Some articles need to be read in their entirety - excerpting just cuts out too much good stuff.You gotta read Thomas' entire article, "Is Social Taking over Google?"
I am only including snippets and graphics here to tantalize you.
- in 2005, Google and the other search engines accounted for 65%.
- today Google has dropped to 2%***.
Note: *** Normal search via Google.com. Search engines variations e.g. image search, language search, and other search engines - still totals 15%
Traffic vs. Influence
You need to forget about measuring traffic. It's inaccurate and it's irrelevant. Instead you need to measure ‘influence'. How many people have you really connected to today? How many people chose to make you a part of their stream? How many people decided to come back another time? That is your new ‘how many are there' statistics. Not people but Influence!
Referrer vs. communication
You need to look at all the times people are referring to you as person, your company, product, content, website, and your social profiles. And you should not look at where people are coming from, but instead what they are doing. What they are talking about, what they are sharing, and who is subscribing to it.
Reaction
But what you really need to do is to look at how people are reacting to your content (or you as a person). The point of this is to discover how people are responding
My Take
Again, please read Thomas' original article. This is a concise, data rich presentation of a trend foreseen in 2007 by Robert Scoble (Twitter: @scobleizer) in his "Why Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are going to kick Google’s butt in four years" video series.
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