Posted on April 1, 2009
The Relationship Between Social Media and Search
BY JASON CORMIER
Kudos to Peter Hershberg regarding his insight on what social media means to search, along with his explanation on the three evolutionary waves of search.
It seems not that long ago (middle of this decade), I was writing quite a bit about how relevant search results had evolved through Google's PageRank concept - what Peter refers to as Search 2.0.
And now here we are talking about Search 3.0 - relevance based on personal networks and the filtering of data through online social graphs, ultimately strengthened as more people connect with each other via the web.
When you consider the technology (RSS) supporting the distribution of information or updates within online social networks like Facebook and Twitter - I think we actually began seeing the infancy of Search 3.0 nearly two years ago through Google's Universal Search algorithm update (see basics of how Google's indexing changed in image below).
Another glimpse of Search 3.0 could be recognized with Stanford's 2008 Study on (Delicious) social bookmarking. Three highlights from the study included the following:
- 25% of posts through Deicious are pages that have yet to be indexed by search engines.
- 35% of URLs submitted are first-time submissions (roughly 120,00 URLs submitted per day).
- Tags are considered 93% relative to associated content.
What does it all mean? People, not search engines, are assigning relevance to content. Whether they know it or not, it's their keywords, their descriptions and their opinions that are making the impact.
Now consider how your opinion is shaped to people you are actually connected (networked) to online. Granted, some connections are stronger than others (Peter refers to three kinds of online connections in his Ad Age post) - but all are still highly relevant because they are ultimately chosen by you.
Bottom line: Marketing and PR folks need to get what this is about - and if you are a "social media expert", then you really need to be on it.
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In my opinion, offering to do social media marketing for others without a strong understanding of search, indexing, PageRank and how it flows gets blocked, web hosting and development basics is pretty iffy. It's important as all social media marketing is done on the web - and the kinds of web software, architecture, and decisions you make will have a huge impact into how you do on the Web. Mistakes and oversights are extremely costly.