What is the intent of your “Like” ?

With Graph Search Facebook has entered the Search game, and it intends to make search relevant with discovery and recommendation.

That’s neat.

However, one of the prime indexes by which they can sift through data and match queries to responses will be the “Like” button.

To give an example, If I use Graph Search  with the query “Which DSLR camera do my friends recommend” - Facebook will search through my network ( maybe later extended network), gather all the instances where my network “Liked” an activity or instance related to a DSLR camera and aggregate them to give me a list of recommendations.

That’s cool.

Now here’s the caveat. Given that many brands have spent tons of money in audience acquisition campaigns- (remember ” Like this page” and you can win a free bar of soap? ) - it is very likely that many of these like’s are not genuine recommendations, but an act that was undertaken simply with the wish of winning a freebie. 

So let’s assume that camera manufacturer A ran a Facebook audience generation campaign using an app, where the sign in was to Like the fan page, then I will have a list of those from my network who “recommended” product A. 

Then let’s assume some months later camera manufacturer B ran a similar Facebook campaign for audience generation and several members of my network signed in ( by liking the page). I will also get their names recommending product B.

Now let’s say I find that a lot of similar names on these two lists.  

Which one would be the real recommendation? Which one would I really go by ? Will it even have relevance to my query ? 

Problem is marketers, agencies all colluded together to ensure that the number of ” Likes” was a metric to chase for.This was not Facebook’s doing. But it sure affects them. As the number of “Likes” grew so did the giddy excitement (amidst marketers/ agencies) of having a number to show as proof of efficacy for a campaign. More “Likes” became equivalent to more success. 

Sadly it was the wrong metric of efficacy to start with. Still is. Especially if you are paying to buy those “likes”. Through ads, apps or contests. Yes you do get people to engage with the brand, but it should not be taken as metric to define buying intent or relevance. One has to take into consideration the intent of a person who presses the “Like” button. Why did s/he hit like? For public good, or for selfish sweepstake? Or to make someone happy ? Or to buy?

When a system has to sift through this kind of data which is ambiguous, the search results can be pretty skewed in terms of relevance. 

It fits in other places as well. Just because I click on an ad word on Google and land on a  page does not give a clear indication of my intent. 

People will buy when they want/need to buy. At that moment they will search, they will read, they will read reviews, they will ask friends and then based on their need and budget, they will make an informed decision. The best we can do, is to ensure we are there in their mind and that our product has the relevance to match to their needs. 

Also, when people really need to search something, they will search. Even if the right answer is in the 20th page of the search results- they will find and use that information which matters to them. Not some paid promotion which supposedly recommends them on their next action. 

Graph Search will be important for power users and with time it will metamorphose, add functionalities and then only we can truly understand what  a game changer it is.

The consumer is not dumb.

Marketers, brands, organizations, digital ninja’s, social guru’s and agencies need to start by acknowledging that first. 

Facebook also takes on Twitters relevancy to News

Interesting post from Vadim Lavrusik on Facebook Notes where he clearly talks about the benefit that Journalists can derive from Graph Search. 

Facebook’s news feed where you can subscribe to journalists to keep abreast of the news as they break is where this is focused- I’m guessing. Using the service Journalists/ writers can search for experts, content, images on relevant topics of discussion from within a community and use it 

Interestingly he calls it a ” Rolodex of 1 billion potential searches”. 

Now imagine if you can really connect your story with user generated content/ images right from location in real time, that would truly create more engagement for users who use the subscribe feature on Facebook to discover news. 

Quoting him from his blog,

“ A “Rolodex” of 1 Billion Potential Sources

“The new search enables journalists to do richer searches when trying to find an expert for a story. For example, say you’re doing a story on a specific company and you’re looking to interview someone who works at the company in their New York office, you could do this by searching for “People who work at ACME Inc in New York” to find potential employees to reach out to. You could even make the search more specific to find people who work at the company with a specific title, for example. This could make it easier to find potential sources & experts to reach out to for stories you’re working on.

This will also make it easier for people to discover journalists on Facebook. For example, if I want to find potential journalists to follow on Facebook, I could simply type in “journalists” to find people or pages that fall into this category. By selecting people, I will see anyone who has a journalist-related public title on their Facebook profile and if they have Follow enabled, I will be able to keep up with their public updates in my News Feed.”


So if Twitter is the 140 character burst of news feeds, this would be the more detailed, community curated version of breaking news as it happens. Imagine something like a Hurricane Sandy and people’s FB updates from location on their individual experiences being community curated under the ambit of a wider news coverage -  and the image of something compelling starts taking shape.

Interesting. I would have never thought that the news angle would be played up via FB’s new search product. 

Photo Courtesy- Vadim Lavrusik

Source: facebook.com

The metamorphosis of search- FB in the ring

As rumored and expected, Facebook entered the search game today. At Menlo Park, CEO Zuckerberg, launched the new product, which was more or less created by a bunch of ex-Googlers Lars Rasmussen and Tom Stocky.

