Just as advertisers were getting more comfortable with their search engine campaigns and warming up to social media advertising, social search emerged as a huge trend in 2006 and threw everyone for a
loop.
Real people like you and me were suddenly in control of this new search engine trend. With more and more search engines announcing their social search development plans every day, it
looks like this trend is here to stay.
The emergence of social search is good news for advertisers, as the move to personalized search results provides new opportunities to deliver targeted
messages.
The social search advantages
The concept behind social search is that hand-picked human intelligence results are indexed so other info seekers can use them again.
Its advantages lie in injection of people into the search process. Human intelligence is important to making search better. Computers are good at algorithmic search but cannot tell intention in
search. Simply put, computers don't have brains. But social search engines do.
Social search engines are leveraging this brain power to produce more relevant and useful search results. Let's
say you wanted to use a traditional search engine to look for a cool video game to get your teenage son for his birthday.
Entering those keywords in a traditional search engine would produce
millions of results to sift through. On a social search engine, you could obtain search results from a hard-core gamer who knows exactly which games are the ones your teenager would enjoy.
Social search also reaches a niche some search engines have missed. It's easy to assume that, given the length of time traditional search engines have been in existence, everyone knows how to use
Boolean operators to get optimal results.
Wrong.
There is a good percentage of the population who wants the more straight-forward approach a social search engine can provide them. This brings
me to my next point, social search's advantages for advertisers.
What it means for advertisers
The social search model lends itself extremely well to advertisers. Never before has
a medium as large as a search engine been able to deliver such targeted advertisements to individual users.
Advertisers benefit from these new search engines' abilities to produce contextual
ads to consumers. Let's say someone searches online for "apple." On traditional search engines, ads could range from anything to Apple's official Web site to Web sites selling apple cider.
With
social search engines, the results are so customized that a targeted ad selling the exact type of apple product they were searching for could be displayed.
With social search's unique ability
to deliver targeted advertisements, it's a growing phenomenon worth your consideration.
David Gilby is the Vice President of Ad Strategy for ChaCha (www.chacha.com), a social search engine
with a twist. ChaCha gives users the ability to search instantly (like traditional search engines) or with the assistance of a human guide in real-time via an instant-message chat session. Gilby is
speaking at the upcoming OMMA Hollywood and can be reached at david.gilby@chacha.com.