Will Social Media lead to the demise of Google?

Google was caught surprised earlier this year when celebrity gossip site PerezHilton reported that the site’s #1 source of traffic was Facebook and not Google. Whoever wins in the numbers race, one thing is clear that more and more people are relying on social networks and blogs and twitterfeeds to get news updates, product reviews and than ever before.

People are increasingly relying on each other for one simple reason: they don’t trust marketing and advertising. Yankelovich reported that 76 percent of American consumers believe that companies don’t tell the truth in advertising. And this skepticism is getting worse rapidly: Yankelovich also cited that 60 percent of surveyed consumers have a much more negative opinion of marketing and advertising than a few years ago.

The good news, of course, is that consumers’ trust of each other is rising as rapidly as their trust of traditional marketing is falling. Neilsen reports that 78 percent of customers say that consumer recommendations are the most credible form of advertising, with 83 percent agreeing that online evaluations and reviews influence their purchasing decisions.

In my opinion, the search engine of the future will integrate search results (especially for very involved purchasing decisions) with my friends’ product reviews on different social networks, blogger reviews, twitter feeds and review sites. The results will further be categorized by semantic engines like Newssift and Sprout Labs to understand whether the underlying sentiment with the product/service is positive or negative. Think of it as an integration of Google with SocialMention, Newssift/Sprout Labs with the results ranked and rated and available to view on the search page.

If I am in the market for a car, why do I need to leave Google/Bing to go to Edmunds.com or JDPower or Cars.com to check product reviews and then to blogger reviews and then check with friends who have owned that car for their feedback? Won’t Google be a lot more valuable to you if it searched all the user generated content across Facebook, Twitter, Blogs and Edmunds etc and presented a negative/positive sentiment on the latest model of Lexus?

And imagine the value to advertisers: you never have to leave Google so all your clicks are coming from a single site.

But I don’t think this is going to come from Google. It will be one of the innovative start-ups who will integrate social media with search.

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About Nitin Gupta

This blog compiles my thoughts and views on the innovations, tools and trends in digital marketing. I have spent more than a decade in financial services, last few studying retail banking and payments industry trends. Particularly interested in the convergence of digital, data, technology and financial services. Email: guptanitinonline@gmail.com Twitter: NitinGuptasays LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/guptanitinonline

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6 comments

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Daksh

Nitin, I think this is something related your original topic. Guess this again answers your question. http://mashable.com/2009/10/01/google-forum-search-results/ For the Google Waves, I believe they're doing incremental invitations. So lets hope for the best. Secondly, I think once somebody gets an invite he/she can invite another guy.

Nitin Gupta

There is definitely lot of exciting work happening in this area. Check out http://bingtweets.com/ if you haven't already

daksh

Yes perhaps the biggest innovation they did in the search-industry is by launching the search engine itself. I guess the other innovation(s) are incremental and smaller subset of a larger product. But still a share of around 67% is huge. (Yahoo + Microsoft's search combination is not even half) But yesterday, it seems internet might have changed with Google wave. Lets see whats on offer there. Speculations are there that the whole digital marketing box will be impacted :) I don't know whether you read this http://adage.com/digitalnext/article?article_id=1... but if some of the things hold true, it could main Google dominating Social Media more than every before.

guptanitin

Thanks for sharing the Ad Age link. I have been following Google Wave's demo version and the features look really cool. Hopefully, it will be a "game changing" app that will change the way we collaborate. Too bad I am not part of the 100k they sent out invites to :)

I don't think social media will lead to the demise of Google, vice-versa isn't true either. But there's truth in the sense that emergence of certain applications have created an impact on the dominance of Google. I think what we'll witness is a mutual partnership eventually leading to benefits for internet audience. On the other hand, Google has started some initiatives some of are bound to create a ripple effect. Google tried to include user-recommendation by having certain ranking suggestions. However, it seems that move didn't work out. Today we're witnessing Google's side wiki. It is again a tremendous example of user-contribution on any web-page. Like you mentioned the knock-out punch will be integration of these comments in the google-search comments. The only question that remains to be answered is how will the users react, get accustomed to a move like this :) Excellent blog by the way. There's a lot of learning that I can have.

Daksh, Thanks for visiting and welcome to the Digital Marketing Today community. There is a lot happening in this area with real time search, user generated content and traditional search all getting integrated. It will be a fun place to watch. I heard someone say that Google is not really a search company but an advertising company. While I don't agree with that, Google has been slow in innovation in the search category. They have been busy expanding into Microsoft's turf. I did check out your blog: good thoughts and all the best. Nitin

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