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Social media is proving very complicated for marketers to navigate. Thus far, in the relatively short history of the medium, there is a lack of agreement on such basics as what “Social Media Marketing” actually is, how success should be measured – even whether or not marketers are welcome in social networks at all. But, with the incredible growth of social media properties marketers are eager to join in and reach consumers.

Marketers have generally entered these networks in one of two ways:

Some buy display or text ads that sit around the outside fringes of social interactions, essentially treating social media sites like any other online publishing property. Other marketers choose to participate directly in the activities these sites are designed to foster.

We believe the latter is the more powerful choice because it harnesses what’s interesting about social media – the direct connection. However, by entering into conversation, you give up a measure of control.

“Control” is a key concept here – more than one entity has found itself washed up on the rocks due to the siren lure of control. We can look at the music industry which has seen its main source of income eroded in part due to its insistence on  controlling whether, when, where and how much to charge for digital music delivery.

Then there are brands who similarly feel that engaging on a social media platform like Twitter or Facebook is to cede control of their messaging and identity. In fact the opposite is true – allowing the conversation to happen without a way to respond and engage as well as to listen is to leave your brand bound and gagged.

This was the Skittles experience when they pointed the front page of their website to a Twitter search feed that aggregated every mention of their brand. The jokers quickly showed up to graffiti all over what had become Skittles’ homepage with disparaging tweets, leaving the brand with no way to address this other than by moving the front page onto a new site.

Finally there are the social media properties themselves who have to wrestle with the choice between letting brands interact organically with their audience and finding a way to turn those activities and relationships into revenue.

For instance, my company initiated a social media engagement on behalf of one of our clients in a free-to-join online community of blogs, journals and diaries that also included some social sharing aspects. We determined that this site was a good fit for our campaign because of the audience’s existing interest in our client’s brand. We set up some profiles and, (with full disclosure of who we were, and what brand we were representing), entered into conversations and shared media with users. We were careful to make sure that nothing we were doing fell outside of the site’s terms of service agreement.

The response from the platform owners, once they figured out what was happening, was to have one of their salespeople contact us to talk about advertising opportunities on their site. When we demurred, their next move was to contact our client and threaten legal action unless they received a piece of the action. Ironically a week later our client’s sites were a “featured community” on the platform homepage due to the success of the outreach and socialization. Our engagement with the platform ended shortly afterwards.

The underlying issue was that in exchange for paying them they were offering nothing else – not better targeting or metrics or functionality. They did offer ad space but that wasn’t what we wanted, or what would offer the most benefit to their community and our client. I’ll grant that they can do what they want with their own platform but some folks would call that a shakedown. In their ham-handed quest to control this interaction, they ended up closing the door to a potential revenue source.

The problem here is that as social media marketing becomes more focused on engagement, it becomes harder for sites to figure out how to make money from the brands and marketers on their platform. Similarly, it can be tricky for marketers to point to a direct dollar-to-response relationship here as they can with a search ad or even a banner advertisement.  In fact, for that reason, I believe that social media spending is significantly underestimated. The most effective campaigns do not involve paying a site money and are thus rarely counted.

Another example of this is what’s happening on platforms like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook every day. Brands can engage on each of these in a meaningful way at low — or no – cost. YouTube offers paid alternatives that allow brands to have some added control over their content presentation such as branded YouTube channels so for the marketing dollar there is a clear functionality being added. Neither Facebook nor Twitter have gone to anything like this (though Facebook does allow for paid advertising with some level of interactivity like polling) but I don’t think it’s far in the future for either site.

It’s easy to forget now that these were once considerations that search engines had to navigate through in the days before paid search advertising emerged. At the beginning of the search engine era, marketing was accomplished organically and engines struggled to find ways to monetize the traffic they were sending sites – sometimes going so far as to consider removing advertisers who declined to buy display advertising from their indexes so that they no longer ranked well for certain search terms.

Part of what search engines offered to attract advertisers to their paid search platforms was access to data, and the ability to target in a variety of ways that would have been more difficult to do organically outside their walls.  Most importantly, search engines developed a way of making sure that the advertising opportunities they offered marketers aligned with the way consumers were already using their sites, rather than trying to change behavior instead.

In a similar way, if social media sites want to find a way to monetize engagement, there needs to be some added value for the marketer. What that might mean for platforms is giving up some control over data (something that Facebook has been wrestling with) or the type of interactions that marketers are able to take part in.

Eventually search engines found the right balance between commerce, control and user-friendliness, a balance that I believe social media sites will eventually strike. There will be some false starts to be sure but there is much to be gained for all parties –marketers, social media platforms, and users – in getting the balance right. And yes, that means that advertisers and platforms both will have to let go of the need to control every element of every interaction.

An interesting online debate caught my attention this past weekend.

It started with Danny Sullivan’s Why Don’t Google & Yahoo Offer Twitter Search? Danny’s point is that people are increasingly turning to Twitter — rather than Google and Yahoo — when looking for information on breaking news.  This is a trend we highlighted in our 2009 predictions post at the end of last year.  For proof of Twitter’s real-time search capabilities all you need to do is look back at last week’s plane crash in the Hudson to see where the news initially broke.  People were talking about the event for several minutes on Twitter before the first mentions of it on Google News or any major media site, for that matter.

