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Why smart spends in downturn focus on social media

Posted by Michael Leis on November 10, 2008 at 05:33 PM PDT

2 comments, Latest by Michael Leis

If you're wondering where to shift marketing dollars for smart long-term investing, take a look at where Google can't get a foothold.

The best place to look into future computing trends right now is Korea. They're the closest thing to ubiquitous computing and broadband access the world has at the moment. And Google has started to buy properties in the country because it can't gain beyond 5% market penetration (yes you read that right) on Naver and to a lesser extent, Daum.

Conversational Rank will supersede Page Rank

Google has made a nice living on showing search relevance to Web pages. But is this as important as what someone like you (or your customers) thinks about a product or topic? Not even close.

Naver is, for lack of a more specific definition, Google for recommendations. More than just similar links, Naver provides similar recommendations that include links. Yahoo! is trying to make inroads on this with Yahoo! Answers, but proprietary information hoarding may ultimately be its downfall.

Where the real value of Social Media chimes in

When you take the dollars you would have spent on TV or paid search and apply those to people participating in rapid-growth social media like Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, you're not just helping the brand with good Word-of-mouth marketing. You're spurring the creation of thousands -- if not hundreds of thousands -- of searchable entries recommending your product.

Searching the social graphs around your needs (as users), your company and what you sell (as brands) will far outweigh today's one-dimensional page-ranking algorithms Google has dominated with.

This is just one reason why learning the ways your audience is using social media now is a tremendous asset for not just surviving the downturn, but outpacing competition now, and in the future demographics of your brand.

What do you think? As always, let's continue the conversation in the comments section below, or @mleis.

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2 Comments

Rick Stratton's headshot

Nov 10, 2008 at 11:55 AM EST

By Rick Stratton

Social networking optimization takes more time versus SEO. SEO typically you hire an expert once per year, quarterly etc to make sure your site is google friendly. But SNO has to be ingrained into your people. Also, I think SNO really works better for individuals, then it does for brands. It can work for a brand - but it's so personal that you really need your people to infuse your brands SNO into their personal online activities.

Nov 11, 2008 at 09:13 AM EST

By Michael Leis

Hey Rick - Thanks for the comment. I'm not referring so much to SEO as I am SEM/Paid Search where you're infusing a lot of cash into the situation to generate/calibrate rank and then pear down budget to a balance of click quantity/quality. In essence, Social Media is coming at search placement from your staff and consumer advocates rather than funneling volume at your properties. We ultimately agree, though: brands that can identify and mobilize around Social Media will be the the companies who thrive over the next five years. Also, just to bring the comments from Twitter full circle back to here: 1) I am not suggesting that any brand shift all their money from TV and paid search. That would be silly. You still need a balance. But you can still generate reach with TV while moving some of that budget over to Social Media and activate the reach. And as Twitter itself has shown in the past quarter, TV is a valuable vehicle that can spur tremendous growth in Social Media communities. As a society we still begin discourse and measure our opinions against the television narrative like always. The fundamental shift is that we are testing those assumptions in real-time over our virtual networks. 2) Yes, this progression is a natural extension of the evolution from the corporate-partnership era to whatever we're building now: some kind of mix of old-fashioned industrialism/oligopoly and commercialism enabled by lowered technological barriers. It's a kind of ebb and flow of massing people around business operations without being in a single physical location. The centralization has always been key to growth in any industry, country: we can't build great things without bringing people together to do it. What's so fascinating about this point in time is that the centralization is coming out of shared interests and ideology without also needing location.