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Event Review: Social Search, Online Identity, and More at Social Media Club-DC

The line-up:
Last night’s Social Media Club, chaired this year by Livingston Communications, covered the gamut on social media search and local search tools. It was a packed house at DC’s National Press Club where Jared Goralnick, AwayFind’s President, moderated a full, debate-filled panel with these industry experts:  Chris Seline, Searchles‘ CTO; Laurence Hooper, Founder & CEO of Loladex; Greg Gershman, VP of Search and Engineering at Odeo; and Aaron Brazell, Business Development Consultant to Lijit.

Social search & key questions:
So many questions (and answers!) … What exactly is ’social search’? How does it differ from mainstream search engine queries?  And why are these questions relevant for marketing your business?   One benefit is social content searches can save time.  They offer more targeted results (vs vast amounts of information from larger search engine queries that take a while to scroll through).

The basics:  social search defined
What helped clarify social search for me was learning it’s not a ‘one size fits all’ approach to search engine queries.  And where mainstream search engines strive to organize all information on the Web, social search tools offer a refined method when searching social media specifically.  These tools, like Searchels, Lijit, Loladex, and Odeo, help to find trusted opinion and ratings within a publisher’s network, on a blog for instance, regarding their social media content (from say social media communities like YouTube, Flickr, and Twitter).

Debating what is searchable (and a question to you):
My favorite part of the night was the panel’s debate over which social media content is relevant enough to search.  Some believed micro sharing posts on networks like Twitter mattered little toward long term archiving of online identity. Yet others disagreed, saying social content forms an online ‘content universe’ of you and your company.  And all of that content, even the miniscule, provides a relevant, larger context to online presence.  I’m still deciding on which side of this debate I fall; do you have an opinion either way?

More meetings, tips, & resources:
Toward the end of the event, the conversation emphasized a key tenet in creating social media on behalf of you and your business:  participate and be yourself i.e. be an authentic human vs an automatic product pusher.  And at the same time, continue monitoring your brand & related conversations via a range of options like BlogDigger, Radian6, or Trackur.

It was time well spent with Social Media Club’s panelist event where those seeking tips on the how’s, what’s, and why’s to social search learned plenty and from varied perspectives.

I’m anticipating good things for Social Media Club’s next meeting on 12/10/08 on distribution strategies for web applications (location to be announced) — hope to see you there.

(SMC logo used with permission from co-founder Brian Solis)

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