Theme: Search and Social platforms are converging – which  means successful marketers musth have one unified team with one set of data.

Key takeaways from this session

1. Connect: facebook to offline experience. feed the metadata
2. Bring: search and social teogher. People, process, and technology
3. Expect: social SEM data unification and all our war among Google, facebook, and twitter for ad dollars

2013

Paid, owned, and earned are converging.  Look at facebook where you can have your owned pages, people who like you and you also buy ads. They might even be on the same page.  Google search results even shows paid and owned assets together, especially with Google + and it’s continuing growth.

2014

Quote: “There’s no free lunch”

Quote: It could be argued from a consumer point of view that the better the search engine is the fewer advertisement  you will need. (Google)

Note that they followed that with a picture of a Google results page with TONS of ads.

• Social will become more like search and search will become more social.  As social becomes more like search, you will pay for it in some form or fashion.
• Search is improving within facebook and users are starting to use the natural search.  The results are like a combination of Yelp and Bing
• Point, you should search for your company or product to see if the results look good or if you need some work.
• Google Hummingbird search uses natural language processing.  They actually followed facebook on this
  • Google is trying to tie in Google+ as much as they can.  There’s a lot of
• Twitter has marketing events but it will depend on real time interactions and key words. You social guys should be talking to your search team.
• Look at all the reviews on facebook.  Although there seems to be some major rate inflation.  It could become the best way to find a restaurant.
  • Note that Google moved their reviews to Google plus so you’ve got something similar going on.
• The clunky: three results for Thornbury Castle on the facebook search right now.  It needs some cleanup.
  • natural language search on facebook is still a bit clunky
• Stalker: Can now search for divorced women over 30 years old. (Creepy)
  • Or divorced women who like a specific tv shows
  • key learning, watch out what you like. It will come back to you.
• Political implications: Femen is illegal in Tunisia but it’s a piece of cake to find people who like Femen in Tunisia.

How to improve your search and your social?

• Update your metadata
• use checkin to your locations
• encourage offline customers to go mobile with likes, checkins, and recommendations
• Great idea: everyone checks in when they upload a picture.   So put something photo worthy in it.
• Don’t forget stickers like rate us on trip advisor, etc.
• It will be easy to get yourself to the top of a list by checking in a fair amount.
• Be careful and remember that Facebook is still working on this. Graph search isn’t even available on mobile.
  • It’s early in the game. They’ve got a lot to do. they just had to index 1 trillion pieces of content.  So something has to slide
• Publish at least one per day on Google+
  • Find something to push out once a day to get decent looking results.
• use Google + social to put content in display advertising in Google ad network
• Twitter strategy
  • Conversation analytics
  • keyword strategy
  • creative development
  • bid optimization
  • Looks a lot like search ad strategy doesn’t it……….

Integrate Search and Social

You need to evolve your approach.

• Disparate teams with social, search etc need to come together.  Adobe uses a hub and spoke framework
  • Other options for approach include centralized, distributed, and holistic
  • Don’t just use a PR agency for your social. Become social yourselves
• Inconsistent KPI’s need a common framework across teams
  • and if you aren’t doing a good job tracking then start.  You need analytics and key measurements
• Siloed tracking and report becomes common tracking and reports
  • Common tracking will push you to channel optimization
  • Which will push your towards attributions.
  • Which will lead you to media mix modeling
  • It must become unified between social and search.  Of course, that’s the whole point of campaign management services.
• Volume, sentiment need to become something that proves value to the business
• In evolving, define what you want to do. Recognize the role of social in YOUR organization
  • PR and communications?
  • Marketing and ecommerce?
    • Search probably belongs mostly in this bucket.
  • Customer service and support?
  • Product innovation?

The ultimate aim is to get to the right mix of search, ads, email, and social media.  Doing that depends on how well you converge it all.

• Adobe CQ5.5 Sneak Peek
• Adobe CQ5.5 Now Available

At the time of the announcement, Adobe also announced CQ 5.5 Social Communities, but had not yet shipped that feature.  Well, I missed the original shipping announcement, so I’m catching up to it now.

