Social Search: Competition = Opportunity
Last week in my post Social CRM: Opportunity Knocking I discussed the flip-side of common online privacy concerns highlighting opportunities for individuals and small businesses. With the rise of Social CRM solutions aggregating personal information to paint a picture of who you are to others I noted the importance of actively managing your online profiles and accounts. To extend this point further I wanted to share with you another area of opportunity for those who are managing their online presence in the Social Search space. Enjoy Part 3 of 3 on the topic of privacy and social media.
It’s been roughly 14 months since I wrote Why Social Media Matters to Photographers and in this time it’s very likely that the exploration of this new communication medium has resulted in your creation of multiple accounts either to experiment with or align into a larger communication strategy. In the past year Social Media use has exploded and the large search engines have taken note. So as to not become obsolete search engines have begun spidering entries in many social media communities to display alongside their traditional search results. Google quickly realized the best way to make sense of all this information in relation to individual identity was not to necessarily rely on algorithms to map things together, but to rely on individuals to piece their online presence together into a single profile… enter Google Profiles in mid-2009. In creating your Google Profile you can actively list sites that pertain to your online persona and footprint in a similar fashion noted in Social CRM: Opportunity Knocking. As an example here’s my Google profile page… feel free to follow me.
In late 2009 Google launched Social Search, 6 months after the launch of Google Profiles, enabling a new means to find information with in your social network. Google maps your relationship to the contacts in your social network and spiders content found with in the listed sites of each of your friends Google Profiles. The end result… for each of your searches Google will present the traditional results reflective of all content across the web and a special sub-set of results reflective of content amongst your contacts. To get a better idea of what this means see the video and screenshots below. (more after the jump)
