ComScore‘s most recent search engine ranking report offers new insight that will make us rethink how we publish content, increase its findability, and facilitate sharing.

In comparing February to January, Google remained on top with 65.4 percent of all core search activity. Yahoo followed with 17 percent and Microsoft ranked third with 11.3 percent.

Things become interesting when we analyze search queries as opposed to core search activity. The landscape broadens beyond traditional search.

Just behind Google, but ahead of Yahoo, YouTube ranks second for search inquiries overall. In 18th and 19th place, Facebook and MySpace also make appearances in the top 20 list respectively. Perhaps most intriguing is that neither Facebook nor MySpace offer true search functionality — but they still account for increasing search activity. Facebook is up 10 percent between January and February.

What does this all mean? As social networks gain in prominence, the amount of relevant information within each ecosystem increases in value and, as such, we deliberately seek content within the networks in which we engage.

It’s the Journey That’s Important, Not the Destination

Destination sites across the board are losing traffic and ultimately favor, simply because destinations are obsolete as intended or designed. The days of the traditional “start page” are coming to an end, only to be replaced with the “attention dashboard” — a dedicated application that aggregates the activity of those we follow in social networks into a series of digestible streams.

TweetDeck, PeopleBrowsr, Seesmic, HootSuite, Brizzly, and Facebook each represent a new generation of attention dashboards as they funnel social feeds into one clickable view. These streams look a lot like slot machines as information flies through dedicated columns, almost blurring the text beyond legibility. But this is where attention is focused and the content that appears within it represents the future of the information life cycle.

So how do we compete for attention if attention itself is learning how to adapt to a new media landscape?

Our job is to ensure that information travels outside of our domains and to the communities of interest in order to create a bridge back to our hub. And, content must adapt based on consumption and sharing patterns with our existing and potential stakeholders.

This is an important point and one that can’t be ignored. Social activity indicates that we are already moving away from the act of proactively traveling to traditional sites as a source of new content.

With the dawn of social media, the activity that brings social graphs and networks to life is quickly changing how we discover, learn and share and it is also forever reshaping the idea of online destinations as they exist today. It all comes down to attention and understanding where it’s focused and how it is tempted, lured, or distracted to click away from it.

The socialization of information is changing everything.

Connect with Attention Where Attention is Focused

Competing for attention is paramount. We lose most of the battles before they’re begun because we’re working against years of behavior that now represent the complete opposite of tomorrow’s consumption and sharing patterns.

Everything begins with identifying where attention is focused, combined with the new laws of attraction.

Gigya reviewed data from Compete from November 2009 and observed that some of the top media properties were already realizing a dominant effect in traffic from social networks. For example, USAToday receives upwards of 35 percent of its referral traffic from social networks and just over 6 percent from Google. People Magazine receives 23 percent of its referrals from social networks and 11 percent from Google. And, CNN earns 11 percent of its referral traffic from social versus 9 percent from Google.

Peer-to-peer activity strongly influences the resulting behavior of impressionable nodes defining social graphs, much in the same way we rely upon trusted referrals from our real life contacts. The more something appears within the attention dashboard, the more likely it is that someone will click through. In addition, the more intriguing it seems, or the stronger the reaction it engenders among peers, also increases its enchantment and thus beguiling spectators to willfully lunge towards a shared experience, most likely triggering a public response that continues the social effect.

Social Architecture and Connecting the Dots

Information is already socializing and changing the behavior for how people search, find, react, and curate. The difference between our present and future is defined by the roads and bridges we build between relevance and prevalence.

As content producers, our responsibility is to connect information and stories to existing and potential stakeholders. It’s also essential to package and optimize our content as social objects in order for them to work for us in our absence, when individuals actively seek content through contextual searches.

In part two, we’ll look at 11 steps for optimizing your brand for sharing and social search.

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Ideally, the link profile of your site should indicate an entity that gives and receives links. The whole idea of a “web” indicates interconnected sites that reference each other. If your site receives links, but does not give any out, then it is going to resemble a dead end or a black hole. Even if your links are fairly unobtrusive, and go to informational sites (as opposed to competitor sites) you can create a more natural looking site profile as you build your link portfolio.

