(Credit: Dale Hugo (cc))
The networks that we live in when we are online can be best understood by looking through the twin lenses of search engines and social media.
We talk about ourselves as a Search and Social company, and I thought it would be good to offer some thoughts on what that means. Although this is a company blog, these thoughts are very much a personal perspective, so I hope my colleagues will chime in with their critique of it.
I think search and social is not just good positioning for a company which has strengths in services around search engine marketing and social media. It is the best possible way for us to think about the web.
Social media and search engines are both things that are – of course – native to the web. Portals and information superhighways were ideas that came to us from thinking rooted the channel media world, a world which basically was centred around, or radiated out from, a centre owned and controlled by the media owners.
Search and social media are user centred. They let people shape their media experience, their experience of the communications technology around their desires.
Search and social are also both about networks. The networks that we live in when we are online can be best understood by looking through the paired lenses of search engines and social media.
Search engines, Google most of all, use their algorithms to “see” reputation in networks and understand what web pages are most likely to be useful to someone entering a phrase or single word into a search box. They do that by picking up clues from human behaviour in networks.
Social media is about our personal networks, very often. Increasingly this is understood best through the idea of the social graph, a person’s personal network of friends, interests and behaviours.
Personally we love our social graphs, because they keep us in touch with people we like, with news and information we’re interested in and allow us to do things more efficiently (like find books we want to read on Amazon). Naturally, marketers lust after the idea of tapping into these social graphs – but more of that another time.
Search, then gives us the computer’s eye view of a human web. To understand search is to understand the way the web works from a technical point of view, certainly to understand how the most powerful mediator / navigator of the web’s vastness works.
Meanwhile, to underastand the web from a social point of view is to understand it as a place where people live. Not just live, but develop it, turn it to work for them, shape it, evolve it, design it.
I like to think about a set of provocations around search and social, expressing the complementary, interlocking aspects of the web and how we use it….
Matt on 
January 13th, 2009 at 10:51 am
Good post Antony. I’m increasingly seeing the two as one entity as opposed to parallel ideas. I personally have trouble making a behavioural difference between finding and filtering as search engines are rapidly evolving their algorithms to include user input.
The original idea of the semantic web, or a web of meaning, has to be human centred and I find searches in Google today a continually amazing way of finding what I want. The implication is that a great search engine (Amazon’s customer experience is still the benchmark for me) filters by a combination of social and search invisibly, rapidly and accurately.
Overall I would say that all of the search and social characteristics your put forward are rapidly merging. This creates huge opportunities for extending ‘digital’ beyond direct marketing and into almost every facet of marketing you can think of.
January 13th, 2009 at 11:52 am
I agree with the point you make about the two coming together – which is why is it important that we don’t think about them separately.
Search and social is what puts digital at the heart of the web as media, and therefore has to put it at the heart of marketing as a whole…
January 13th, 2009 at 2:15 pm
How could one not agree? Great post. But, are clients set up to buy a ‘search and social media’ strategy?
January 13th, 2009 at 9:58 pm
Thoughtful stuff….! I think I agree with your definitions and differences. But where it all tends to get mangled – to Philip’s point – is what are clients buying? Ultimately I reckon this is where the definitions need to be drawn – the rest is kind of interesting but fluffy (I don’t mean that in a disparaging sense!)…
ie, clients right now will buy traffic acquisition, reputation monitoring, social ‘engagement’ (etc), and other stuff…. but this might be search, social or a combination of the two by your definition. So, is it worth decoupling them at all? Is there value in that approach….? How do you describe outcomes/results…? …and if we get good results, who cares for the source – Google, Twitter, woteva…??
(I have no answers on this one – just interested in your views!!)
January 14th, 2009 at 6:54 am
Who’s buying? It’s the key question. Well, I’ll answer in three ways:
First up, some people buy services relating to one, then the other because it makes sense, it’s the next logical step. Sometimes people include search and social in the same brief (that I’ve seen).
Second, I think search and social as a strategic perspective is the right way to understand and buy/sell all digital services, from web development (Is it findable? Is it portable? Is it useful to communities/users we see in social spaces?) to display advertising (What do our networks look like? How are users searching around our topics? How do these things help us design creative/content and place ads in the most relevant places?).
Third, clients want effective strategy. A search and social perspective is a great place to start. As we practice it, it means evidence/research based insights, strategy based on what will work in search and social media, followed through with programmes that are adaptive and evaluated well.
@Roger I think you’re right. Smart clients buy outcomes – and I’m talking about is how we get there. Who cares? Well, mainly us… clients can see the innards of how it all works if they wish – or not. Many opt to see the detail, out of interest and enthusiasm but certainly not all.
January 14th, 2009 at 1:14 pm
Agree completely – users cannot see any divide between search and social when they approach the web. Without a second thought they key in what they want to find and send that request off into the networked community and once said content is found, they look for the community’s attitude towards a particular topic or product.
Perhaps further down the line the industry won’t need to define search and social as it will be assumed that these are the bedrock of what needs to be addressed.
January 14th, 2009 at 5:22 pm
I’m in the camp who sees search and social as parts of the same whole. Google computes organic search relevance from, among other things, users’ clicks on past search results pages. This can be seen as “social activity”: as you click, you’re recommending the result to other users, influencing its popularity and its likelihood to presented to subsequent visitors. Incoming links -another key factor for search relevance- are even more clearly the result of social engagement.
Experiments like the Google Search Wiki contribute to blurring the divide even more, while on the other side, mobile apps like Yelp for the iPhone bring social results to searching in the physical world, in the form of user-generated reviews of local businesses.
To challenge the title of your post: while conversing about social and search’s convergence, are we not rather missing the pachiderm in the room? This larger etity comprising Social and Search is quietly bleeding out of the Web and into the real, physical world. What brave new world will that bring?
January 15th, 2009 at 12:06 am
Wow Roberto, this really gets interesting… If behaviour is rapidly changing and that people are being empowered to find and socialise online does this then translate to the world of bricks and mortar – I think so.
Think of the way news and traditional media is changing; the high street; international trade; banking?; the trade of used goods; travel and so on. Will this be a golden age for entrepreneurs in every sense of the word? I think so. What implications does this have for democracy (think of the edge that the use of online brought to Obama) and both truth and lies (propaganda)?
Apologies in advance if I’ve got the wrong end of the stick, I just got excited.
January 15th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
Just two (of I’m sure thousands) of examples of search/social affecting ‘the real world’.