On May 15, 2012, Adobe announced that CQ 5.5 Social Communities was available.  Social Communities builds on to some existing features already available in Adobe CQ 5.5, such as “developing and managing blogs, forums, comments, and ratings, as well as connecting to social networks, across all aspects of an organization’s digital presence”.

You can now include login to CQ 5 using Twitter or Facebook and then personalize their experience using information from their profile or data from other systems.  Adobe has included several social plugins in CQ 5.5 that include:Activity feeds

• “Like” buttons
• Comments
• Twitter Share
• Twitter Follow
• Twitter Search

These new features will make it even easier for site managers to add social capabilities to their websites.

You can see a video of some of the social plugins on YouTube or inline below.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DVlaN_zcs0[/youtube]

What is interesting is that the report includes only those companies that have native applications on multiple mobile operating systems and have some sort of cloud-based solution.  Naturally this criteria is going to leave some companies out, like Apple, Microsoft, and RIM who target apps for one mobile OS.

The applications included in this Wave are somewhat of a melting pot.  Adobe’s Connect application is a leader and delivers web-based conferencing.  Comparing that application to Yammer, also a leader but more of a corporate-friendly Facebook, is kind of hard.  Box.com is a file sharing and synchronizing application which is completely different than Connect or Yammer.

Still, the collaboration space is a very broad market consisting of a variety of application types.  It is good to see an evaluation of these different companies not based just on the product they deliver, but on many other factors, such as strategy and market presence.

Forrester rates the leaders in these categories as follows:

• Current Offerings: Box, IBM, and Yammer
• Strategy: Skype, Box, Cisco, and Yammer
• Market Presence: Skype, Cisco, and Google

If you don’t have access to Forrester.com, you can read a quick review of this Wave on CMS Wire here.

• Organizations are demanding better user experiences in their portals.
• They see consumerization driving other products and want it for their portals.
• Mobile devices and the need for context-awareness are being demanded by users

What about cloud-based portals – is that in our future?  It certainly is!   Many vendors are starting to offer cloud-based portal systems. But beware!  The very nature of the portal is that it typically connects to a whole bunch of other systems in your organization behind your firewall.  So for a cloud-based portal to be effective, you will need to open up your internal systems to the cloud vendor and have some serious networking pipes. On the other hand, a cloud-based portal would be ideal to integrate your other cloud-based applications.

2015 is still a long way away, so what is happening between now and that future?  Here are the seven things that Gartner sees trending in the portal market over the next few years.

• Analytics need to be implemented to help gauge the effectiveness of the portal.  There has been a recent flurry of acquisitions in the Web Analytics market by traditional and newer portal vendors
• Portal-less Portals – there are several vendors beginning to offer portal type systems without claiming to be true portals.  Backbase is considered one of those vendors.  Adobe’s CQ5 could also qualify.
• Portal ubiquity – portals will become more ubiquitous as unbind their services
• Exploit context across more user attributes (aka enhanced personalization)
• Widgets are becoming more important and portlets less-so
• Mobile is becoming a key first consideration
• The User Experience Platform begins to emerge as a set of cohesive, pre-integrated, highly user interactive services rather than a bunch of products loosely coupled together.

Finally, in terms of vendors, we have basically three major portal vendors today:  IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft.  Close behind are our open source friends Liferay and JBoss. As the market begins to move toward this UXP concept, we are going to see lots of other vendors emerge with UXP offerings.  Firms from the content management space are beginning to move toward UXP, as are firms in the Social Software, Mashups, Portal-less Portals and other Markets.

Here are some vendors to keep your eye on over the next few years:

IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Liferay, Redhat JBoss, Backbase, Adobe, Cisco, Google, Apple, United Planet, JackBe, NetVibes, Pageflakes, Fatwire, Extron, Automony, Drupal, DotNetNuke, Plone, Jive, Atlassian, Telligent, SocialText.