360i Report: How the Social Landscape Will Change Search

Integrated Solutions. Measurable Results.

October 2010

360i Point of View on
How the Social Landscape Will Change Search
Overview
At 360i, we have long been speculating on the unavoidable contribution of social relevance to search.
The recent Bing announcement is confirmation that the intrinsic value of social context that Facebook
holds is going to improve and expand what we view as the traditional search experience. The news also
seems to place Bing and Facebook at loggerheads with Google.

The battle for web users’ attention on Facebook and Google showcases a twist on the David-and-Goliath
story, as Bing now finds itself the sole current beneficiary of much envied social data that its main
competitor lacks. Facebook now receives more visits in the United States than Google. The latest data
from Compete suggests that these two properties are neck-and-neck when it comes to the amount of
time users spend on their sites.

The sheer velocity at which Facebook has
grown begs the question of whether a
turning point for search is here, and what
that might mean for marketers. While
Facebook is not a search engine itself, the
value of data it collects within its user base
makes it a potent force that will soon enrich
how search is delivered. In this POV, we
explore how the social boom – fueled by
success stories like Facebook’s – will change Compete Data: Visits to Google.com vs. visits to
the search landscape and, as a result, Facebook.com (September 2010)
influence how marketers approach SEO.

Facebook vs. Google Referrals
Many companies have begun leveraging and harnessing the power of social media to interact with
their users, as well as get more users to other digital properties (websites) they control. An excellent
example of this is Levi’s. A year ago, Facebook barely made the top ten referrers to Levi’s.com; flash-
forward to July 2010 and Facebook is Levi’s #2 referrer.

This pattern is similar across many brands analyzed using comScore Marketer, including American
Eagle, Dell, the New York Times and even BP.

Incoming Traffic: July 2009 vs. July 2010 (comScore Marketer)

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October 2010

Facebook is increasingly proving to be a significant driver of traffic once integrated on a marketers’
site. According to Inside Facebook, websites that have implemented the Like button or other social
Plugins have experienced huge traffic increases. Some examples:

• ABC News (190% traffic increase)
• Gawker (200% traffic increase)
• TypePad (200% traffic increase)
• Sporting News (500% traffic increase)

Facebook has also published figures on NHL.com. According to Inside Facebook, “visitors are reading
92% more articles, spending 85% more time on-site, viewing 86% more videos and generating 36%
more visits.”

Google’s Forays into Social
Google CEO Eric Schmidt and search competitors alike have long recognized the importance of social
data as a new indicator that may lead to a more relevant search experience, enabling further
customized, timely and personalized search results. In the last year alone, Google has made several
attempts to integrate social into search – including incorporating Twitter as a real-time search input,
and the creation/acquisition of Google Buzz, Friend Connect, Search Wiki, Latitude, Voice, Social
Circles and Wave. Unfortunately for Google, none of these efforts have resonated with its audience at
a large scale. Nevertheless, persistence could pay off, as the search giant is rumored to launch a
series of social upgrades to existing products in the coming months. At Google’s recent Zeitgeist
conference in Scottsdale, Ariz., Schmidt touched on plans to place social media at the center of its key
products by late this year – a project some have labeled “Google Me.”

“Search is going to get better
with more social information.”
- Eric Schmidt,
August 2010

Image via Portfolio

It shouldn't be forgotten that Google pioneered the relevant search experience that marketers and
users alike have come to love and trust. Its chief innovation was to interpret links between websites
as a signal of subject matter and authority. Google’s PageRank was born, establishing a score for
websites and each of their URLs with a public facing scale of 0-10: zero meaning the site’s URL has
not accrued any third-party link authority; ten meaning a URL relevancies an undisputed authority




October 2010

within its web index as compared to all other URLs. This measure, now more than ten years old, was
created at a time when ICQ and AIM were about as “social” as it got.

Like & PageRank: Friends or Foes?

In April 2010, Facebook released the Like button, which was thought to possess similar utility as any
other social plug-in. Yet, one might speculate that Facebook has sown the seeds of a comparable
innovation to that of Google’s PageRank. Through the universal popularity of Facebook, its Like button
has enabled online properties to tap into an ever valuable social currency upon their own website
URLs.

SportingNews.com incorporates the Facebook Like button as well as other social plugins within site content.

The ubiquity of the Like button on brands’ websites will allow any Facebook user to seamlessly favor,
or Like, any URL. This explicit endorsement is stored within Facebook’s Open Graph, whose individual
parts consist of individual URL addresses. Of course, Google as a search engine is not going away, and
its reliance on links (hyperlinks between documents on the web) is certainly not diminished by
Facebook’s feature. However, it does mean that Facebook has ownership of an emerging relevancy
signal. As more and more websites adopt the Like button, Facebook will be able to measure explicit
user action or endorsement of Web URLs in real-time and with much greater ease than in establishing
the traditional hypertext link between sites.

‘Likes’ are perhaps a direct signal that might supplement search algorithms and influence how
algorithms determine authority on the Web. Of course, the concept – and significance – of rankings
will never die. A brand’s online visibility and page rank will always be critical, as compared to its
competitors. The web is founded on hyperlinks (or links), so if your URLs are being calculated by
David and Goliath via Likes or PageRank, building up both could be a solid recipe for a new
convergence of visibility and relevance. Facebook’s Open Graph system makes URL Likes a
transparent metric for the world to access, similar to how Google’s toolbar publishes a PageRank score
for any URL.




