1. The ‘Search Wiki’ results page where users can rearrange the results they are getting - true personalized results

2. Integration with Twitter search which will deliver more real-time Twitter content into the search results page

3. ‘Social Search’ which puts content from your personal network into the search results page

This is all disrupting one of the primary tenants of SEO: the relatively stable search results page that is arranged by an algorithm that ranks results on their relevancy to the search query.

However, these new products are really shifting the control of the search results page to the user, their personal preferences, live results, and content from their social networks. For SEO purposes, we may not even know what the search results page looks like from user to user. These are additional levels of complexity that simply cannot be overcome by “content optimization” and “link building.”

Even though adoption of these features still needs to increase, SEO specialists will need to expand their worldview and join the other types of marketers that are all converging on Social Media whether they are advertisers, PR, SEO, direct response, and other types of specialists.

Although it is extremely worthwhile to read the entire article and draw your own conclusions, here are the points which resonated with me:

• Experiment with new content formats and user participation: Blog posts are not just columns and op-ed pieces. Stephen M. Walt of the Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government found that he could actually develop ongoing pieces based on live developments and included multiple perspectives. Instead of his own single perspective on a certain battle in Afghanistan, he actually began to interact with the battle participants and integrating their perspectives into the analysis. So don’t be limited to column format pieces and truly push the medium.
• Be ready to be challenged and let go of being a perfectionist: Pieces are developed with short lead times and that presents an additional challenge as bloggers: “have to have a much thicker skin because the response is so instantaneous you’re likely to be wrong more often than you would with something you spend months or years working on.” Again, a great piece of insight from Stephen M. Walt. The feedback will range from absurd, to supportive, to challenging so be flexible.
• Don’t be afraid of strong positions and perhaps a bit of sensationalism: Bloggers note that taking on controversial topics gained the most attention and feedback. While not necessarily surprising, it may make sense to create a balance between posts that take on controversial topics that would provide a boost in overall readership.
• Be ready for a real commitment and time investment: This seems to be the biggest challenge. David J. Rothkoff of the Carnegie Endowment found: “My main goal when I started was that it shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes a day. That was not successful.” Evgeny Morozov of the Open Society Institute also noted the key challenge of “feeding the beast.” “Sometimes I wake up and just think ‘I’ve got nothin’. I have to do a lot of prior planning. I have a notebook where I keep ideas, and sometimes I’ll incubate something for several weeks.” Being a frequent blogger is quite a time investment so make sure you’re ready for that type of commitment and idea generation is another key challenge.

Blogging is a great platform to take a thought leadership position within an online space and it makes sense to do it especially since most organizations have such a wealth brain power locked away behind the company walls. However, before opening up these points and challenges are worth addressing, otherwise failure is a very real option.

Social Media “frenzies” are over-analyzed as they are happening but are then inadequately remembered after they pass, making their true impact hard to understand.  For example, I would really like to know what was the true impact of the so-called “Motrin Moms” incident?  Did it affect sales, reputation, favorability?

The Skittles experiment in March was hugely effective in generating buzz and traffic but what effect did that truly have and was it sustainable? In these cases it really is just conjecture.  Sales and other brand metrics are not readily available as they are just products within larger organizations, and after initial interest wanes these “social media frenzies” are somewhat forgotten and do not get re-examined.  As this practice area develops, I do believe that Social Media professionals should develop a habit of re-examining these examples as case studies in order to better understand their impact.

One recent example that is interesting to re-examine with having the benefit of time is the Domino’s social media scandal from March 2009 (initially discussed here).  The fact that it is a public company and the top level brand at the company makes it easier to go back and understand the impact of that crisis.  This was actually a frequent discussion point on the company earning’s conference call for that quarter (transcript at Seeking Alpha).  Apparently, the company will not suffer long-term losses, but did suffer sales 1%-2% in that quarter (WSJ article).  So it seems that the damage was pretty heavy, yet limited since that truly was the worst case scenario of a social media crisis.  Domino’s will obviously survive this.

I am not questioning the importance of social media to today’s business. I’m simply suggesting that we should remember to re-examine these events long after they take place as that will give us a clearer understanding about their the long-term significance.