The product aptly titled Graph Search, would help you draw answers by combing your networks Open Graph. These answers can be names of people by location, images, videos et all- layered by discovery and recommendation. But it is not like web search. 

So how does it differ ? ( Phrasing from the FB blog)

Web search is designed to take a set of keywords (for example: “ SLR Cameras”) and provide the best possible results that match those keywords. With Graph Search one can combine phrases (for example: “my friends in Mumbai who like Nikon “) to get that set of people, places, photos or other content that’s been shared on Facebook. 


Another big difference from web search is that every piece of content on Facebook has its own audience, and most content isn’t public ( based on a users privacy settings) . Graph Search has been built with privacy in mind, and it respects the privacy and audience of each piece of content on Facebook. It makes finding new things much easier, but you can only see what you could already view elsewhere on Facebook.

Which means if you do not wish your photos/ content to be public Graph Search will exclude those results from the search query

The initial four areas where Graph Search is going to concentrate on are People, Photos, Places and Interests.

image

The other area of importance is that Graph Search will work in collaboration with Bing. The answers that worn be able to found via Graph Search will be handed over to bing to provide the necessary responses - but this has been built in an integrated fashion. Quoting the Bing Blog

“Now when you do a web search on Facebook, the new search results page will feature a two-column layout with Bing-powered web results appearing on the left-hand side overlaid with social information from Facebook including how many people like a given result. On the right hand side, you will see content from Facebook Pages and apps that are related to your search.”

Pretty neat.

image

Integrating search, discovery, recommendation and services all in one flow. App developers on Facebook should get a good fillip from this, given that searching for good apps can be a nightmare anywhere.

From a monetization point of view in the long run, I can imagine places and interests to be of key interest for advertisers, while from a database point of view and targeted marketing it would be interesting to know if a brand page owner can search for ” who of my fans like  or recommended products A, B or C to further customize marketing and lead generation messaging to them individually. Facebook though is not talking about monetization right now.

Big changes. New innovations. 

From indexed links to discovery via recommendations along with promoted services - search has come a long way indeed.

The true shift to semantic search via products like knowledge graph and graph search only goes to underscore that point.

Google had already done it with Search Plus Your World and they have integrated it amazingly well within the fabric of Google Plus which is truly bolstering its enterprise potential. Google Plus does not have the membership base of Facebook, but for businesses they are truly providing an enterprise solutions suite on the cloud to run basic office operations which search  and social integration baked right in. 

All in all exciting stuff. And more power to the consumer.

Now to wait for all the privacy related concerns.

Source: newsroom.fb.com

A fundamental problem of search is that it does not understand the difference between say Apple the Fruit and Apple the Company

The first page of Google results does not even return one link around the fruit. Irony of  SEO and SEM.

As Google ups the ante on Freebase and Microsoft Bing does the same with Satori, we have the birth of semantic search. Welcome to the Knowledge Graph.

Now think where Siri and IBM’s Watson are different. Think where Google can lose the search battle in the future if they cannot solve this problem.

A question of funnels

All of us who have dabbled a bit in marketing have heard of this word. 

Funnel.

It is that magical vortex where supposedly once you can progress a customer , a sale is imminent. No wonder there is so much of brouhaha around this one word. Customer funnel, sales funnel, marketing funnel …ad nauseum it continues.

So it didn’t take long for internet geeks to come up with another funnel. The search funnel.

Like any other funnel it has two ends, the upper end and the lower end. So let’s see how it works;

Say you are interested in camera’s:

The upper funnel consists of words like camera

The lower end of the funnel consists of a term like canon G1X.

Generally a search marketing agency will combine these two words in a keyword pack, bid like crazy on them, optimize the hell out of them, run cpc and ctr graph charts that will make your mind boggle  and somehow tie it to the sales funnel to show ROI.

Everyone’s happy.

Question is did it really work?

When you type the word camera, no one really knows at what level your interest is. Does it reflect purchasing intent or information hunger intent or “I had nothing else to do and hence was just killing time” intent ?

When you type Canon G1X, you have already narrowed down your own query to a point product. Getting a result on that is a no brainer and creating a keyword pack which optimizes that word is plain simple half -assed.

It is the journey between the word Camera to the word G1X where search plans and search engine marketing needs to make its impact. Making a list of nouns and indexing them can  never help in this journey from a planning perspective.

Adjectives, verbs, adverbs, relations, differentiating factors, keyword analysis, keyword optimized content and pronouns are equally important in responding to a complete search query when the surfer is making this journey.

If your search plans don’t help you in tackling this, then it’s a waste.

A waste of your time. And MONEY. Even with high CTR’s which have zero value.

After ages, Yahoo surprises with an awesome product

Yes, it may not win the browser wars, but then who thought Chrome would be the top dog in just four years.

Fact is, with Axis, Yahoo has really got something which is quite different from other browsers  from an experience point of view, and the search experience is visually quite appealing.

Yes no more lines of blue links….all you get to see are a series of box images and you can decide where you want to click on….pretty neat…pretty unique.

