About dlouden
Derek’s career in interactive marketing began at Temerlin McClain in 2004 where he planned display media for American Airlines and the Texas Department of Tourism. It was working on these clients that Derek was first exposed to the world of search engine marketing and he hasn’t looked back since. The data intensive SEM world appealed to Derek’s analytical side and when he started to figure out how to lower the cost per mile of his drive to work, he knew this was the field he was meant for. At Click Here, Derek analyzes his clients’ businesses and crafts PPC marketing plans to drive bottom line success as efficiently as possible. With experience across a vast range of clients, Derek has crafted search strategies for almost all of Click Here’s clients. Employing some of the most advanced tools available, Derek ensures that his clients remain competitive and are always moving towards their goals.
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It’s not every day you hear something described as the “challenge of the age”, but that’s what the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, was recently quoted as saying about Social Search. With the recent explosion of social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, a whole new world of opinions, reviews, and sentiments is being unleashed on the web. Each of these tweets, status updates, blogs represents a huge opportunity and challenge for marketers seeking to harness the collective power of internet users to further their company or brand.
However, an awareness that this social material exists online is only half the battle. The proliferation of different social media outlets has also led to increased fragmentation. Rarely is this material contained in a single location where users can browse all of it at once. Even if there was, new sites are constantly emerging which makes keeping an updated repository a formidable challenge. Enter Social Search. Social Search is simply the way to empower people to find the information they seek that’s embedded in all of these various social media outlets from one central location.
Being no small task, it becomes more reasonable to start calling the collection, organization, ranking of all this social activity a “challenge for the ages”. This is where Google, Microsoft, and a number of other players who are working to create a real-time resource for finding all things social about anything that interest you.
Currently, social search features exist in several beta programs such as Google’s Social Search (below). In Google’s ‘experiment’ searchers will have the opportunity to filter search results by blogs, forums, and the ‘social’ option. Results from a user’s search will include content from users’ friends and contacts (from Gmail, for example).
Another example is what Bing is starting to do by incorporating Tweets in their search results along with dedicated Twitter search capabilities (below).
As more of this material becomes indexed and ultimately more findable, marketers and advertisers will be presented with the aforementioned challenges and opportunities. There are three things that marketers can and should be doing to capitalize on the social media opportunity:
- Companies should focus on getting their customers to tell the right kind of stories about their experiences. By making it easy for users to share their good experiences, marketers help give their consumers a voice. By increasing the number of brand mentions by users, the potential for a brand to show up in other social searches increases.
- Brands should actively engage with users of social media. Companies are starting to leverage Twitter as a customer service tool to help distraught customers find a solution to their woes. This two way dialog helps to humanize brands as entities that want their customers have the best experience possible.
- Companies should be actively listening to what their customers are saying. While this might seem like a basic suggestion, many companies are unaware of the 100’s of Facebook fan pages, unofficial blogs, and countless Tweets that might be out there about their brand. Each may hold priceless information about how brands can become better and satisfying their customers. By paying attention, companies can centralize their efforts to more effectively control what’s being said about the brands.
Social media could be called one of greatest collaboration tools in the history of mankind. Ensuring that brands actively engage in using this method of communication will help them to stay connected with the customers for the long run and ultimately help drive their success.
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