Lastly, it pays to avoid complex (or not so complex) interlinking to your own sites, or to “web rings” which all link to each other. In the eyes of a search engine algorithm, these relationships are easy to spot and can work against you. Your link building profile should make your site look like a great source of information that isn’t afraid to refer users to other sites for further study. As an added bonus, users tend to go back to websites that help them find what they’re looking for, and that goes right back into the directive to “build a site as if search engines did not exist.”

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For that, the best option is setting yourself up with a self-hosted WordPress blog.

While there’s nothing wrong per se with free blogging options like Blogger or WordPress (the .com version; self-hosted WordPress is on the .org domain), they severely limit how much interaction you have with them from a user perspective. Designs are limited as well, and add-ons aren’t supported, and to make a truly effective social media hub on your blog, you need fluidity to design.

The worst thing about free blogging options is that you’re also placing all your content into the hands of a third-party. If Blogger, WordPress or any other free blogging platforms change their Terms and Conditions, you could find yourself without a blog. With a self-hosted option, all the control lies in your hands. While there are other options like TypePad and Squarespace, I just prefer WordPress for its ease-of-use and community support.

Going Self-Hosted

Just in case you aren’t already using self-hosted WordPress, here’s a quick guide to getting set up :

• Choose a domain name and a web host to host your blog. Bluehost is perfect for this, since it offers packages that set up the domain and hosting as an all-in-one package. There are several others, so Google “web host” and find the one right for you.
• Once you have your account, you’ll be taken to an area called C-panel. This is simply the Admin dashboard for all the backroom stuff associated with your site. Once in there, its simply a matter of using Fantastico to set up your WordPress account, as shown by my friend  John Haydon’s video.

Planting the Seeds

The reasons for using a self-hosted WordPress blog are numerous, but the main two (at least as far as a social media hub is concerned) are design and add-on flexibility. Since the hub is going to be both your home-base and outpost, you need a platform that can handle your needs – WordPress is perfect for this.

The look and feel of your hub will define how useful it is to your visitors. The less cluttered the look, the more effective the hub can be, although some folks prefer a more information-led design. This is where WordPress and a premium theme comes into play (a theme is just a pre-designed look or framework for your blog) -  you can choose a template, page, sub-pages, sub-domain or any number of design options to present your hub.

There are benefits to each option:

• A page holds everything in one area, although it could get cluttered.
• Sub-pages allow you to set up different niche hubs (more on that tomorrow).
• Sub-domains offer a completely separate hub altogether, but still tied to your blog’s main domain.
• Templates allow a different look and feel from your blog design, and help give that unique hub feel.

What you choose will mostly be determined by how many resources you populate your hub with. How you populate these resources is up to you; again, the great thing with self-hosted WordPress is that the flexibility of design is limitless, thanks to plug-ins.

Social Media Plug-Ins for Your Hub

WordPress is an open-source community, which means that there is a whole community of developers making really cool applications (or plug-ins) every day. These are released to the WordPress userbase (almost always free of charge) and you can then use them on your blog to help turn it into anything you like.

Some of the best ones for a social media hub (and ones that I’ll show you examples of in the design post coming next in the series) include:

• Enthropia’s Lifestream. One of the ways to show what you’re up to on different networks is Lifestreaming, and Enthropia’s plug-in for WordPress is one of the simplest. This is perfect for those that don’t want a full-on social media hub.
• Twitter Tools. Offers great integration between Twitter and your blog and vice versa, including tweet archives, posts, admin options and more.
• Smart YouTube. Ideal for video bloggers, this gives you a larger set of options than just video embedding – playlists, RSS feed support and iPhone compatibility being just a few.
• FotoBook. While there are plug-ins and widgets to integrate your blog with Facebook, one of the coolest to do this in reverse is FotoBook. This imports all your pictures from Facebook and enhances the personal aspect of your social media hub.

These are just some plug-ins that, along with your design and the existing applications from the various social networks, will make up your social media hub. The great thing with WordPress is that, no matter what you’re looking to do via your hub, you can probably find a plug-in for it. Just go to WordPress Extend and start searching – that’s where the treasure is to shape your hub, your way.

Takeaway: Make a list of how many features you’d like on your blog. Decide if you want to go for a single page, sub-pages, sub-domain and how intensive or lite you wish your hub to be. Sketch some ideas for layout, since tomorrow we’ll look at the various options available, with examples of each to a successful hub.

