you’d have to do that manually for now, but it’s easy to do, and the reach of Get Glue seems to make it worth the effort.

This is Web 3.0 stuff, in that it’s based on semantic technologies. They’re searching quantitative data and making it easy to follow things or people you’re interested in. As I understand it, the service follows the user around the web, so it indexes your activity without effort on your part. If that creeps you out, then Get Glue isn’t for you. If you do this sort of commenting/reviewing to provide info to other people (isn’t that the main reason?), then maybe you want an easy way to share what you do, making it more readily visible to more people.

Yes, definitely interesting!