With that in mind, I agree with Danny when he suggests it’s important that Google and Yahoo develop ways to search Twitter. Where we (may) disagree is over exactly what that would look like.  Danny seems to be suggesting that the engines develop search services that are dedicated to searching Twitter.  My own take is that while it’s important for Google and Yahoo to consider how Twitter could compliment their broader search services, it would be a mistake to create something solely Twitter-centric.

Why Don’t Major Search Engines Offer Twitter Search?

For starters, that has already been addressed by Summize (acquired by Twitter last year and re-branded Twitter Search).  Its search functionality hasn’t been integrated directly into Twitter yet, but anyone can use the site to search all Twitter updates. There are also third-party tools like Power Twitter for Firefox that integrate Twitter Search into the main Twitter page.

Beyond that, most people generally do not want to use several different search engines when looking for products, services, and information – they want different types of results (images videos, and yes, breaking news headlines) brought directly to them on a single results page.  That’s the whole idea behind Universal Search. When there is breaking news Twitter updates could be treated just like news results which sometimes show up above organic listings.

Regardless of what the “right” implementation would look like, however, Danny’s larger question is why hasn’t this been addressed yet?

John Battelle’s take is that it’s all about competition:

“The reason there is not a “Twitter search” from Yahoo or Google is because both companies want to own Twitter, or at least, they want to own the phenomenon of real time search Twitter represents. If they were to create a Twitter search, it would validate Twitter and give the company way too much power.“

Also:

“And Google is likely viewing Twitter as a competitor, and is probably noodling the addition of Twitter-like functionality to Blogger (if it hasn’t already, I’m not following the service too closely). The reason? TweetSense. I am certain Google wants AdSense to be TweetSense, and I am equally certain that the Twitter team will want to build its own version of a scaled ad platform that matches consumer intent, as declared through Tweets and search, to marketers’ paid listings.”

While I don’t disagree with John’s POV, particularly as it relates to the potential advertising opportunity Twitter inventory could represent, I think it would be a mistake for both companies to try to develop Twitter competitors.  Yahoo is moving in the direction of fewer projects and it’s unlikely they would put the adequate amount of resources behind the project.  Google, on the other hand, is well-equipped to issue a challenge in theory, but they have a very questionable record on projects outside of search and it’s reasonable to wonder whether they could be successful.  This is essentially what they’ve tried to do with Knol in response to Wikipedia’s popularity and the results have been mixed at best. Similarly, they haven’t put too many resources behind Blogspot which still attracts most of its users because it’s no charge to use it.

On the other hand, an aggregator of Twitter results similar to Google’s Blog Search or Google News functionality would have potential to be successful, as a way of filtering Twitter posts from universal results. Just as they checkmated Technorati with blog search, they could use the power of their huge number of users to overwhelm Twitter Search. So why haven’t they done something like this yet?

On a Collision Course

My personal view is that Google and Yahoo haven’t come up with Twitter solutions simply because they did not initially understand what Twitter represents from a search perspective. Twitter themselves may have failed to grasp this initially, before Summize came into the mix. It’s unlikely that either Google or Yahoo saw Twitter’s potential as a search engine.  So, it’s only now that they’re probably starting to put adequate resources behind developing a strategy in this area, though I have to believe that it’s become a very high priority, particularly for Google. That’s where this issue gets really interesting – particularly for someone like me who views social media through the lens of search.

There may in fact be a sort of online game of chicken happening between Google and Twitter. As Battelle points out, Google wants to be the one to serve ads on Twitter’s platform if indeed that is the monetization direction Twitter decides to follow. Twitter understands this, but they would like to develop and reap the potential profits from what Battelle calls “TweetSense” themselves. The bet from Twitter is that they will continue to pull the audience for breaking news away from Google quickly enough so that Google will have to capitulate to stay competitive. Google would like to keep this audience but their bet is that Twitter wants the big boost in users that Google search results would bring and would be willing to share some of the ad profit to do so.

This may be what keeps Google from enacting a version of Twitter Search soon. Why build up Twitter’s platform only to see them monetize it without Google’s involvement? Keep in mind the above is all pure speculation.

Open the Fire Hose

Twitter’s growth has already been pretty phenomenal – its recent use on CNN and mentions on ESPN.com and in the New Yorker would seem to indicate that it’s beginning to go mainstream.  Still, relative to the 200 million plus  people currently online in the U.S. , Twitter’s user-base is relatively small – recent estimates suggests there are  around 6 million people currently signed up for the service, with most of them only ever sending out a handful of updates. Most of the “tweets” even active Twitter users send are only viewed by their “followers” (the occasional retweet notwithstanding), so at best, a user’s most popular updates are viewed by tens of thousands of people.  More likely, their updates are viewed by dozens or possibly hundreds of people.

