Online Marketing Blog

Editor’s note: Social search isn’t the new kid on the block anymore but it still has it’s mystery as far as search marketing implications. The next in our series of guest posts comes from a very well respected guy who I’ve long appreciated as having more than an advanced understanding of where the search marketing industry is going. Ron Belanger is Vice President, Agency Development at Yahoo! and has been a strong voice on topics ranging from search as a powerful branding tool to social search and the future of the search engine industry.

Photo credit Mike Grehan

Ron Belanger from Yahoo does a decent job explaining, “Engagement, Search and Social Media” in a video over at iMedia Connection. I like the context in which he presents social search - as a third channel to organic and PPC. Now if iMedia just offered some social bookmark links for the video!

WSJ posits a good question: “Google Tests New Ad Offerings — But Will Advertisers Follow?” In order to accomplish the transfer of ad dollars to other ad formats, Google will need to change existing mindsets about advertising in print, on radio and TV as being too expensive or complicated.

Eurekster has announced today that their social search product, SwickiPublisher, will be used to create a new vertical search engine feature on the Forbes.com home page via a tab called “Web” and on the search results pages.

I had the opportunity during the San Jose Search Engine Strategies conference to talk about Eurekster with CEO, Steve Marder. Unfortunatley, I did not get a chance to write about that meeting during the conference, so I’ll include some of the things he shared here.

A few recent articles on social search got me thinking about how much search has changed and continues to change. In a meeting with a staff member last week I was explaining the notion of “collective intelligence” and how millions of individual editorial decisions people make through social search and tagging is taking the user search experience to a new level.

Over at iMedia Connection, iProspect’s Naga Krothapalli talks about the pros and cons of social tagging and search. The pros include: an alternative to browser based bookmarks, ease of use due to tags and the “theoretical” improvement in ability for the search engine to provide relevant and more accurate results. The cons: limited number of user adoption and doing tagging as well as limitations of tagging.