Uw Digital Communications Social Media Is Not Search

Why Social Media is NOT a Replacement for Search OptimizationUniversity of Washington Digital Communications

February 1, 2010

Bellevue Seattle Portland Spokane Los Angeles Baltimore London

Ubiquitous Agenda Slide

1. Search Engines & the Evolution of the Web•Search Distraction•Search Ennui

2. Social Media•Growth•Usage•Twitter•Facebook

3. Intersection of Search & Social Media•New Forms of Relevance

4. Dark Side of Search•Consolidation of power•Search Engine Bias

5.Resources


Evolution of the WebGoogle claims to have found 1 trillion URLs

There are approximately 320 million new pages added to the Web every week

•Shelf life of a page is roughly 1 year

•80% of links are replaced within 1 yearThere’s a lot of Web junk out

there•15% of pages change

weekly

•Mostly small changes

Googlearchy : dominant Web sites become more firmly entrenched in search results by nature of sizeOlder sites rewarded for

longevity

Link rich get richer


Search DisorientationThere is now too much to choose from in search results• Berrypicking on Steroids

Searchers do not know “how to search”• 56% constructed poor queries

• Did not suite their information need

• Were too generic

• 95% did not use any operators to refine query

• 92% used information from a single resource

• 28% had difficulty maintaining orientation on a website• Searchers hop-scotching from

result to result

• 33% had difficulty navigating/orienting search results


Search Ennui

Over confidence in search effectiveness for all searches

36% did not go beyond the first 3 search results • not pages…results on page 1

91% did not go beyond the first page of search results

55% selected irrelevant results 1 or more times

Too lazy to switch?•My own Facebook poll


Social MediaConnection with friends, family, colleagues

•Twitter

Blogs

•Facebook/MySpace

•Instant Messaging

•Skype

http://www.marketing-online.co.uk/wiki/File:Social_Media_Statistics.png

Largest participation, largest growth sector is uploading photos

•Video sharing next

Most social media participants are passive consumers

•More activity = steep drop in participation


Key Online Demand Generation Activities

Customer Engagement media activates

Search for brand online = 67.2%

Social Media Activities• Read Blogs: 26.90%

• Play Company Online Games: 25.30%

• Post reviews: 35.20%


Twitter

The numbers of new people joining Twitter has declined

The level of Twitter engagement is low – a majority of the users follow very few and have low tweet volume


Facebook350 million active users

• 65 million mobile users (50% more active than non-mobile users)

• 70% of users are outside of the U.S.• 35 million users update status daily

Average user is a member of 12 groups

Average user has 130 friends

500,000 active applications

250 applications with more than 1 million active users

http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics


Intersection of Search & Social Media

Reveal valuable information about conversations around brand or key phrases related to products & services

• Terms for optimization• Locations where

conversation is taking place• Trends over time

Shared search information• Heystaks

http://www.heystaks.com/

http://www.heystaks.com/


How Search Engines Determine Influential Bloggers

If a blog post has a large number of inlinks, then it is more likely to be influential. • influence of a blog post depends on the influence of the blog posts referencing it:

The more influential the blog posts that refer to this blog post, the more influential this blog post becomes.

The influence of a blog post could depend on the amount of discussion it initiated. • Little or no discussion = did not arouse others' interests or their contents were not

appealing. • Large number of comments indicates that the particular blog post affects many

people so they care to write comments.

If a blog post refers to many articles or other blog posts, it is less likely to be an innovative piece

• Keller and Berry have listed innovativeness as an essential property of being influential in a physical community.

• The number of outlinks reflects how innovative a blog post is.

An influential blog post is often well written., i.e. eloquent, descriptive, logical, insightful, authoritative, rhetoric, relatively self-contained.

• The length of a blog post (¸) is a heuristic measure checking if post is influential or not.

