Friday, October 25, 2013

Social Search: What's it Mean for You?






“search”: early 14c., from Old French cerchier "to search," from Latin circare "go about, wander, traverse," from circus "circle".   


Glancing into the near past...
Well, it’s the first weeks after the New Year and many social media visionaries are scanning the event horizon hoping to give us a glimpse into the near future.  I’m not going to do that.  In fact, I’m going to take you back to a simpler time when people had to haul their own water, heat their houses by wood, and cook their meals on outdoor fires by the light of kerosene lanterns.  Yes, I’m talking about the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in October 2012.   

The storm hit Bucks County like Tonya Harding with a righteous grievance; we were without power for 11 days.  While the rest of the family went off to seek comfort, my granddog Critter and I stuck it out in my 18th century stone farmhouse.  We stayed warm by the fire, kept each other company and did important farm things like digging up moles and cleaning up debris from the storm.

Critter and I are raw dudes, stoking the
   fire and keeping the moles out.
     I learned a couple of things about social search during this episode.  Using my Droid (no wireless at my office due to outage) I searched my twitter feed to find useful local information such as where to find a shower, which nearby areas still had power, which local roads were passable, and where to find ANY size hot coffee for only 89 cents- McDonalds in Plumsteadville!  (By the way if I had done a traditional google search of roads closed in Bucks County, I might have turned up irrelevant news articles from storms in 2006.)   By searching my twitter feed I got real time information that made a difference.  Without being conscious of it, I was at the kerosene-lit intersection of two of the greatest trends in social media in 2012: local mobile and social search.



What is social search and why should you care about it?  
Traditional Search Engine Optimization relies on tag word and backlink strategies to get on the front page of search results.   As SEO companies charged big bucks to game the system with tricks and techniques designed to generate fake activity, companies like google and Bing rewrote algorithms to recognize and punish “grey hat” SEO techniques and reward authentic and organic website activity.  

Social Search integrates “social signals” to indicate the authenticity of a given search result.  Where backlinks and tag words were the sine qua non of a traditional SEO strategy, now a company needs to look at developing an optimized content strategy to build authority for their brand. In addition to a backlink strategy for the company website, a business must develop a strategy to propagate their optimized content through a network of individuals with high “author rank.” A strategy aimed at retweets, google +1s and facebook shares will increase visibility of a company and a brand in the new socially skewed search engines and generate authentic backlinks to the company website. While these SEO issues are important, even more meaningful is the ability of your brand to contribute value to the conversations your clients and customers are already engaged in.  This will build trust in your brand and that word will get around- especially in a local or regional market.

What is the future?...

I don’t know.  On Tuesday, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had Wall Street and the
social media marketing community holding their collective breath prior to announcing that Facebook was launching “Graph Search”, a foray into social search.  What happened next was more an anticlimactic expression of confusion than exuberant approval ; Facebook stock sold off, some critics decried the implied invasion of privacy, and CNBC braniacs pontificated about whether or not Graph Search  was going to be a significant source of additional revenue for the stumbling giant. What the pundits have missed is how significant the small and the local and the recent is to the decision-making of consumers and brand advocates. If traditional SEO is dying the death of 1000 cuts, my take is that Zuckerberg’s announcement is more than just another nick on the way to true user generated search. For the first time, local and regional businesses have a unique opportunity to beat the big brands in grooming their local markets.

So if author rank is the new SEO, here are some action items that will help to improve your rank or at least get you interacting with authors of high rank:

1. Develop a strategy to generate original, high quality content that will be entertaining, informative, or educational to your audience.
2. Post consistently. Authors will get a higher rank if their content is seen, shared or “liked”.
3. Post as an individual.  Author Rank on google is calculated for individuals, not company profiles
3.
Sign up for a personal google+ account. Google is the giant in the search business.  Google+ posts with high author rank now appear alongside traditional search results and while google says they do not give additional weight to g+ in their search, experience shows otherwise. By having a personal g+ account you can engage authors with high rank and they will help propagate your content (if the quality is there).  High ranking g+ posts will show up in search results for key words.
4. Engage your audience in your social media circles.  Comments by readers and interactions throughout your social media channels will boost your author rank.


The author, Philip Stephano, is a social media marketing strategist in Bucks County,  PA.  He is passionate about helping local and regional business around the country to use social media as an effective tool to find local prospects and customers. To learn more about Stephano go to http://about.me/philipstephano