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Charlene Li is co-author of the business best-seller, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies and gave the keynote on day 3 of SES San Jose.  She spoke on the intersection of search and social and discussed how to prepare for the future of search.  Read on for the highlights of her presentation:

How far have we come since 2001?  In just 8 years, we’ve gone from simple text links in search results to pictures, video and a rich user experience.

Imagine what will happen going forward into the future.  The engines are only going to keep innovating – and one of the trends is the integration of social and real-time into search results.

The first session for me on day two of Web 2.0, “Creating a Coherent Social Strategy for Business” with Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li of Forrester, was one I’ve been looking forward to since I first read Groundswell. See my previous interview with Charlene Li on Groundswell.

In this session, both Li and Bernoff emphasize the importance of not jumping into social technologies and applications just because the competition does, but to have specific objectives and measurement. With defensible results, a social technology will be in a much better position to survive slimming budgets. The focus is on people, not technology with social technologies and applications.

Josh Bernoff: Are you experiencing web 2.0 avoidance syndrome?

Symptoms:

• Obsessive interest in blogosphoere, etc
• Excessive salivation of successful corp applications

This week might as well be called “social media week” with the NewComm Forum, SMX Social Media and the Web 2.0 Expo all happening at pretty much the same time. Companies worldwide are trying their best to make sense of the emerging landscape of social technologies and the new book, Groundswell, from Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li of Forrester does a fantastic job at just that.

Photo Credit stuartliroff

Charlene Li is Vice President & Principal Analyst at Forrester Research covering social computing and technologies. She is undoubtedly one of the most often quoted analysts on all things dealing with social computing and commerce on the web. After reading a review copy of “Groundswell – Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies” I’ve been referring every chance I get. Following is an interview with Charlene about the book and her insights into key questions for companies trying to demystify the social web.