Watch Out Google, Here Comes Social Media
By Anna Johnson on September 29th, 2008Frank Watson, writing in Search Engine Watch, reckons the real threat to Google may not come from Yahoo, Microsoft, or indeed any other search engine. Instead it may come from social media.
“People are starting to move away from being satisfied with search results,” writes Mr Watson. “They’re starting to develop trust groups with social bookmarking tools and other community or social networks. If this behavior continues, we may see a change in the way the majority of people use the Web.”
Watson seems to be saying that as more people use social media… and as more advertisers follow people onto social media… search engines will lose their pre-eminence, if not relevance.
Hmmm… I dunno. While I appreciate the rising popularity of social media, I don’t see it happening at the expense of the search engines. What may emerge is a kind of morphing of the two – where search results are more informed by social media.
But that’s kind of happening already, isn’t it? At least to the extent that the search engines seem to favor social media results in the organic search engine results.
As for social media advertising displacing search advertising… I don’t see that happening any time soon. Not among direct response advertisers anyway. Nothing yields an advertising return on investment (ROI) quite so high as advertising your product to people who are specifically looking for that product.
So unless social media can start delivering a direct response kind of ROI, it won’t beat Google or the other search engines on the advertising front either.
All the same, I think Watson is on to something. A Google beater may well emerge from social media or ‘Web 2.0′… and it may not be anything we’ve seen yet.
Source: Frank Watson, “Could Social Media Be the Google Killer?” Search Engine Watch, Sep 19, 2008