[Also published on Social Media Today]

Search is a hot topic these days and has occupied many headlines. “Bing takes market share from Google”, “YouTube is the second most popular search engine”, “Facebook competes with Google by acquiring FriendFeed”, and so on… The more I see these, the more it seems that we cannot group all these discussions under the headings of general category of “search.” It seems that we may not be talking about a single market share but a market that is evolving, growing, and segmenting itself. I believe time has come to begin to distinguish the various type of “search” into sub categories that are based on user intent or expectation of what a user wants to do. These are the proposed categories:

Real time, personalized advice: This is grounded in a belief that micro content platforms and social networks are competing with traditional search engines. Users can tap their personal networks for queries like “what is the best way to manage Twitter?” or “What is a good hotel in Montego Bay, Jamaica?”

I don’t think that this is a type of search that is worrying Google for the next several years. Yes, they are taking steps to making their search results more real-time, but ultimately this type of search depends on the strength of one’s social network and its ability to field these questions. Most users still wound not rely consistently on their social networks to provide the type of information. If this were a threat to traditional search engine use, we would begin to see a decrease in overall number of queries and users on Google, Yahoo, and Bing and that has not happened yet.

Video and music search: This category is strong enough to stand on its own at this point and while I have heard the mention of “YouTube is the 2^nd most popular search engine”, perhaps it is better to say that it is the “top video search engine” or “top niche search engine” because it simply ONLY indexes video content.

It comes down to: does a user want to watch video or do they want to read? AND, the way we consume information currently is by consuming various information sources quickly. We scan content and therefore reading seems to be the most appropriate way. Reading suits our short attention spans (created in no small part by TV)— and videos are actually less efficient way of consuming information. Therefore, video search is a category, not an all encompassing search engine. It’s a tool for entertainment and niche instructional segments.

And finally:

Topical (or traditional) search: Traditional search engines will remain the immediate source of information for all types of results, video, niche, news, education, etc…. They are effective regardless of how strong your social network is and they have an algorithm behind delivering authoritative results. Going back to an earlier point, if that position was threatened we would already be seeing those trends.

It is important to distinguish between the various types of search in order to be able to properly understand the role of each because it impacts user experience and expectation as well as how organizations can plan to leverage them, but they are not all “search”.

This conference call had all the classic elements: poor sound quality, audible  typing into the microphone, and long blocks of hard-to-follow dialogue.  However, overall the effect of galvanizing support and getting the message across to the influentials worked: it resulted in on-message coverage from all the bloggers.  Granted, this is the actual President of the United States speaking to bloggers so they are likely to pay attention; nevertheless, there are important lessons here.  This was a high level executive making time to actually speak to bloggers and make relationships.  Not many CEOs do that.  The element of research was also present as these were progressive/liberal leaning bloggers that would almost certainly be receptive to the President’s message.  This research element of understanding a blogger position before outreach cannot be underestimated.   Bloggers are the new journalists and need to be treated accordingly. It is nice to see these basic tactics being practiced by President Obama.

See sample coverage and listen to the call here

There are too many “life” recording devices, information sharing platforms, and people to control for an organization or corporation. What happened to Domino’s with “rogue” personnel posting content of inappropriate and damaging activity is not too different from what lead to the exposure of Abu Ghraib abuse in 2004. The point is that these incidents are likely to happen as they reflect not only deeper underlying issues such as mismanagement and organizational practices, but now more than ever actions of individuals can have a huge impact. These incidents also tend to skew in a negative direction as it is much more likely that something shocking and inappropriate will get more attention than potential positive stories.

It is necessary for any organization to accept that a similar incident may happen to them at any time. It is impossible to have 100% satisfaction from all company stakeholder groups and focusing on draconian prevention practices will not likely work. These incidents again show that it is necessary to cultivate a positive social media presence not just to drive revenue and other goals but as a risk management tactic in case of crisis. Preparing a tiered social media crisis plan should be on the agenda of most companies and only serve as another reason to develop a social strategy.

We have seen many obituaries for various types of media in the last few years. While the following summary statement will be an oversimplification, it can all be condensed into the impending death of newspapers, magazines, TV, traditional websites, and the subsequent rise of mobile and social media. I believe that there needs to be a clarification about these issues.

