I’ve really taken a liking to these SearchMarketingNow webcasts. In today’s webcast, I have had the pleasure to listen to Chris Sherman who tackled the topic of Social Search: New Marketing Opportunities. With a lot of social networks out there, where can you leverage your traffic and what problems can you foresee? Chris discusses these areas and offers his insights.

Well, first, Chris introduces social search. What the heck is social search? There is no good industry definition at the present.

• The simple definition: On the Internet, is a way of finding tools that are informed by human judgment. People are thinking about it, or describing websites, and so on.
• Informed can mean many things, including egregiously uninformed. People are writing things or tagging things that makes it harder for people to find content.

Truthfully, we’ve always had social search.

• When Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, created it in 1990, he wanted something that people could use to search for what they wanted.
• Yahoo, too, was very social before it became a more algorithmically-based search engine. It was originally created by a team of human editors.
• Meta tags were created in 1996 to help content owners influence search engines, which was a great idea, but it was a massive failure when spammers realized that they could manipulate these results. Putting desirable content that was not useful in the meta tags caused their utility to dominish rapidly. This is why search engines stopped using them.

Better yet, algorithmic search is social.

• Yes, we’re talking about Google, Ask.com, Yahoo, and MSN: the people who write that code for the algorithms and engines make judgments.
• Fundamentally, these search engines reflect a human bias (in programmer choices, for example)
• Search engines are keen of searcher behavior and observe human behavior. They watch click paths – how humans progress through results. They look at popular URLs – what people choose to look at. Consequently, they modify algorithms based on our input.
• Newer personalization efforts are used to refine search for everyone. Right now, Google has the lead, but Yahoo is catching up. This is an important consideration for Search Marketers. The generic techniques are all of the sudden put at risk when people can go in and change the ordering of their search results to suit their needs. It’s not a huge risk today but can be later. Personalization will become increasingly common.

Well, if social search has been around for so long, why the buzz now? Why is it hot now despite its earlier beginnings?

• Algorithmic search has plateaued in the past 12-18 months. There really isn’t that much improvement or change. Innovation is much harder than it used to be. People are looking for alternative ways to find content. Thus, we see the emergence of social search platforms that are suitable alternatives to the traditional search engines. They are even faster than traditional search engines.
• Humans are still better at some things than computers. As an example, we can recognize images better than computers can. There are techniques that simply have not yet been invented by computer scientists.
• Collective effort: this is a major factor. Many, if not most of the players in social search are leveraging the work of volunteers. The problem with social search efforts in the early days of the web (Yahoo directory, Looksmart, etc.) is that the companies hired human beings. This cost a lot of money and didn’t scale very well. Now we have communities with tens of thousands of volunteers which scales better.

Social search provides interesting alternatives to regular search at a relatively low cost.

What are the types of social search? These are the categories that exist at the present.

• At the basic level, you see shared bookmarks and cached web pages. Examples: del.icio.us, Shadows, Yahoo MyWeb (which is more of a social networking kind of site than a simple site that is more about bookmarks), Furl, Diigo. There are a lot of these sites. They are relatively simple but they help users of the service find content. If you find people that have a similar interest, you can find what they have already “saved” for you.
• Then there are tag engines (blogs and RSS). Examples: Technorati, Bloglines. Blog content is a different kind of content. Technorati and Bloglines are updated pretty quickly as opposed to longer updates for search engines.
• There are collaborative directories as well. Examples: ODP (Open Directory Project/DMOZ), Prefound, Zimbio, Wikipedia. Instead of people being paid, these are volunteers. People who contribute are part of communities.
• Now, we see emerging personalized verticals. Examples: Google Custom Search Engine (formerly COOP), Eurekster Swicki, Rollyo. The idea is to have a lot of smaller search engines focusing on particular topics because they deliver specific content. The whole notion behind verticals didn’t initially play out but we’re now seeing a twist where technology is available for free that allows anyone to create their own vertical search engine, like on gardening or cooking. You can narrow it down as much as you like. One that I noticed yesterday, for example, covers search marketing blogs. It’s a really intriguing idea: you can create a very valuable resource with little effort. You can turn it into a very compelling tool with very little marketing resources.
• The popular ones seem to be the collaborative harvesters: Digg, Netscape, Reddit (popurls.com aggregates these).
• And there are also Social Question and Answer Sites. Example: Yahoo Answers, AnswerBag. Over the past year, Yahoo has learned from watching people interact with the service about the individuals who give quality answers and who the community trusts. It has evolved into a very useful service. It’s almost a hybrid approach. Yahoo uses its search to analyze what’s going on to a reputable resource. The hybrid is between social and algorithmic search but it learns much more toward the social side.
• There are other communities that are part search, definitely social. Examples: Craigslist, Judy’s Book, Insider pages, Yelp. It tends to be focused on local events or local services. Despite this, they have an extremely high level of social interaction. This vertical is not “search” in the true sense but these communities attract a lot of interest and unique content that present interesting opportunities for search marketers.