October 2010


Like: Bing’s Early Mover Advantage

While there is still uncertainty as to how social will ultimately persist in search, we know that social
and search are on a collision course in the near future. The Like button has significant potential to
become a supplementary signal to search. As of the recent announcement, Bing will benefit from an
early adopter access to Like signals and other social graph information to produce more relevant
results to Bing users and Facebook searchers.

Bing and Facebook’s partnership has evolved into something even bigger. Moving forward, Bing will be
integrating Facebook as a social layer within its search results – initially around people-based
searches, but with upcoming extensions to Product, Local and Video searches.

The partnership, which dates back to 2007 when Facebook had “only” 7 million users, has now
reached a new level. Zuckerberg rationalized Bing as an obvious partner on the grounds that they are
“underdogs”, and “innovative.” However, it was implied that this social integration to search is not
exclusive to Bing, but that the Redmond giant proved to be the most suited early beneficiary of this
social context.

Facebook, with over 500 million users, billions of sharing activities, and 25 million pieces of content
shared every day offers a critical signal that can supplement and make search a better experience. For
example, Bing reported that 4% of its search queries are people-related searches. The satisfaction
rate against these queries is low, in the order of 20% - with the Facebook integration, Bing can
provide results that benefit from rich social context. Ultimately, this will extend to further search use
cases, including recommendations from your social network on product queries, restaurants or even
that Banksy Simpsons video your friends told you about.




October 2010

However, the Bing-Facebook relationship has not been confirmed as exclusive. This opens up the
possibility for an API to become available to others, similar to Twitter’s Firehose data feed, which is
now consumed by all major search engines.

Key Recommendations

What does all of this mean for marketers, and how can they prepare for a new KPI that could impact
their website’s authority, URL visibility, referrals and relevance in search and social? Before making
the jump into social search, there are some considerations that should be taken into account:

1. Does a Like button even make sense for your website and a brand’s audience?
o Who: Consider whether your audience is actively engaged on Facebook, and are liable to
share your brand content through Likes at a sufficient scale to drive social search and
influence.
o What: What are your best sociable assets that your audience would pick up and share?
Do you have shareable content? Products? Contests? Deals? Tools? News Articles?
Games? Tips?
o How: Is Facebook’s Like button even relevant to your market (e.g. Japan, or Brazil)?
o Where: Do you have the creative real estate, and do you even want to introduce a third
party in such a high-profile way within your brand identity or web delivery
infrastructure? Do you have a Facebook strategy in place that is geared to engage and
monetize Likers?

2. Do you keep benchmarks and measurements of new KPIs?
o Likes are fully measurable – 360i has developed tools that assess Like metrics for
your Facebook Pages and individual URLs. We can assess these metrics when it comes to
your competitors’ online destinations, as well.
o It’s possible to view Like metrics alongside traditional SEO metrics – this can
inform your strategy in preparation for social search.
o Liking is not just about Facebook – the Open Graph was introduced to take the
concept to the wider web. For example, measuring other forms of “liking” can be
considered for “Diggs,” “Buzzes,” “tweets” and other social voting platforms.
3. Remember, SEO Best Practices still apply when implementing the Like button.
o What Open Graph meta data you apply to your content and the URLs you choose to
accrue Likes upon may play an increasingly important role.
o Ensure a single URL is served for both search and social.
o You can control which URL a Like button acts upon. Seemingly, this is a loophole in
Facebook at the moment, as users are not pre-warned what URL they are liking.

Facebook provides a meta data language that provides critical context to Open Graph objects (such as
your website home page), and may become an important signal of keyword relevance within search.




October 2010


Conclusion

Facebook is not a search engine itself – and according to Mark Zuckerberg the platform is not aiming
to become one. Facebook instead wants to provide social layers atop search results, as they’ve done
with the gaming apps in the past. Zuckerberg envisions this model extending to even more vertical
applications moving forward.

Given the new announcement from Bing and Facebook, the rapid rise and ever-increasing popularity
of social media cannot go unnoticed. Companies are leveraging Facebook’s Like button as a means of
targeting their market and becoming more search-relevant to users, while continuing to increase their
online visibility via search engines. The Bing-Facebook partnership is confirmation that the intrinsic
value of social context that Facebook holds is imminently going to improve and expand what we view
as the traditional search experience.

These opportunities in the future might not be limited to the Bing search experience, as the
partnership with Facebook is seemingly non-exclusive. Google, for example, has voiced its desire to
incorporate social information into its products. According to Schmidt, “We want our core products to
get better from social information. The best thing that could happen is if Facebook opened up its
network and if we could just use that information. […] With your permission, and knowing more about
who your friends are, we can provide more tailored recommendations. Search quality will be better.”

Next Steps
Contact your 360i strategic advisor to help develop a strategy for approaching the evolving social search
landscape.

About 360i
360i is an award-winning digital communications agency that drives results for Fortune 500 marketers through insights,
ideas and technologies. 360i helps its clients think differently about their online presence and evolve their strategies to
take advantage of the new world of marketing communications – one where brands and consumers engage in
interactive and multi-directional conversations. Current clients include Kraft Foods, JCPenney, Coca-Cola, NBC Universal
and H&R Block, among others. For more information, please visit blog.360i.com or follow us on Twitter @360i.



360i Report: How the Social Landscape Will Change Search

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360i Report: How the Social Landscape Will Change Search