I’ll be the first to admit it. Search, while critically important in any marketing plan, has never exactly been my first digital love. Let’s face it—algorithms, SERPs and the like are more the purview of the right brained among us. Generally speaking, clever banners catch my eye a lot more often than the dependable keyword. But these days, I’m giving search another look. Because, well—frankly, search is getting all kinds of sexy.
First, just consider the technology around the new voice-driven search offerings from Google and Apple. Apple’s Siri debuted with the launch of the iPhone 4S. An iPhone assistant, Siri is based on search technology called Wulfram Alpha, which instead of trying to match your question with a set of possible matching documents, actually attempts to respond with a structured response.
Google already has Voice Search, which was launched in late 2011, with a vocabulary of over a million words and supported in 29 languages and accents. But Goggle already has plans to evolve Voice Search into Majel, Google’s answer to Siri. That’s two digital media giants with two competing voice search assistants based on very different search technology for us to fall in love with in 2012.
Another aspect of Search 3.0 that should capture the hearts of marketers is how it is now crawling over social media content, in addition to other sources. With social media content exploding by the second, from a search perspective we’ve just gone from black and white television straight to 3D. Social Search Optimisation (SSO) is another acronym we have to integrate into our marketing thinking. Of course more options mean more work—because now we have to approach and deliver search-friendly content for three different audiences: the web (for focused readers), the search engines (and their spiders) and now social (for those always-in-motion Facebook addicts and Tweeters). That means different content development strategies for each—but what relationship worth having isn’t worth some work?
Luckily, there are more tools to help us embrace the potentials of Search 3.0. My favourites are Google Trends and Yahoo! Clues. Google Trends (www.google.com/trends) is sort of a search engine for search activity. It provides you with a dashboard on search term hotness”, search activity volume and various related postings. Yahoo! Clues is still in Beta but offers geographic and demographic data around searches. Think of these tools as reverse look-ups for search terms—you can see who is searching for what and, based on some of the associated search terms they use, even begin to infer some whys” around the searches conducted.
Write me at patty@digitalchameleon.net and let me know your thoughts on search.
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Special bd member offer!
Digital Chameleon is proud to be the exclusive sponsor of Meet the marketers with Mumbrella” on January 31, 2012 and we want two beautydirectory members to join us for free!
Andy Lark, chief marketing officer of Commonwealth Bank; Nick Baker, executive GM of marketing for Tourism Australia; Ed Smith, group marketing director of News Limited and Simon McDowell, marketing director of Coles, will participate in the session moderated by Mumbrella editor-in-chief Tim Burrowes.
There’s limited seating and tickets cost $99 but if you want to enter our draw, just email Patty at patty@digitalchameleon.net (please put Mumbrella” in your subject line!). We’ll announce our winners in the January column.
Patty Keegan is Director of Digital Chameleon. Beginning her career in magazines, she was also VP at Carat USA, founder and Director of Carat Interactive Australia, founding General Manager of the IAB Australia, and listed as one of B&T’s 40 biggest players of Australia’s digital age.”
Digital Chameleon provides learning & development programs for marketers transitioning their skills to digital. We offer face-to-face and online courses that can be customised to your needs, for groups or individuals. Visit us at www.digitalchameleon.net. Contact us at info@digitalchameleon.net, Twitter:@pattykeegan, Facebook: digitalchameleon