Showing Twitter updates in search results by the major search engines means that users will no longer have to exclusively rely on a large group of followers for distribution of updates – Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft will effectively become distribution valves for Twitter conversations (much the same way as Twitter has represented a distribution source for content created in other areas on the web through link dissemination).  It’s at that point that Twitter usage will really begin to tip as people without Twitter accounts discover useful and interesting information in these results.

From a marketer’s perspective, this means that companies who have been successful using Twitter as a standalone social media strategy will need to recognize that those efforts will need to evolve so that they’re part of a more integrated effort – one that likely includes Facebook fan pages, corporate blogs, branded YouTube channels, etc – that ties back to one overarching corporate goal.  Social media properties continue to dominate search results pages – for better or for worse, the amount of presence a marketer has in those results oftentimes represents the aggregation of the company’s social media efforts.  SEO will become a core component of a successful Twitter strategy.

It’s worth noting that this is a development that has significant relevance to recent debates about Twitter and authority.  To this point, the “Twitterverse” has pretty much been living in a bubble – one where all updates are made and consumed within Twitter and its associated applications alone and where some believe that having 10,000 followers means that you are an authoritative or influential figure.  While I believe that is, in fact, the case for some (and I won’t diminish the value in having a large following), the volume of traffic some individual Twitter updates will receive from organic search will dwarf what they are typically able to generate from Twitter alone.  It also means that Twitter accounts with fewer followers – but with something important and to say on a given topic – will start to see some increased attention as well.  Much like many of the early bloggers did.  And when that happens, the whole question of influence and authority will once again be turned on its head.

In less than a decade, search engine marketing has grown from a little understood and even derided concept (“who would ever want to pay to be in search results?”) into the single biggest sector in online advertising. With all that change and upheaval, it’s only natural for advertisers to start asking: What’s next for search?

In many ways, when you ask that question, you can’t help but focus on the industry’s largest player. With Google commanding 70 percent of the market, all eyes are on the biggest kid in class in order to figure out where we’re heading next. So what is Google doing?

The company continues to expand the list of services it offers to users at a torrid rate. In doing so, it’s started to resemble the portals that it displaced in the late ’90s. One of the reasons for Google’s early success had been its exclusive focus on search. And now it sells TV ads and offers word processing software? What’s the connection?

It turns out that change costs are not high in search—if I don’t get what I want on Google, then Microsoft or Yahoo are just a click away.

Thus far, Google has maintained its lead by providing a superior search experience. But the difference between its results and the competition’s is shrinking. At some point, either one of their current companies or someone around them is going to catch up. In order to keep up the growth rate and defend its turf, the company needs to find ways to grow its relationship with users beyond search, and lock them in.

Enter a broad range of tools that not only give users valuable and useful services—for free—but also provide Google with insight into user needs:

Personalized Search, Google Reader and iGoogle personalized homepages offer the company a view into a user’s individual content preferences.

Google Product Search and Checkout provide one-click checkout on thousands of retail sites, while giving Google access to detailed transactional information and crucial data about how search activity links to pur- chase behaviors.

Google’s Web-based applications, including Documents, Spreadsheets and Presentations, give the company a foothold into information that, until recently, was stored primarily on users’ desktops and potentially loosens Microsoft’s hold on consumers.

YouTube and Picasa allow users to store and share multimedia clips.

Google Maps and Earth allow users to navigate their world, in exchange for rich data about locations.

Google is also planning to launch a service called Google Health that will allow users to store and access their personal health records from any computer.

As users adopt more of these services, Google is building a large collection of the world’s data that some affectionately refer to as the Google Cloud. Once your data is in the “cloud,” that’s when things get interesting.

Despite its mammoth market share and broad range of services, less than 5 percent of Google’s users visit the search site today for anything other than search. It seems that users simply equate Google with search, and only search. So instead of bringing users to the cloud, Google is focused on bringing the cloud to users.

This philosophy is apparent in strategic moves such as Google’s recently announced alliance with Salesforce. Through this partnership, elements of the Google App suite—word processing, chat and e-mail—will be integrated directly into the Salesforce interface. This gives Google access to an audience of millions and puts its useful applications into action.

Additionally, Google has placed a lot of resources behind Google Gadgets—small, self-contained applications that can easily be syndicated to any blog or social network. These tools allow users to place doorways to any Google service or application in the places where they find them most useful.

Despite the impact of both of these tools, Google’s Android operating system for mobile phones may be the product that finally brings together the giant’s broad suite of services. All Android-enabled phones will undoubtedly have out-of-the-box integration with virtually every Google application. The value of having access to your entire “Google Cloud” in your pocket at any time may finally cause users to adopt these applications at a higher rate. After all, it’s not all that hard to imagine:

Accessing Google Health while sitting in a doctor’s office during your first visit and being able to pull up and easily share your medical records.

Taking and uploading mobile pictures directly to a Picasa account, posting mobile videos to YouTube or blogging directly to Blogger from your phone.

Once Android-enabled phones have conditioned users to view Google as the central point for storage and access to all their data, they are more likely to begin using more of the search giant’s services. That doesn’t mean that another engine couldn’t catch them—just that the stakes will have been raised once again.