My Take: Social Networking Vs. Search

Is Search Dying?

From "How Social Networking Could Kill Web Search as We Know It"

By Glenn Derene as published on April 16, 2008 in Popular Mechanics

Excerpts:

"Silicon Valley’s Big Three are fighting over the scraps of the last decade of innovation while there’s a sea change taking place in the way people use the Internet"

"with the rise of social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Second Life, LinkedIn and even Google’s own Orkut, the next generation of Web users may find what they want by using their social network rather than a search algorithm"

"The Web is, in a sense, maturing into a different medium than the one that search engines were originally designed to tackle."

"in the past few years, a bunch of sites have begun to pop up based on the philosophy of user-generated content—a phenomenon often referred to as “Web 2.0” "

"as we each carve out our individual niche on the Web, the logic of search may well flip inside out. Since we are essentially meta-tagging ourselves through our social networking memberships ... it’s conceivable that the information could attempt to find us "

even though Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Amazon and others all have elements of this new relationship with users, nobody owns this space the way Google “owns” search

My Take

Amen.

My Take on Recession-Proofing Your Business

"Recession Proof Your Business" as seen in Relativity

Excerpts

"businesses that are bogged down in traditional ways of thinking about advertising and marketing are losing out on the next great gold rush present on the internet today"

"those not able to communicate to their marketplace in a rapid and concise manner ... will shrink and lose traction in their marketplace while those that efficiently use the internet to broaden and enrich their current market share will thrive and continue to influence a larger market"

"successful and recession proof businesses will be those that engage in growing their market share by providing high quality content and effectively leveraging “e-word of mouth” to spread their information quickly and with impact. Those that do not succesfuly communicate will go the way of the dodo. The real power lies in the hands of the people."

My Take:

How to maintain a steady supply of high quality referrals? Look at the organic word-of-mouth cycle ...

• The most successful businesses offer the best value.
• Value creates buzz.
• Buzz drives word-of-mouth referrals.

Consequently successful businesses are the ones already receiving organic word-of-mouth referrals.

The question then becomes what new tools will allow businesses to more efficiently generate and capture these referrals to convert them to sales at a higher rate? This will determine which businesses can compete in a down market by conserving their ad budget while increasing their sales revenues.

The tools that will do this will be easy to use, be widely distributed, be cost-effective (in today's Internet age this means free - or "Better than free") and will provide rewards to consumers and to the community as a whole. Or at least that's "My Take" on it.