The empowering role of social search

With Ad:Tech wrapping up last week in New York City, I felt it was time to revisit what was, in my opinion, the most important topic of the conference: social search. Social search isn’t socializing with your five closest friends in a marathon Google and Yahoo group session. Rather, social search takes a powerful offline marketing concept, word of mouth, and exponentially expands the potential referral network.

Throughout history, word of mouth marketing has been one of the most powerful marketing tools. Like its big brother, today’s high-tech version has the potential to be the most influential driver of consumer response in interactive marketing.

How is it possible that a concept has so much potential?

For several years, Google has enjoyed (and benefited handsomely from) its search dominance. Provide Internet users with the most up-to-date content relevant to their search queries, and you’ll find yourself with a very loyal user base. Add some advertising to the mix and you have a recipe for success.

Google relevance drives your brand value and consumer loyalty. People believe that Google returns the most relevant search results, so they come back again and again. When a new search engine comes along or an existing engine renews its offers, I try it for a while. After all, searching is my profession.

Inevitably, I return to Google. Familiar, fast, fresh and relevant.

The web of tomorrow has taken a radically different approach to relevant content. Aptly named “web 2.0,” the next generation of websites promotes social elements that encourage community participation. The content, online discussions, and even the general purpose of these sites are defined by the user. After all, isn’t that what the web is all about: bringing together like-minded people from all over the world to collaborate, innovate and share?

Today’s casual web surfer has immense power. The power to shape and influence community thinking and, at the very least, offer two cents to the broader meaning. Never before has the “average Joe” individual wielded so much power.

Part of that power is the ability to auto-categorize or “tag” content that is useful to people in their daily search for content that is important to them. Social bookmarking sites like Digg, del.icio.us, and furl allow users to place server-side bookmarks on sites and structure those bookmarks around tagged keyword terms for quick and easy access. These sites allow the “tagged” to share their tagged sites and media with the world, a particular group of friends, or possibly just themselves.

Peter Hirschberg, President and Chief Marketing Officer of Technorati, participated in the social search panel discussion at Ad:Tech. Technorati, a pioneer in social search technologies, allows bloggers to create keyword tags for their post content and share them online with other bloggers.

Speaking about the inherent power of social search, Mr. Hirschberg reflected that “more than two-thirds of people trust their peers when it comes to buying products or services.”

We’ve removed word-of-mouth references and gossip from America’s living rooms and placed them in virtual meeting places that are as relevant to people as the village pub of a century ago or the coffee shop of the century. xx.

This new direction has the potential to rewrite the rules for data collection and search methodologies. Anyone with an Internet connection can discover unique and relevant content, tag that content, and share it with their online network. The search becomes a much more personal experience.

Search results are no longer displayed to users; they interact and even define the results.

Why should the web of tomorrow be tied to what any search engine’s computer-controlled algorithm returns as the most “relevant” content for a given search? Who is actually making that relevance determination?

I have long been a proponent of great web content and copy. Over a year ago, I declared that the future of search engine optimization (SEO) was in the hands of copywriters. The technical tricks of yesteryear were disappearing, and as search engines evolved, they gave rise to the web copywriter.

Today we are looking at the next milestone on that path to a content-dominated web landscape. As the blogosphere and social networking sites are buzzing with news, can you afford to sit back and wait for the GoogleBot to find, index, and classify that content?

The web moves at the speed of light, and if you want relevance, you have a few options. You can ask your network of friends online or Googlebot.

My money is on the user-driven Web 2.0 search model.