It really builds heavily on the safari webkit rendering engine and creates a UI which I found quite refreshing. On my Mac, it gave me a test run which made me want to play with it for a while. And unlike other browsers which take out half of your screen on the top, the search bar on the Axis sits ubiquitously at the bottom left of the screen. A small box, and a much easier place from a UI perspective to type a few words and get results, without changing windows. The beauty is since the  search window glides up from the bottom of the screen, you can keep on the same window and keep searching through rows of visual search windows with images with no scroll up/down. It just keeps scrolling sideways. Neat.

But it’s not the desktop where the Axis can change the game. Mobile search as of today is horribly clunky. As a mobile browser Axis, is far more easier to handle. On a mobile interface it is nicely packaged, quite intuitive and gives a much better experience, especially for a generation of touch smartphones. 

Now it’s left to the Yahoo search algorithms. Can they at least compete with Google and Bing ? If they can, then this browser will stay in the game and it will force the others to change and come up with something similar. It will be a lynchpin.

Irrespective of what happens, I am a very much about experience when it comes to digital products. And this one rocked me on first attempt. 

For the first time, after Google rolled out the first search product, I came across a browser which is rendering search experience in a radically different form from an experience and look and feel perspective. All the rest have been me too’s. 

Well done Yahoo. Between law suits, bad press, fired CEO, resume gate, one more fired CEO, activist shareholders and the ensuing soap opera it must have been hard to concentrate on new products, but this time around its a good one. 

You may not win, cos its late, but you have given a product which has the ability to even start a fight. 
Yahoo didn’t lose because Google out-competed them on search. They lost because they didn’t really care about search – indeed, they outsourced algorithmic search to Alta Vista, Inktomi and then Google itself. The leading portals back in circa 2000 (Yahoo, Excite, Lycos etc) desperately wanted to keep keep users on their site – the buzzword was “stickiness” – but Google knew better and focused on getting users off of Google to other places on the web. Yahoo became just another place to read celebrity gossip and use generic web services.
Chris Dixon

Traditional search will be dead- welcome to cloud communication

The RSS feedreader is DYING. Being part of the feed will not be enough to those who want to master the next stage of search marketing. That’s because, smaller integrated mobile web communities will make the process of spontaneous discovery far more faster, far more better, leading to better engagement.

The search result will compete against the discovery and recommendation result and beyond the link rank, search cannot really recommend.

Traditional SEO and SEM can no longer be the surviving grace for digital marketers. That’s because the cloud communications landscape is unfriendly to lead forms. Any kind of complicated data capture form based functions. So the good old days where people searched and you made your product weave in as part of those search results, only to have consumers come to  a landing page to fill in forms which you then qualified as leads, is more or less over.

As Dan Kaplan Says, 

“The future of marketing in the post-PC world is not about showing up high in search results. It is about reputation and spontaneous discovery. It is about weaving yourself into the feed. This is an evolution of what is known these days as inbound marketing. It involves creating awesome content that makes you relevant and then leveraging your overall awesomeness to establish a relationship with your target customers and maintain it over the years.”

It spins my mind to think that even after a decade, traditional search marketing consists of a landing page, some key words, adwords, and lead capture forms. That’s close to being retarded in your digital strategy and marketing approach if you are planning for tomorrow. What’s equally retarded is this whole perception that  spending some money on digital and ad words will get leads immediately.

NO. IT WONT. Not unless you create a digital experience which engages people to spend time on your site. Not unless your content is good enough to make a difference. Not unless your product is recommended by anyone other than you. Not unless you create relevance. Not unless people discover you and your product within their digital communities. And you cannot do all of that overnight. Hell you cannot do all of that in over a year of constant change, because you currently have a legacy system which was created and perfected for web 1.0.

You. Just. Can’t. 

You can start though. Start thinking different and doing a few changes. Your display advertising means zilch , if the display is not discovered. For discovery you cannot still hold on to the same media platform which you have been holding on to for the last ten years. Sure they give you the hits, which looks great on a metrics spreadsheet but are they REALLY giving you results? 

Like REALLY? I do not read the websites which I used to read 10 years ago. Am sure even you don’t. Then why do you think that your consumers like bozos, are still reading the same sites? 

Customers like yesterday are willing to BUY even today. But unlike yesterday the noise capturing their attention span is tremendous. So if they don’t get a good experience of experiencing you and your presence and your content on digital, they will move away, because their attention span is being  pinged by twitter updates, FB updates and all other such updates every second.  And in that stream every other marketer is trying to sell something.

As I have said earlier as well, in a post PC, Cloud Communication world, how will you even enable search? How will you enable social when communities with their strong and weak ties change platforms?  How will you enable form based marketing, when you yourself don’t fill a single form which has more than 3 fields? 

Digital marketing is not very complicated. Just don’t ask others to do what you spontaneously don’t do. Understand the digital experience that gives you true happiness and try to first re-create that for your own consumers. 

Then think about doing lead generation.