by dator at 8:36 AM
*Social Media Rule!*
And, faster than a speeding bullet, Google responds to the concerns
expressed by the Market Researchers as I represented them yesterday--and
even faster, Twitter joins in too!
---------------------------
/Web 2.0 Summit: Google Unveils Social Search/
Users of Google's search engine will soon have the option to include
content created by friends in search results lists.
By Thomas Claburn
/InformationWeek/
October 21, 2009 07:53 PM
<http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/google/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=220900052&subSection=News>
In a surprise announcement at the Web 2.0 Summit, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) VP
of search products and user experience Marissa Mayer revealed an
upcoming Google product called Social Search.
"We've been thinking about social networks for a long time," said Mayer,
without any hint that the meteoric rise of social networks might be a
source of concern at Google.
WOWD debuted its search oriented product at Web 2.0 saying that it
provides more "discovery" than "search," and demonstrating how it pulls
the crowd into search results. Web 2.0 Chair John Battelle tries to pin
down Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter, on the company's potential revenue
models. Comcast CEO Brian Roberts provides his view on the net
neutrality debate, saying that he welcomes the dialog.
WOWD debuted its search oriented product at Web 2.0 saying that it
provides more "discovery" than "search," and demonstrating how it pulls
the crowd into search results.
Social Search, said Mayer, recognizes a fundamental need for real-time
information and demonstrates Google's commitment to innovating in search.
Social Search will be launched in a few weeks as a Google Labs
experiment. As its name suggest, it integrates information created by
people in a searcher's Google network -- defined by one's list of Google
Contacts -- into Google search results.
Mayer demonstrated how a search for "New Zealand" produced a list of
search results that included relevant content created by friends
midway-down the search results page. Among the search results were links
to a Gmail message that referenced New Zealand and a FriendFeed entry,
each from a different friend.
In order for Social Search to work, users much have a Google Account, a
Google Profile, and friends listed as Google Contacts.
The existence of Google's Social Search service appears to validate
claims made earlier on Wednesday afternoon at the Web 2.0 Summit by
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. "There is a very fundamental shift going
on from the information Web to the social Web," she said.
Google clearly wants to be a part of that shift.
Mayer also confirmed an announcement made earlier in the afternoon that
Google had reached a deal with Twitter to include tweets in its search
index as a way to improve access to real-time information.
---------------------------------
Jim Dator
by dator at 9:06 AM
I have just returned from The Market Research Event, held this year in Las Vegas, where I gave a keynote address full of my usual equal measures of hope and doom.
As always, I learn far more from attending events like this than I imagine I share in return.
From the workshop presentations I dropped in on, I discovered that market researchers are as inspired and confused about the consequences of the new Social Media on their work as futurists are.
The Manoa School for many years has used a formula for identifying trends and emerging issues that Graham Molitor published in the mid 1970s.
That was a pre-Social Media era, to say the least.
Molitor correctly said at the time that emerging issues (future problem/opportunities just barely popping into view) can be found only in extremely obscure and often unsavory places. It takes a lot of rooting around to find them. Once they emerge, if they survive at all, they then go through a series of predictable processes of growth from emergence, to take off, to becoming a raging trend, to becoming an all-apparent problem/opportunity, and then either persisting as such, or dying, or cycling down only to emerge at some later point in time.
Using Molitor's scheme, we at the Manoa School prided ourselves on developing good scanners who produced useful emerging issues before many other futurists did.
It turns out that market researchers are short-run futurists of a particular kind: they are trying to discover what new products customers will buy and consumers use, and they are interested in discovering what customers and consumers think about new products.
Surely, then, the new Social Media are a gold mine for both futurists and market researchers.
Indeed, they would seem to be a market researchers dream come true: millions of people very willingly trying out new products and expressing their opinions about them and everything else. All that valuable information just hanging out there for anyone to see. No need to go to the difficult process of identifying and interviewing random samples, or assembling focus groups, or using other traditional survey research methods. Instead, with blogs, et al, getting opinions is like shooting fish in a barrel, right?
On the Internet, and specifically on blogs, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and the like, everyone is eagerly revealing their innermost thoughts (and bodies) for anyone who wants to read, hear or look.
Hoo Ha!
But that is just the problem: everyone is online expressing a million opinions in a million different places. Holy Infoglut!
Well, how about surfing the blogs of blogs or the other many services telling you (for a price, and with proprietary software that may or may not exist) what the blogs are saying?
But are complainers more like to speak out than praisers, or those who are neutral?
It also turns out that an unknown number of bloggers are being paid to say they like (or dislike) a product (or a candidate, or a policy), seriously skewing the results.
And then there are the "everyones" who are NOT online but who still are customers and consumers. Are their opinions similar or different from the ones online?
And so on.
So market researchers are in a quandary, trying to figure out how to use the goldmine to find gold and not gigantic amounts of dross.
We futurists are in the same situation as we look for true emerging issues.
Any suggestions as to a solution?
Especially since yesterday's hottest thing--say, My Space--becomes passé before many people even learn how to use it, and there is no reason to assume YouTube, or Facebook (especially), or even Google (currently proclaimed the Emperor--often without clothes, but still the Emperor--by several market researches) will be The Next Thing next year. The learning curve is so great and the half-life of The Next Thing is so short, that many appear to be giving up and going back to watching TV.
Leaving the truly weird and out-of-it crying away in lonely cyberspace.
Ah! Just the place to find Molitor's old emerging issues!
Jim Dator
