NP: Mew, And The Glass Handed Kites

Laurie Sullivan has been posting quite a bit at Search Marketing Daily about real-time search, and the gist of it seems to be that search marketers are just starting to get a handle on their data, and all of a sudden, here comes this new firehose of similar, and yet totally different data making things much more complicated.

Complexity seems to be building in the formerly simple concept of what a search engine does. It used to be that you wanted to know something about something, so you searched for it. These were searches for information -- about people, places, things.

With the rise of social media, and the immediacy of Twitter and Facebook, search providers are betting on users searching for interaction as well. Divining what your friends think and what they are doing is fundamentally different than simple information-gathering. Coupled with efforts in further personalization, this greatly expands the focus of what search can do.

Kaila Colbin quotes Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg on this exact subject, who says "There is a very fundamental shift going on from the information Web to the social Web." Colbin's conclustion? "In other words, it's no longer about the mechanistic parts, about the data; it's about the relationships."

I would quibble that it's no longer just about the mechanistic parts. They still matter, but there's now more to it than that.

Unfortunately for marketers, this means that the previously focused data are also now diluted by these relationships. Sullivan quotes some industry folks who point out that you can glean lots of insights about who is searching for information by looking at how they're searching for interaction, and there's certainly something to that. She also points out the challenges in managing even more data. To my mind, you've got to consider the information and interactivity buckets as separate entities in the marketing spectrum. The interactivity piece is more akin to social media, and as such, it's only relevant to the level that you can tie it back to the more action-oriented search data.

Which means, in general, one of three things. Either you, as a marketer, are active in both spaces, and measure both spaces directly, complete with the ability to tie them together. Or, you measure one directly and the other indirectly, through a third-party, and make assumptions about how they fit. This isn't all that different from any other multi-channel analysis, and aside from ignoring it completely, is probably going to be the most common approach. The third option isn't so much an option as the effect the engines themselves may have on all this, because they hold the most information on both topics.

On that third point, it will be interesting to see how, say, Google tries to tie real-time search analytics with SEM/SEO and then offer it to advertisers for a price, since they own so much of the sandbox. Is that enough of the market to satisfy marketers, or can a third-party with broader reach do it better? Is Facebook just a content provider in this model, or do they get into the insight business as well? Can any individual marketer (or digital agency) manage all these data streams on their own? And could they manage them any better if they, say, gave me a job?

Important questions. Especially that last one.