Sunday, February 27, 2011

Google leverages your social network

If you and your organization don't use social media because you don't want to invest them time, you might want to rethink that. Google is now combining search and social media into their results. Here's a short video from Google explaining this:


This means that not participating is going to become a problem if SEO is at all an issue for your organization. And I'm not sure if I know of any organization that is NOT worried about being relevant in search.

I have to congratulate Google on what is a major head slapping aha moment to me. A large part of the power of social media results from trusting one's network. If you can see search results that are from your trusted sources instead only returning from an algorithm, it is obvious this is going to have an impact on what people will click through from their searches.

Watson's appearance on Jeopardy! may not have proven the existence of artificial intelligence, but tying scientific search with human opinion is really at the heart of leveraging large networks and creating a form of artificial intelligence from wide network thinking. The word networking seems to be having its computer and human definitions folding together into a major force for how we as individuals will learn.

If you have an organization, product, mission, or almost anything that you want new people to learn about, it will now be near impossible to not participate in social media. Though this is where the listening to others and encouraging their participation becomes even more critical in the recipe.

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