
Hurricane Sandy Stirs Up 11.5 Million Social Media Conversations http://bit.ly/RLZf6X
via Tumblr http://mhandy1.tumblr.com/post/35061122225

Hurricane Sandy Stirs Up 11.5 Million Social Media Conversations http://bit.ly/RLZf6X

Take the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Customer Relationship Survey http://bit.ly/SI7PqO

4 Secret Listening Techniques for Twitter http://bit.ly/SwFZvO

Mellow Mushroom’s Mascot Delivers a Slice of Social Media Gold http://bit.ly/PJKqa9

Note: tumblr publishing is down right now but normally I blog at mhandy1.tumbr.com
The goal, for many companies, for a long time has been hitting the #1 position on major search engines. A "science" called SEO was invented to game (both ethically and questionable aka white hat/black hat) the results. Things like Link-building, keyword set, and Meta tags are now buzz words.
I have a somewhat controversial thought about all of this...
SEO isn't as important today as it was a year ago and in a year from now it will matter less.
Google is trying to humanize search, that is what Google Buzz (#fail) and Google +1 are all about. The idea is that great content will be voted up and not so great content will be voted down. Variable data will be a major key to success in SEO going forward. In short content is more important now than now than a year ago, and relationships are even more important.
If your not with me, here is the kicker... Semantic Search. Semantic search is a complicated concept but basically it gives you content based on thematic cues. Semantic search can "read" the content of a site and come up with contextual results that cover several different modalities (youtube, flickr, blogs, websites, product pages, etc.).
I would venture to say within the next 3 years Google will be 80% semantic based. Meaning adding meta tags, building links wont matter as much. It is going to be all about content.
How does this effect community managers?
Last point about search and leads...Every brand concerned about being #1 on Google should ask themselves, "what type of leads search is producing?"... Search is not always a good fit for business objectives...
What do you think?