After the polling question (“Has your company placed any advertising on any social sites?”), Chris says that there’s definitely opportunity here. The real unique aspect is that users of social sites are relatively cutting-edge. Social search isn’t mainstream yet. They’re computer savvy: the younger demographic and so on. The good news is that because they are not extremely popular, the opportunities are there to get in at an early stage with relatively little effort/investment.

There are problems with social search that create challenges for search marketers:

• Scale and scope issues: there are tens of thousands of users and a ton of content on the web. People can’t keep up as often as computers can with new content.
• Tagging issues: People don’t know how to use tags effectively to label content.
  • ambiguity of language: For example, if you use the word “orange” as a tag, what could it mean? Is it referring to an orange fruit, an orange ball, an orange sunset?
  • lack of controlled vocabulary: meta tags work well in a closed environment.
  • human laziness: people don’t tag. We have the ability in Microsoft Office and Excel to tag our own documents. I have never done it. We could use automation.
  • idiots: there are people who use “orange” and are referring to a purple grape.
• Spammers: Blackhats can game a system to get their content in front of people. Spammers will become a potent force in the social space.

So, what will ultimately work?

• A combination of algorithmic and people-mediated search
• Trust networks: we don’t just want a person looking to tag content. We need a person who is trustworthy and reliable — someone that we know delivers the quality we desire.
• Increased personalization and user control over result filtering: as we learn how people are personalizing, we can learn to adapt our content without sacrificing the core fundamentals of our campaign.
• Soocial search will probably work best for non-text content (photos, music, video, widgets, etc). People really come into play here since computers cannot crack open the format of a file or a song file and understand what it is. Pandora is a great music search site that was defined by music experts who broke songs down into descriptors.

Threats and opportunities for Social Search

• Social search is already impacting algorithmic results and they will have an even more significant effect in the future. Wikipedia results appear quite often in the top 10 for praticular queries.

The Art of Linkbaiting
The concept of link baiting was coined by Nick Wilson. The idea is not like conventional requests for links. If you create really compelling content, people will be inclined to say “Wow, this is great, I need to put a link to it on my blog.” You create desirable content that attracts people to your site. Examples of this: great content, a useful service, or a widget (a piece of code that people can download and use). Once you’ve got this great content, you can submit it to harvesters so that they can spread the word. It’s a virtuous circle: more people link to it and you get higher rankings. A lot of traffic will come in. As more and more people link in, your algorithmic search results benefit as well.

So, what can you do to be successful?

• Create your own community:
  • Build your own customized search engine. You can become the vertical search for the particular topic. You can become the authoritative search site for the category. And it’s easy: read the instructions and embed the code onto your site.
  • Then, use linkbaiting to get people to use and link to this search tool. People will bookmark it, and if you get more links to it, the search engine will recognize your personal search engine as an authoritative search site for whatever your topic appears to cater for.
• Go for the top Google listings via social search:
  • Wikipedia is a site that anyone can edit, and it’s in the top 10. Go and find the category in Wikipedia that relates to you and edit it so that it can potentially get to your site. However, be very careful. Wikipedia editors tend to be cautious about people being self promotional. This is a delicate matter; you can get kicked out or banned from it.
  • Craigslist: On Greg Boser’s blog, I read that he did a study and saw craigslist results showing up in the top 10 for queries that return between 1 and 2 million results. This is also really good for small town postings that last for 45 days rather than 7, thereby giving you a longer opportunity for visibility.
• Don’t overlook traditional directories.
  • ODP is like the walking dead: don’t spend too much time with that. Instead…
  • The Yahoo directory, while a paid link, is very important. It generates great traffic even if it isn’t on the topmost results. On Yahoo’s search engine, its algorithmic search uses directory listings as a check and balance: if you’re in the directory, you have a much better chance of being on top of the algorithmic results.
  • Links from smaller directories (joeant, GoGuides) can also help you have visibility.
  • Even better, links from vertical directories in your category are great. Search engines consider this extremely relevant if your site is featured in a directory that is on topic for what your site is about.

What about Question and Answer sites?

• I wouldn’t bother. Most don’t allow you to link back to your site. You can’t leverage them into a search marketing benefit.
• There’s an exception and that’s LinkedIn answers. People want to do networking, and they want to establish connections to quality contacts in a professional context. It is a serious network. You can drop links within an answer. You can definitely take advantage of linkbaiting opportunities by LinkedIn answers.

