The words were barely out my mouth about the urgent need for Google to get more “real-time” with the search results…
..when Voila!
BOTH Google and Bing
announce strategic alliances with Twitter.
Naturally, the Twitter grapevine was ablaze with the news.
I have 3 things to say about this (besides, “I told you so!” ).
1. SEX
Like sex, this is bigger and more pervasive than most people realise.
Social Media is now bigger than porn. And Google and Bing garner most of the search engine traffic for the English-speaking world.
This move not only marks Twitter’s Cinderella ascendancy to what some have termed “being a first rate citizen” of the burgeoning real-time Social Media spaces. (In these spaces, Twitter has long been looked down upon as Facebook’s 2nd rate, country-mouse cousin).
It’s also a watershed for search engines generally. It’s a crossing of The Rubicon, into a search world of a more immediate search result context.
The search brass ring: Give searchers the most relevant and most current results. Now!. Image Credit: Janek M
And it’s not just “real-time” search that’s the magic pill here. It’s the combination of real time search and searcher relevance that’s so virile and potent from a search perspective.
In that context, this may very well be one of the sexiest things to happen to both Search and Social Media in about 6 months. Which is aeons in cyber terms.
2. SEARCH
As @jowyang suggests:
There are a lot of blog posts and articles about the Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft and Google Deals, but most miss a key insight. Social Search Shifts Power To Twitter Users, As They Influence Search Results.
He expands his thoughts on that in his post written with Charlene Li about social search and how customers will influence search results over brands.
One of the key points of that is that this trend towards micro-media (and social search) requires companies to pay attention to the real time and social web for marketing, support and competitive strategies.
From a search professional’s perspective, it means our search methodologies will need to be modified and possibly even re-invented – to cater for this rapidly changing search landscape.
Some of the relatively crude “blast” techniques some marketers have used to try game Social Media spaces will not work. Inevitably, Twitter and the search engines will work mutually to distil better signals and separate them out from the Social Media noise. As they do that, Search Marketers will need to adopt more sophisticated techniques to get results.
3. SOCIOLOGY
Lastly – this Google-Bing-Twitter real-time search-fest doesn’t really surprise me because it’s smack-bang on target with mega-trends affecting all of us.
Trendwatching.com’s megatrend for October 2009 is Nowism.
A bit more about that megatrend from their site:
NOWISM | “Consumers" ingrained lust for instant gratification is being satisfied by a host of novel, important (offline and online) real-time products, services and experiences.
Consumers are also feverishly contributing to the real-time content avalanche that’s building as we speak. As a result, expect your brand and company to have no choice but to finally mirror and join the ‘now’, in all its splendid chaos, realness and excitement.”
As Trendwatching points out – the human desire for instant gratification is nothing new:
….our current consumer societies handily accommodating and encouraging this relentless pursuit of instant information, communications, pleasure, if not indulgences. En passant reducing the ‘now’ to mere minutes, if not seconds….
What is evolving though is how quickly and easily we can do that and what mechanisms are available to do so.
So, the Google-Bing-Twitter ménage à trois is merely a symptom of a much greater trend.
It’s in sync with Zygmunt Bauman's "Liquid Modernity”
Social forms and institutions no longer have enough time to solidify and cannot serve as frames of reference for human actions and long-term life plans, so individuals have to find other ways to organise their lives.
Such fragmented lives require individuals to be flexible and adaptable — to be constantly ready and willing to change tactics at short notice, to abandon commitments and loyalties without regret and to pursue opportunities according to their current availability.
In liquid modernity the individual must act, plan actions and calculate the likely gains and losses of acting (or failing to act) under conditions of endemic uncertainty.
Anyone who has spent enough time getting to grips with Twitter will realise, this is exactly the paradigms Twitter serves so well: The online quest for the Instant Information Orgasm.
Enough waffling on about sex and socialism though.
Let’s cut to the chase and raise our champagne glasses to Nowism… And to Twitter as a vehicle of liquid modernity in Search.
Viva the hotbed of instant Search gratification!
For another angle on this story you may want to consider this very entertaining talk given by Rory Sutherland, in which he talks about the fact that intangible value is becoming more and more important - things like real time search and immediate information and influence have huge relevance to or world today.
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