Search
On my commute to work instead of picking up my book I utilised my finger tips to access the world of information available to us. Namely I played around on my iphone. In my ritual habit of checking brandrepublic I came across an article on the things you need to know about Twitter search. This acted as a reminder of an article I had read the previous night about Twitters potential collaboration with Google and Bing to integrate into real-time search results.
These articles, among many others got me thinking about search and the future of consumer behaviour and how we as an agency have to anticipate this to be leaders in best practice – not to mention innovative problem solving. Search is a massive market as you will have seen from Neil’s and Geoff’s posts. We all use Google on a daily basis whether to find something we are looking, out of laziness or out of habit as a path to get where we are going. As an advertising medium this is relevant across all the industries and markets we serve – the results of University of Surrey’s last media analysis report shows Google Adwords campaigns as the highest traffic driver of ‘quality’ users to the site. The potential is massive – but how will the integration of real-time search, particularly from social media sites impact the service we offer to clients.
Drew’s digital seminar highlighted the need to be findable and relevant. I and many others have spoke of the importance of talking to our clients about social media. Surely this emerging trend means we not only need to be talking to our clients about Twitter and why they should be using it but also brings another element into the how. It is no longer going to be good enough to simply have a profile – the key will not only be engagement and interaction with the audience but will be how we optimise what we tweet to be high within the real-time search platform. I am not condoning holding optimisation over the true communication and community building social media offers – it is more about a balance. This links more and more to why we can’t just build profiles for our clients we need to manage their social media accounts and activities.
Will we soon have a purely social media development and management team to include a dedicated content developer, SEM specialist for social media among other roles outside of Google/Yahoo etc… This also closely links to a report I read on the increased use of Twitter but also Facebook to search for information. When looking at creating online Buzz and being findable and relevant this stems across all social platforms and requires us to adapt our clients thinking and approach. We need to ensure we are at the top of the gaming and thinking two steps ahead when our clients may be two steps behind. Some people fill with pride to say their organisation is on Twitter – good for them but as strategic agency we need to working hard in the background to ensure our clients are making the most of the social world not just put their name to it to seem update and cool.