Conclusion

• Social search will become more important over time, but it won’t replace algorithmic search
• It poses a threat to traditional SEM, but its not insurmountable. Now you need to get creative and it will ultimately pay off.
• Social search also offers unique opportunities for savvy search marketers. It takes a little creativity and learning how these services work so you can be part of the community.

Questions and Answers:

Question: In the social networking environment, is business involvement equated with spam, and how do we overcome this? Are there restrictions of corporate involvement on sites?
Chris: With social networking sites, most popular ones have an “attitude.” They are not necessarily anti-business but are rather against traditional forms of marketing. They want the “cool” or innovative approach. Each site has guidelines and rules to determine what is appropriate. You can go in and look and see what other companies have done. For example, in MySpace, you will find a lot of companies that have MySpace pages. They aren’t the traditional mainstream images that you find in traditional advertising. These pages are edgier. You have to be careful with it not only because if you dont follow the rules you’ll get kicked out, but because users will recognize phony/insincere types of networking. You can risk negative backlash if you don’t respect the way the community interacts.

Question: Can you comment on the demographics of the users of the social networking sites?
Chris: This depends on the site itself. The more popular ones — Digg or MySpace that get the most traffic — the demographic skews younger (mid 20s and younger). There are older users that are out there. The networks are big enough and diverse enough so you’ll find a lot of people out there. They also tend to be fickle and they rotate among demographic groups and people who have influence will lose it over time or people will gain it. The numbers are not solid. But we see right now that there’s a more sophisticated crowd.

Question: What about Wikipedia adding nofollow on their links?
Chris: I don’t think it’s a big deal. I don’t think it will impact the strategy. It will impact to a certain degree on how the search engines crawl the Wikipedia pages. If you have links to Wikipedia content from outside pages, that’s why its still in the top 10 – because there are follow links. Its a very viable strategy. This way, you still have people in Wikipedia clicking through. If you get a particular Wikipedia entry, you can see significant traffic when they locate you in Wikipedia.

Question: Would you use data in the non-text format that would work for social search?
Chris: Absolutely. People love numbers. If you create data with interesting information, this is great. It’s even better if you get the data out there in a way that allows them to reuse it. Anything that has that unique hook that sets your content apart regardless of what format it is in is good.

Question: What do you think will happen to the larger search engines? What will happen to Google, if anything? Will it change their algorithms?
Chris: Google is always changing their algorithms. This social search is new for them, so they have to learn too. We’ll see change but it’s going to be slow. There are those issue with scalability, ambiguity, and tagging issues. Search engines are embracing these things but slowly. They are probably going to do it in a way that is rolled out over time and is done in a very careful slow way that doesn’t alienate their current users. I’m not too concerned about algorithmic search in the short run.

Question: What about YouTube, and is this a good strategy?
Chris: It’s not a good “search marketing” strategy. It’s good linkbait. You are creating a video and offering something unique. Within the video, you can display the URL of your site in what is called “badging.” If you get a video and it becomes viral, it doesn’t matter where it’s hosted. The more it’s hosted, the better: the coverage will be there. One of the kinds of content you can create that is linkbait that draws attention to your website in that regard.

Question: What about paid search options on social search sites?
Chris: On customized search engines, Google/Yahoo serves contextual advertising. You can take advantage of that. You can do a revenue share with these tools and monetize your own vertical search engine. In addition to linkbait, you can get monetary reward. With some of the other sites, such as Digg, they also have ad networks (Digg has an arrangement with Federated Media). If you do create a widget or video as linkbait, you could drive traffic on a particular page to you, but that’s a complimentary strategy. You should focus on linkbait.

Question: Doing this is a lot of work. Does it really get the results?
Chris: Any type of search marketing is a lot of work. On the social search side of things, it’s still relatively new, and it’s relatively undiscovered by search marketers. You’re at a relatively early stage of what I think is a major trend going forward. You can experiment and learn before the masses. That said, the traffic you will get is great- SearchEngineLand gets huge spikes. Spikes and traffic will introduce new people to your site who might bookmark you, and gradually, over time, it can help you build a significant recurring/returning audience base. Ultimately, it’s a lot of work, but if you look at it the right way and approach it the right way, the efforts itself to build your audience will pay off.

Thanks again Chris, SearchMarketingNow, and iProspect, who sponsored the event — and please see my previous posts on Chris Sherman’s webcasts:

• Measuring Search Success 2007
• How to Find the Right Search Marketing Partner

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