The relationship between social media and search has truly intensified over the past 12months. Both mediums are complimentary of each other. Virtually everything you do online socially impacts what you do for search and vice versa. You need to measure and understand both mediums to get the full benefit. For example, if your social campaign is creating a lot of noise, this could impact how much traffic your PPC campaigns generate, subsequently you would need to adjust bids.

With the inclusion of real-time results in search engines, you can see why a social media campaign would need to be understood as users directly searching for your brand may stumble upon the real-time result describing your social status.

One would wonder whether search is becoming more social and vice versa, but both have coexisted since the dawn of the internet so neither really have an edge over each other.

For those unsure, or still unsold on actually how beneficial social media can be for marketing – it must be noted that social media can be employed to dictate search strategies. If you know what your goal of your search campaign is, you could use social media to influence or dictate the outcome.

For example, if you wanted to increase the volume of links to your website, your social media campaign goal could be focussed towards that – links often play an important role in search strategies hence it could benefit your search campaign.

Furthermore, the measurement of social media can be achieved in numerous ways. If you distinguish  your goals, measurement is naturally easier!

At the onset of measuring any campaigns results it is recommended that you always refer to the overall digital goals i.e. traffic, sales etc regardless of your social goals to see how they are impacted. You may find that what you thought your goal was, wasn’t – other metrics you  measure may be impacted, thus the campaign could still be a success.

Social media and search will continue to grow; search leverages social media and vice versa. Until we have a day where neither search engines or social platforms exist, this will always be the case.

Perhaps future trends will see social activity being carried out on platforms controlled and managed by brands as opposed to external solitude platforms such as Facebook? While Facebook etc have the means to support social activity, as social activity increases, the need for more will arise and if social platforms do not offer more customisation, people and brands will use them less often.

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1. Social media in 2010

Not to discount the fact that the word blog was coined in 1997 by Jorn Barger, it wasn’t until the launch of Blogger on 23rd August 1999 that blogging really began to gain traction.  There is no doubt that the launch of Blogger by Meg Hourihan and Twitter’s CEO, Evan Williams was the beginning of a massive shift in media production and consumption that would continue to 2009.

If you look back at how blogs looked in the early 00’s, they were true grass-roots media. It was an opportunity for anyone to publish content easily on the web. I doubt that anyone had the inkling that blogging might become so popular back then, but there is no doubting the shift it has caused in the media landscape.

Today, it is difficult to distinguish between blogs, news hubs, online newspapers and pretty much any online destination. Blogs that started years ago have become media behemoths. Often with influence beyond that of “traditional” news sources. While the “traditional” news sources are and have been blogging for many years.

With all this blurring and convergence, where does it leave blogs? Anyone can still create a blog. So, in a sense, it is still grass-roots media. But there’s very little chance that any blog created today will be able to grow to the size that the likes of Gizmodo, TechCrunch and Mashable have in the short time that they did. So is blogging still what blogging set out to be?

Wired editor Chris Anderson made an interesting, yet rather pretentious claim recently in an interview with Der Spiegal:

…I don’t use the word media. I don’t use the word news. I don’t think that those words mean anything anymore. They defined publishing in the 20th century. Today, they are a barrier. They are standing in our way, like “horseless carriage”

It’s a slightly baffling claim, but one I can see sense in. Print newspapers are dying; are the pigeon hole definitions we’re using contributing to this? Wouldn’t it be better if we stopped trying to recreate online what we had before? I think the same is true with blogging. Blogging isn’t dying, it’s stronger than ever, but can it really be called blogging any more, or has it changed into something different from what it started out as.

Anyway, I’m straying from my point. Blogger is 10, it has helped to revolutionise an industry faster than any other communication technology before it, and I think that is something worth celebrating!

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• Before There Was Twitter, There Was Blogger. And It’s Turning 10. (techcrunch.com)
• The Evolution of Blogging (time.com)

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