Thanks for your comment! I’ll certainly consider doing another social media experiment and will get in touch when I do.

Watch this space.

On your point about search in social media:

I just spotted that one of the trackbacks on this article is by a company called Topsy who according to their website link search results to social media conversations:

“Topsy is a new kind of search engine, with a new way of looking at the Internet. Topsy doesn’t think the Internet is a collection of documents. Or even a web of documents. Topsy sees the Internet as a stream of conversations.

When you search for something on Topsy, such as “free music“, it finds snippets of conversations that match what you’re looking for.”

Worth checking out maybe?

Thanks for your comment! I’d be more than happy to do another social media experiment involving American bands but why would you want me to do that?

What are you after? ;o)

You make some excellent points, thanks for taking the time to leaving such a detailed comment.

Your comments regarding clients feeling shaky about committing resources to social media makes a lot of sense, it is still quite a new industry and more time needs to be invested in understanding how it works, which is why Real Fresh TV offers social media training!

And I heartily agree about trusting a Which? Review over a Twitter recommendation but both are actually forms of social media! They would have both been written by consumers.

My core argument in the debate was that the web is now inherently social and that {search} marketers needed to allow customers to converse around their clients’ products and services because this gives the customers a sense of ownership in the brand. This sense of ownership is the basis for customer loyalty.

To do this, a search marketer would probably have to become more of a social media marketer though.

Yes, search within social media is still fairly rudimentary; there are few directories out there associating Twitter recommendations with products, for example.

However, as the deluge of social content grows, more companies will realise that a well-rounded social media strategy that encompasses not just accounts on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube but copy from carefully managed blogs is the best way to co-ordinate their conversations with consumers, rudimentary developments in ‘social search’ notwithstanding.

Thanks again for taking the time to speak up for Manchester’s SEO community!

The debate was very interesting – I would have been tempted to take the stand myself, but alas, as it was my first SMC_MCR I was a little unnerved by the prospect of standing up in front of a host of strangers relatively unprepared!

An idea which was picked up later by one of the panellists suggested that there was a third way; that search and social media could live in harmony together. I tend to steer to this side of the fence.

The general feedback I get from clients – and one I agree with – is that social media has some great advantages: the opportunity to directly communicate with consumers, highlight new services to a loyal follower base and quickly establishing a brand online.

However, clients get a little shaky on the idea of moving resources from search – PPC funds, site content – to social media.

Firstly, the vast proportion of internet users are still finding and buying products using search. Google et al has been established as the norm to find things on the internet. People trust search results – rather than the opinion of relative strangers on social media. Search engines try to present the most relevant, credible information in an ordered fashion.

True, someone can recommend a product to me on Twitter, but I’ll probably look for a Which? review or the like on search before purchasing.

Secondly, the option to search in more depth isn’t yet available in social media – indeed, trending topics come and go and finding information a user posted over a month or two ago on Twitter can be incredibly difficult. Unless there is some definable way to sort results on social media (rather than having to wade through a raft of occasionally irrelevant tweets), most users are still going to rely on search.

True, some companies do use black hat approaches to social media – fake account and the likes – but mainly, the good companies and SEO copywriters are aware that the negatives of this approach greatly outweigh the positives – the infamous Habitat scandal being the most recent example. Most companies are smart enough to see that social media can have an instant backlash which can damage a brand.

At the moment, social media is a nice compliment to an SEO strategy – directing users to a site or giving them instant access to new products or services. I think it needs to evolve further before we begins to see it as a real challenger to search.