Not too long ago we listened to a talk given by the founders of Stik on Google’s Search Plus Your World. Like so many things Google, this amazingly large concept is masked by a slightly confusing title the belies the products actual significance. With so many products and so many sub-brands and a long history of nonsense, SPYW not only has SPY in the acronym, it sounds like something coming out of a corporate benefits department not Google’s take to combat their biggest fear – that search has peaked. The method for making sense of the internet that they perfected in both function and monetization is over a decade old. That makes it older than if digital products were counted in dog years. How we use the internet has dramatically changed, but the search experience hasn’t. Should it? Will it?
The rise of Facebook had most of us assuming major change to the search ecosystem was inevitable. The dialog has certainly shifted away from search with most new dollars going towards social and mobile. They are enjoying a demand shift that far outpaces market as those with money try and make sense of what the reach, frequency, and overall “feel” of the market tells them. Facebook, and now Twitter have smartly learned from their predecessors – building out self-service platforms and thinking through how they might capture brand dollars from the get go. They have both, conscientiously and through luck, stoked the fire of end user demand and brand demand.
Before asking what search going away means, let’s first ask why we thought that. It has part to do with the aforementioned culture-level trends. People still talk about Googling, but the pop-landscape, both organic content and commercial content, has shifted to mentions of other digital aggregation and distribution. For Twitter, having a company like Budweiser spend close to a hundred million dollars on air-time promoting a hashtag is incredible validation. Great as the validation is, it should be inspiring them to try harder. These same companies used to include on their paid media spend references to their MySpace pages. In other words, it’s a signal of success but not sufficient for it.
In addition to the cultural signals, there are the digital metrics – number of users, time spent, and a slew of other tangibles that suggest not only should social and mobile platforms command the attention of any business… but like it or not, they will impact how we do business. That was certainly the case with online and ultimately search. In the early days of online, a web presence was a luxury, like a fan page or twitter handle is for many small businesses. Now, some web presence is mandatory. As search fully replaced the Yellow Pages, businesses only care about how they show up and are affected online. Whether it’s Yelp for a restaurant or the info or the number of stars they get when Google Maps loads, they know that’s where their customers are going to get information about them. This shift of customers getting information from one platform and moving it to another is what we are trying to predict with social.
We know that for many small businesses they are better off having a fan page and not a real website. It has all the features they really need – a way to have supporters identify with them and to reach out to them. Soon they will have tools for acquisition and retention. We also know that the data contained within the social graph has amazing value that current search and current platforms don’t leverage. This is the thought that started it all, the insights understood by the team at Stik, who felt that finding service providers through traditional search is broken. You want to find providers through your social graph. Using who your friends used (in the beginning who is in your graph) is better than who pays to be listed or knows how to get listed. Speaking for them, that could imply the current Google is the Yellow Pages of the future, and the company with the social data will be the new Google.
The ultimate question is whether social data alone is enough to re-write how we find information. Is this the equivalent of the car replacing the horse-drawn carriage as digital was to print, or are we talking about an evolution of the motorized vehicle. If it’s the latter, Mercedes-Benz has shown an impressive ability in maintaining leadership and adapting as the technology develops. Is Google and the infrastructure of search the buggy or the car? Google might not have the marketing muscle or natural marketing ingenuity that Twitter and Facebook do, but it doesn’t make them obsolete either.
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