• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, October 3, 2012

The challenge of linking intent from social ad campaigns with search engine marketing strategies has surpassed the act of tying social signals into search. The combination of social search no longer means analyzing the Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare results serving up in Google and Bing search engine queries.

While advertisers wait for Facebook to get its act together, Twitter appears to be capitalizing on real-time intent. You can tell by the chuckle from Kevin Dando, director of digital marketing at PBS, when talking about a recent campaign using the recently launched Twitter microtargeting tool.

Twitter allows advertisers to target ads to followers of followers with similar interests. It's a tactic that Kevin Dando, director of digital marketing at PBS, used to microtarget a campaign that -- along with earned media -- helped a recent documentary "Half the Sky" become a trending topic.

Dando said he meets with one of PBS's search strategists for a 15-minute daily tactical 9:30 a.m. meeting to determine what went well the previous night and how they will approach the coming day. The two discuss the possibility of tying programming into the day's current happenings to capitalize on real-time events. "There's no chairs," he said.

Determining measureable content by associating social interaction directly to a brand's Web site might not seem apparent, but there are ways to quantify the actions. The value of social media comes from tactics related to correlation, measurement and segmentation, according to Steve Wirig, senior social media consultant at Adobe. In a recent presentation, he talks about the differences in quantifying earned media, likes and comments that consumers write and post about a company, vs. owned media, such as posts and tweets that marketers write about their own company.

Earned media is not directly measureable, Wirig explains, but overlaying the data on other trends can identify the spike and dips during the last 30 days and the content causing them. The cause becomes the key. It will tell marketers the characteristics causing the content to go viral.

Join us at the Search Insider Summit (SIS) in December (12-15), Park City, Utah, to talk about the social implications of search engine marketing and how to quantify intent.