It really seems that there needs to be a distinction between the two issues at hand: that of media consumption and that of media monetization. Media consumption is far from dead. From various studies (industry and in-house RF Insights research) the media consumption is growing. Even today’s Nielsen’s "3 Screen Report" (click here for pdf) shows that TV viewing is at an all-time high. Social Media, while trendy, still feeds on things that occur outside of social media: hot stories, campaigns, issues, products, etc…

The other issue is monetization. Recent magazine failures are not due to lack of readers but to lack of advertiser commitments. The classified section, the key moneymaker for newspapers, seems to be a lost battle, but newspapers still have the content that is wanted and demanded by users. They just want to consume it in different ways whether it’s through an iPhone app or Twitter feed. They also don’t want to pay for it anymore with subscriptions or perhaps even by viewing ads (hence the short form of the online New York Times or its iPhone app). It is also worthwhile to note that monetization has been an issue for social media darlings as well. Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are quite lost in monetizing their highly used platforms. And while TV viewing is at an all-time high, a closer reading of the Nielsen’s report identifies that even the high consumption of TV content may not lead to easy advantages:

1. An astounding 29% of US homes have DVR technology. That can really doom the standard commercial spots
2. 31% of all internet activity occurs while also watching TV meaning that user’s attention may be in multiple places

While these issues are not new, the point is to try to distinguish between consumption and monetization before declaring the death of various media. Is the lack of monetization sustainable? We shall see….

A recent episode involving the head of Ford’s social media efforts, the well known Scott Monty of Twitter, highlighted several key issues. To get more information on what actually happened, I would recommend reading the following Jalopnik blog post (part of Gawker Media).

One issue raised by the episode was: who is leading the conversation? Is it the social media persona or the overall corporate brand. It is true that Scott Monty is very well known in the social media circle so his personal brand has very high awareness. On the other hand, it can be argued that such a tactic does work well in social media because other users want to connect to a person (that can personify a brand) and not just a corporate logo. It makes sense for Scott Monty to have dinner with bloggers and post about that but it’s tough to understand how "Ford" can have the same experience.

The other issue is value. While Scott Monty has been praised as a model social media success, the inevitable question that comes up is how has this benefited Ford? The well known tangible benefit is that Scott has a large following on Twitter, approximately 10K followers. Yet, how many of those are current vehicle shoppers or are truly interested in Ford? A good indicator of who is on Twitter is the fact that Mashable, a blog that focuses on social media, has over 100K followers (that is out of 1M to 1.5M estimated total Twitter users). So yes, Twitter is a place for social media evangelists, communications people, and technology early adopters, but probably not people currently interested in purchasing vehicles. I am one of those people btw and currently not in the market (@shikhvarger).

Some of this criticism is a bit harsh. While not directly selling product, Scott did manage to keep informed a certain online segment about all things Ford. This segment is very active and influential online so Ford was likely to benefit by a lot of grassroots publicity from the people following Scott. It would be interesting to track if any of this publicity spilled out of the tech and social media segment and entered communities of vehicle shoppers…

So this episode did start an interesting dialogue, especially with more companies likely to hire their own "director of social media." Few tough issues to work out beforehand:

• Who will lead the conversation? Persona or the brand? Is there a way to integrate?
• Focus on the target audience and not proponents of social media
• What is the primary responsibility: corporate communications or product?
• Which are the right communities to focus on? Where are the right audiences (Is it Twitter, Facebook, niche communities, etc…)?

Inspired by annual prediction and end-of-year reviews, here are a few things which I hope will not happen next year within our industry:

• More new niche "beta" social networks that do not work
• SPAM hitting Twitter
• A new free web analytics solution
• A hyped comeback of Cuil
• Either a way to monetize Facebook or a government bailout
• Microblogging affecting the course of history

And last but not least…

• More irrelevant thought leadership pieces from the "experts"

It can be a decent year if these things can be avoided, but we shall see….

Interesting article in our company’s MOVE Magazine about Health 2.0. Apologies for the shameless self promotion.