Mitch Joel had a post a few weeks ago called “Confusion Over Search Engine Marketing.”

He asked if “search engine marketing is up, down or right where we left it prior to the meltdown?”

My answer: not sure.

But I challenge the premise of the question..I don’t think the meltdown is relevant to the status of search engine marketing.

I’ve never been an expert in SEO and I suspect there’s a place for it, like there is for most other elements of marketing, but I think the real issue as it relates to the future of search engine marketing is the advent and gradual shift to what I will term “social search”

As more and more people come online to social networks and turn to those networks as the first stop in the search process, the top links on google will take a backseat to the top links which are referred/suggested/recommended by your network.

Jeff Jarvis has outlined quite well how we are moving to link economy from a content economy.

I combine that with Fred Wilson’s analysis of the Power of Passed Links (part 1 and here’s part 2) where he demonstrates that more and more of the traffic to his blog is coming from links that people share with their network (primarily via Facebook and Twitter.)

So, when Fred asks about the future of “default behavior of the Internet Operating System,” I would agree that today, for almost all of us, Google.com is the default start page, but over time, we start moving to where “search” will start with the trusted members of your network.

And it doesn’t have to be an active request/response.

It can be like what Delicious already does, a place where your search terms are filtered and ranked and presented by your network and your network’s network. Admittedly, it’s a phase 1 of it all.

So, what does this all mean for you?

Well, I’m biased, of course, so take it for what it’s worth…

I think that it makes it even more critical to connect with your Raving Fans and cultivate them so that they are experts (or perceived as such by their network, what Emanuel Rosen might call “expert hubs” [see The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited: Real-life lessons in Word-of-Mouth Marketing]), so that when the “social search” process begins on the part of a potential customer of yours, your Raving Fans are there to provide the answer…YOU.

 

 

 

 

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