There's been a lot of big words and circular rhetoric put out about whether ‘search will be replaced by social media’ lately. This one smacks of ‘too much free time’ if you ask me: It’s a bit like wondering whether social events will replace research.
If I need to decide whether argon filled double glazing is the right answer for a loft conversion I will do research and take expert advice (content I can trust).
When I need to find a builder that won't rip me off to fit that double glazing, I switch to friend’s recommendations (people I can trust).
From my perspective these are both tricky problems to solve that demand different approaches, the first is more of a research project, the second more of a social one.
A Nielson report from October 2009) seems to have helped fuel the debate around whether search will replace social by asserting that "roughly 18% of users see social media as a core navigation and information discovery tool". But if you look more closely at their research this 18% breaks down as 9% Wikipedia, 5% Blogs and 4% Facebook/Myspace/Twitter etc. So 14 of those 18 percentage points are actually content sources (Wiki and Blog) that work closely with search and meet a ‘research role’, whereas only 4 of those points relate to inherently ‘social’ media that fills more of the ‘social role’.
So the search/social debate isn’t quite what it seems at face value.
Where search and social meet is a fascinating place. By reducing it to a fatuous ‘replacement’ discussion diminishes it, and ignores the opportunities it presents for consumers and brands, especially if you start to think of search and social as “search friendly content informed by data from social media”.
Now that really starts to fry my hamburger.
We are drowning in content these days. Anything that helps seperate the wheat from the chaffe is a boon. I’ve always found websites that rely on recommendations for big ticket items (like a holiday or a new TV) are not useful when it comes to ‘making a buy’ because I don’t have confidence that recommendations come from ‘people like me’. Comments are more useful, but inconvenient and time consuming. Rave seeking hedonists and I (family man) differ when it comes to what would make an ideal place to stay in Ibiza. A website like Tripadvisor would be transformed if I was confident the recommendations it showed me took me into careful, intelligent consideration. That personalised experience would be incredibly valuable to me, and delivering on this boils down to using great data well.
Making search and social bed partners by better qualifying and presenting content using the rich data available from digital social interaction is an incredibly exciting area for innovation that offers the potential of real benefit to consumers and brands.
When this has been cracked in a way that safeguards privacy, it will leave us looking back at our current Web 2.0 world with dull contempt, when we compare it to the utility and convenience the successful union of search and social can offer us.NMA Opinion Piece, Sep 2010
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1 comments:
Nice post and I agree that search and social are complimentary solutions, not competitors. We've been working in social search now for over 2 years and deliberately don't mention the word search because people assume you compete with Google which is not true (and not desirable from a business perspective). For us Vark nailed it when they talked about finding people not pages, there are times when you want to research and seek information though often you'd rather just ask someone you trust. User behaviour on Twitter and Facebook are good examples of this with people asking their friends and followers for advice.
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