Google Social Search - Could your brand and products get hijacked

November 12, 2009
by Rob Watts

Google Social Search for those who don’t go on the Internet very often is part of Google’s strategy to position itself as more of a social entity. Many of my friends don’t know what it is, and some of my colleagues pull funny faces when I talk about it, so in an effort to remove the label of Internet freak from myself, I thought it might be useful to talk about how and why it might become important to businesses looking to connect in social media and why now more than ever, it’s vital to get on board and build their social profiles.

My brand ‘robwatts‘ is fairly small - I have various social profiles on sites that have popped up here and there over the years. The nature of my job and the things that interest me about the online space dictates that I usually sign up for new things and see what I can learn from them. The benefits are twofold - I learn a bit and I get to impart anything useful to colleagues or clients I work with.

After years of suspicion and reticence, I recently decided to enable Google Social search and updated my Google profile to make it all work, adding my twitter feed, search blog and Google reader.

When I’m logged in to Google.com (not very often as .co.uk is my default) I now get to see results from my ‘Social Circle’ at the bottom of the search results for certain queries.

A search for ‘analytics’ when logged in to my Google account, shows the following at the bottom of the results page.

We can see that Google has identified this post from Latitude as being of interest to the query, simply because I’ve added the blog feed to my Google reader. As Google indexes my social graph, I’d expect to see different things from people I might follow on Twitter or friendfeed. Maybe I’ll one day see a video that a friend had tagged as ‘analytics’ in their youtube account.

It really does depend on how extensively I build my network out, and according to Google how well connected/integrated that second tier network is. The idea being that I not only see content from my first level network, but people one step outside with connections to my inner circle too.

Brand Impact

This has obvious massive potentials for businesses, especially those with developed social profiles. It’s one simple example of how the importance of social media and the networks that it helps nurture are.

The Dell Approach

Social accounts like https://twitter.com/DellOutlet for example, with its close to 1.4 million followers are in an excellent position to appear for all manner of brand and product related searches, and that’s just at first network level. Every single one of those 1.4 million followers who have a Google account (think Google Docs, Gmail, Youtube, Blogger ) searching for related products in everyday Google search, might just see the boxed representation similar to my example above.

Dell.com clearly recognises that a well developed social strategy has the potential to offer massive benefits. It’s probably a good reason why they have developed strategic social accounts targeting a variety of markets and segments. Just take a look at their twitter page here.

The positive benefits to Dell for this alone are very difficult to determine, but it’s very clear that whatever way it’s sliced, the opportunity to have a positive message returned in a SERP (Search Engine Result Page) at zero cost is just awesome. As Google grows its social offering and improves its products it’s reasonable to assume that uptake and buy in to such features will improve and like most of its better experiments, will be rolled out by default.

Another benefit to brands and companies is that CTR (Click Through Rate) and the interest it generates shouldn’t go unnoticed. A key flaw with Google and other search engines too, is that they all place a big emphasis on signals that are relatively simple to manipulate through SEO - anything that gives them a strong signal of quality outside of things like on page factors or external link popularity is of use. The view here is that signals like these are much more difficult to manipulate and as a result could be potentially useful in terms of factoring into any algorithmic system. A social circle result with a disproportionate high level of click through could point to something worthy of interest. Add sentiment interpretation into the mix and things start to get very interesting indeed.

The how much is it worth in PPC terms scenario

It might be useful to put this into some kind of financial context and take a quick look at a CPC cost for a keyword like ‘laptops’. According to Google globally, this keyword has a CPC of between £2.09 and £3.12 for estimated ad positions 1- 3. Search volume on exact match (considerably overestimated perhaps) is around the 2,740,000 searches per month mark. For one keyword, that’s a lot of searches. Getting to play on the page for that keyword at those levels of interest has clear value. Social search, it would appear, enables for access to that SERP - given the right kinds of social activity.

Keep connected to your customer base

So what else does this mean? What should companies do to both insulate them and enhance potential benefits that could stem?

Using the example above it isn’t too much of a stretch to envisage a scenario whereby a negative representation of a brand or a product could potentially appear in that same social circle box, for that same query.

A query for laptops could say ‘Dell Laptops are rubbish’. If shown enough times to enough people, then click through rates to the negative piece could easily snowball a message embedded. Online awareness of the perception could also spread, tweets would get made, negative sentiments re-tweeted, and reinforcing blog posts made into the bargain.

The illustration above is an example of how a disgruntled customer or unfortunate news event, left unmanaged could grow - previously to social search, negative sentiments like the scenarios cited might only appear in a news result, or blog result on a high profile strong authority search result - these could be managed by search tactics designed to push negative sentiments down and positive sentiments up, often post event. Social search if rolled out wholesale, would make this a little more difficult to achieve quickly - as a result companies and brands will increasingly need to be alive to events as they happen, monitoring online in a proactive engaging way. As a direct response tool, Social media is an obvious asset, an almost why wouldn’t you scenario.

There are many different examples of brands and people who have suffered through poor brand management. It is still true that companies are reluctant to invest in social media as their marketing dept, or online marketing manager simply doesn’t see the potential for a ROI.

Invest in Social, it’s the future

It’s a crying shame of course and many a CEO will no doubt have made their concerns known as they’ve watched their brand take a battering in a SERP, the simple reality is however, that had the company team had the foresight to invest in a strategy that not only helps protect the organisation from bad vibes, but has added CRM and SEO benefits that directly contribute to the bottom line, then they might have found themself concentrating on more positive rather than negative outcomes.

Maybe if we go back to basics and ask ourselves why it is that companies have customer services departments and press offices, perhaps we’ll all conclude that the simple answer is that they recognise that to not have either would be customer base and marketing suicide. Nuff said?

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