More About Search


New Formulas for Relevance

Behavioral: Microsoft: Compares snippets of Web search engine results with data collected from user behavior and client, Google: user bookmarks [online and client] used to construct “personalized search object” that is used to filter Web search results

•Query

•Click through

•Currency

•Time on page

Social: The wisdom of crowds•Annotation

•Bookmarks

•Sharing

•Subscription

Universal: text, image, audio, video


Search v.Next

Google: Focus on user-centric data associated with relevance ranking and storage enhancements for multiple data types

•Improving Search using Population Information (November 2008)•Rendering Context Sensitive Ads for Multi-topic searchers (April 2008)•Presentation of Local Results (July 2008)•Detecting Novel Content (November 2008)•Document Scoring based on Document Content Update (May 2007)•Document Scoring based on Link-based Criteria (April 2007)

Microsoft: Launches “decision engine” with focus on multiple meaning (contexts) as well as term indexing and topic association and tracking

•Calculating Valence of Expressions within Documents for Searching a Document Index (March 2009)•Efficiently Representing Word Sense Probabilities (April 2009)•Tracking Storylines Around a Query (May 2008)•Document Segmentation based on Visual Gaps (July 2006)

Yahoo: focus on display indicators of relevance, either user, publisher or system employed

•Systems and Methods for Contextual Transaction Proposals (July 2006)•Delivering Items Based on Links to Resources Associated with Results (April 2008)•Web Activity Monitoring System with Tracking by Categories and Terms (December

2006)


The Dark Side

Scale issues•Low index ratio: Just because the spider hits your page, doesn’t

mean you are in the index

Quality issues•Duplicate content: an issue for dynamically rendered sites

•Form over substance

Search Engine agenda•Monetizing search – how they store and use data collected from

search logs

•Consolidation of Power

•International Politics of Search


Consolidation of Power

While it's easy to see the user empowerment and democratization implicit in web 2.0, it's also easy to overlook the enormous power that is being accrued by those who've successfully become the repository for our collective intelligence. Who owns that data? Is it ours, or does it belong to the vendor?

Tim O’Reilly, 2006

• 2 billion searches a day worldwide• Cookie with 5 year expiration• data storage and manipulation on a monumental scale


International Politics of Search

Not all pages found are indexed

Google indexes more sites

Academic and EDU sites from the U.S. and get the most coverage

U.S. sites have a statistically better chance of more complete indexing•China has the lowest average coverage rate

•US: 93.6% indexed, China: 79.8% indexed

In-links DO matter across the board, regardless of site type

Smaller coverage more pronounced in .com and .gov sites

Type US % China % Sing % Taiwan %

COM 94.8 67.6 67.9 78.6

GOV 98.3 77.9 94.5 97.9

ORG 82.1 79.3 87.9 86.0

AVG 91.8 74.9 83.4 87.5


Google US: “ Tiananmen Square”

Showcasing Google’s preference for Wikipedia

Majority of results are on massacre


Google China

Generic tourism results

Tourism photos

Filtered from outside as well as inside China

Google US


Google FranceShowcase Google’s preference for Wikipedia

BBC result

News photos document protest

General Tourism sites

Google US

UW Digital Communications04/08/202321

Resources

Social Media Usage Statistics http://www.marketing-online.co.uk/wiki/Social_Media_Usage_Statistics

Razorfish Digital Feed 2009 http://feed.razorfish.com/feed09/the-data/

Hubspot Twitter Usage Report http://www.hubspot.com/Portals/53/docs/01.10.sot.report.pdf

Ignite Social Network Analysis Report http://hbr.org/2010/01/the-hbr-list-breakthrough-ideas-for-2010/ar/1

Identifying Influentials in the Blogsosphere: Agarwal, Liu, Tang

Search & Social Media: http://palblog.fxpal.com/?p=2814

http://www.marketing-online.co.uk/wiki/Social_Media_Usage_Statistics

http://feed.razorfish.com/feed09/the-data/

http://www.hubspot.com/Portals/53/docs/01.10.sot.report.pdf

http://hbr.org/2010/01/the-hbr-list-breakthrough-ideas-for-2010/ar/1

http://palblog.fxpal.com/?p=2814

UW Digital Communications04/08/202322

Thank You

Marianne Sweeny

Search Services

M 206.898.3786

D 425.519.7700

E [email protected]

E: [email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

Uw Digital Communications Social Media Is Not Search

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