Social media is the big story at SES San Jose

Nilhan Jayasinghe, Head of Search, recounts the main themes and talking points from this years SES San Jose.

Social media was the dominant theme at this year’s SES San Jose, probably the most important conference in the search engine marketing calendar. With a continuous track dedicated to the subject it was clear that blogging, tagging and sharing were going to be hot topics, but we were struck by how much buzz there was around social media everywhere, from the networking events to keynotes.

As you’d expect from a search conference, there was more to social media than ‘just’ the new revolution in PR and marketing. A key question on many people’s lips was ‘Will these communities really define and shape web search relevance any time soon?’

Chris Sherman, senior editor and co-founder of SearchEngineWatch.com, introduced the topic by pointing out that the first search destinations like Yahoo! were in fact ‘human edited’. Hence, socially biased, and even the modern algorithmic engines like Google are in fact written by people, who decide what factors should dictate relevance, their theories, almost entirely based on real world social networks and their social bias.

So, what’s changed? In a word, scale

Before, we relied on a few editors or computer programmers to represent tastes and desires of the masses, now we can all influence relevancy through blogging, tagging and sharing. This all sounds great – but what are the barriers to success in socially driven perfect relevance?

• Too much ambiguity in tagging creates a need for a controlled vocabulary
• The low barriers to entry allows the misinformed to skew results
• And a search engine favourite, the blackhat spammer. As one unamed SES panelist stated, ‘I am that eighteen year old blonde with the fifty thousand friends on MySpace’.

Factoring reputation and building trust networks was going to be key to enabling the real knowledge experts to define quality.

So what did the search engines have to say:

• Grant Ryan from Eurekster introduced their social search engine which can be influenced by your social network to create a subject specific vertical search engine.
• Yahoo!’s Tim Mayor was keen to point out how serious Yahoo! was about the implication of social networks. Its toolkit already comprised of Flickr, Delicious, Yahoo! Answers and a less publicised Yahoo! Search Builder, which allows webmasters to deploy Yahoo search, tweaked for their specific topic. He also talked about MyWeb 2.0, which enables results to be influenced by pages tagged and saved by the community. Add to this their recent hire of Raghu Ramakrishnan, a former professor of computer sciences at UW-Madison, to help them define their social search strategy, and you start to get a clearer idea of how serious Yahoo! really is about social search.
• Nils Pohlmann from MSN, demonstrated its efforts with Microsoft Ideas Live Beta – a personalised home page enabling you to integrate social media with web content. This system has already started to address the trust issue by allowing users to see the reputation score of other members.
• As for the biggest search engine of them all, it was clear that Google was behind when it came to facilitating this social space. Google’s co-op didn’t create quite the excitement of Yahoo!’s armoury. The irony is Google’s success as a search engine was largely due to its reliance on cold hard algorithms over human input, but as the ranking algorithms are starting to exhaust the way of link analysis, human input seems the next logical step to greater relevance. This was definitely taking Google out of its comfort zone.

From a purely financial view point – MySpace made Google question that old SEM statistic ‘90% of people find sites through search engines’ – that may still be the case, but there was a significant number that were circumnavigating Google straight to MySpace, before Google could serve them an add for space flights with NASA.

Of course Google had to partner with MySpace – not just for the Adspend, but to know a bit more about this mysterious world of the online fellowship. May be this was a better way forward than trying to compete with Yahoo! and MSN who have a huge database of registered users.

What’s in it for you?

If you’re a business or marketer, the mantra was ‘engage, listen and act’.

For web designers and developers, it is important to look at how people will access your content. With the use of RSS in personal web pages gaining momentum, and the next version of the Windows operating system including RSS functionality built in, people will increasingly access your content remotely and just the bits they want.

The best advice given was to build every piece of content on your site like a blog – that means RSS, tagging and bookmarking functionality for every page and feed. The more you allow your content to be accessed remotely, tagged and bookmarked the more you’ll engage with the wider community.

The days of you dictating how visitors interact with your site are numbered. It’s likely you may not even have returning visitors – they will access the bits they like and will never see the rest.

Nilhan Jayasinghe is Head of Search at Spannerworks. If you would like to comment on this article please email nilhanREMOVE@spannerworksME.com.