That line from one of my FAVORITE scenes in Knocked Up when Leslie Mann tells Paul Rudd to search for the possible chicken pox on their children while she’s at a bar. It’s the normal thing for us to say. If we don’t know something we automatically turn to Google for the answers. Or, that’s what we DID.
Gary Vaynerchuck said it best. “If you do not understand that search.twitter.com is the single most important website on the Internet, then you are a clown.”
It’s true. Twitter being the real time search tool to see what people are talking about RIGHT NOW is the golden ticket for every brand out there. Sure, you get your ideas about what people are saying on media blogs and coverage reports from the next day, but what about the people actually buying/checking out your product RIGHT NOW? There is the value. Someone tweeting that they LOVED a Carl’s Jr. burger or HATED Benjamin Button is important for brands/marketers to look at. Real time search and personal information shared on social media networks is vital to gathering information about your brand and ways to monitor and respond. Gary Vee’s explanation provides further support on that, definitely check out the video.
Peter Hershberg over at Reprise Media provides a great overview in AdAge today on the changing world of social media and search incorporating the importance of Twitter among other social media priorities.People are going to social networks and sites to find content. The shift is happening. Think about where you go to find content. While Google is still a natural site for us to go to right away, the “shortcuts” are slowly being incorporated into our web browsing trends.
From the article: In many instances, these sites have started to surpass Google for specific information searches. When you look for video, do you go to Google first or do you go to YouTube? (Demand for video content has made YouTube the No. 2 search engine, ahead of Yahoo.)
He also notes that these search engines like Google and Yahoo are not going away, but rather the social networks are now being indexed and looked at with more importance. “As more and more people connect to each other through social networks, the resulting social graph is proving extremely powerful in helping users filter the data coming at them.”
In summary, this is the shift in how we’re searching on the different sites we interact with on a regular basis. Or, as Peter calls it “Search 3.0.” With so many sites out there offering content, why not make it easier to search for something with the ones you’re so familiar with? Point proven: I found the image for this post by doing a quick search on my Tumblr dashboard.
