The Next Big Thing just could be social search. One thing’s fairly clear: Google has hired some of the smartest people on the planet to do just one thing—to help inquiring minds find the exact information they’re searching for. Google wants searchers to find the most relevant content to satiate their curiosity.
Today those search results are significantly influenced by what you, the author, say about yourself. You control the page titles, meta data, alt tags, keywords, keyword density and placement, and anchor text. While Google does take into account incoming links and the quality of the link sources, they still weight search results based upon the content you yourself publish.
It won’t always be that way. Someday search engines will weigh what others are saying about you more significantly.
Think back one decade. Remember a time you needed to “influence” a target audience. You searched SRDS for sources who covered your marketplace. You looked for the key magazines covering the topics your marketplace cared about. There probably weren’t that many, and for each one you found, you could easily identify and contact the author creating the content you wanted to influence.
In other words, when you wanted to influence your market, you found the few authors creating content being consumed by them. You sought to influence the few influencers.
Why? Because you knew that whatever content that author created carried weight with the folks you wanted to reach. Google knows this truth, too. Google’s searching for the content that carries weight with audiences who are looking for it. Soon Google will know every single author creating content for your market. They’ll know who they are, how much they write and how often, who reads them and what those readers are saying about the author. Based upon those factors, Google will mathematically determine how relevant you are.
An old African proverbs counsels, “It’s best to dig your well before you’re thirsty.” That’s good advice for all of us. Now is the time to be building our online networks (digging our wells) before Google and other search engines start paying more attention to those networks thanthey do to what we ourselves create.
Now is the time to be getting ready for social search.
ACTION STEPS:
- Stop putting off full immersion in social media. As Nike says, “Just do it (already!)”
- Start paying attention to the micro-influencers in your marketplace (someday THEY will get all the attention)
- Build a solid, humble presence on the major social media networks today (and, no reason not to build a presence on the not-yet major networks, too; experiment)