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So, yeah – social media is a pretty big thing. But it can also be a pretty fractured thing as well.

New platforms spring up, old ones wither and die, some are more beneficial than others and some will just take up valuable time and waste it. And it doesn’t matter if you’re using social media personally or professionally, time is a luxury very few of us can afford to be lenient with.

This is where having a single point social media hub comes into play (or at the very least, a single collection point for all the passengers that are your social outposts).

Instead of being fractured, you concentrate your efforts where they’ll have most impact. You also make it easier for people to connect and interact with you (which, from a business point of view, is the relationship to the sale). And for personal users, these interactions open you up to whatever future possibilities you may already be planning (career, business idea, non-profit support, etc).

And the best place for your social media hub? Your own blog.

The Blog is the Hub

Why your blog? Simple (and I’m talking mainly from a self-hosted option here – free is fine but self-hosted is your complete control) – the only limitations to what your hub contains are your needs and outreach goals.

You define the role your blog will play in your social outreach as well as your social incoming – and that’s the key word here. You.

A lot of people use  Facebook as their social media hub, and it’s a great platform for doing this. But it’s a third-party solution, so you’ll always be bound by their terms and conditions. All you’re doing is renting space and abiding by a landlord’s rule. But your blog – especially a self-hosted one – is your rulebook. For this alone, it’s the ideal platform to create a social media hub.

But there’s a lot more to your blog acting as your hub than not giving over control to third parties. By using your blog as your home-base and connecting the dots to your social outposts, you’re essentially making yourself both resource and resource centre.

Yes,  Twitter initiates great connections and is ideal for short-burst infomercials. Facebook is perfect for offering a neutral ground on connecting only with those you want to connect with.  Viddler and  blip.tv are both great platforms for finding and sharing more than just text.  LinkedIn is the portal that holds many a key to your business goals.

But every single one is a separate entity from each other. Not all the connections on one will be connected on the others. See the potential time suck for keeping up with every account, while doing your day job too? There is one common denominator though – you. You’re the filling on the sandwich; the bus driver to the destination; the glue that holds everything together.

Turning this glue to your blog makes it – and therefore, you – sticky. The reason kids like connect the dot books is that there’s a defined path, a clear goal and direction. Taking the pain out of finding you, what you do and where you do it is the adult equivalent of connect the dot books. Your blog-led social media hub is the perfect dot connector.

Defining the Hub Spokes

A good hub is only as strong as its spokes. Where it feeds to; how it feeds inward; who the spokes talk to and who speak via the spokes. To make your hub effective, you need to showcase its – your – strengths and build on them. You need to have a clear, defined path, how you’re going to travel it and what’s going to make the journey easier (both for you and fellow travelers).

To define your hub, you need to ask some questions:

• Where will my focus be?
• What is my goal?
• What are my measurement points?
• Where can I outsource to outposts and where should I build at home?

These are just some of the questions that will define what kind of hub you have and where the hub leads to (and leads back from). Answering these (and ones that will come organically because of them) will start to define you within your hub. And that’s where the real fun and success begins.

Takeaway: Look at where you currently have a presence online. Social networks; forums; community sites like  Ning; video or podcasting sites. Do a mini audit and see which ones are strong and which need work. Ask yourself if the weaker ones are worth continuing or if you can sacrifice them to take the others and use as building blocks to make a solid social media hub with.

This is the first part of a seven part mini-series looking at how and why to turn your blog into a social media hub. You’ll be able to find the complete series here.

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Testimonial link building really is a win-win scenario for both sites and usually has a much higher approval rate than your standard link request emails. The contact gets another testimonial to place on their site, while you get a new incoming link.

Another good feature of testimonial based links is that they can be often found on core product pages or even the homepage. This means they’re going to have a strong positive influence in your overall link popularity.

Getting started is as simple as writing an email to a few of your suppliers. Explain to them how happy you are with the service and offer to write a few lines they can place on their site.

If they accept, write something specific and ask if it would be ok for them to provide a link to your site. You can make it simple for them by showing an example of how you would like the link to be created:

Hi Supplier name,

“This is an example comment praising the suppliers business.”

Your Name, CEO of Company name – a leading provider of example services.

While this can be a great strategy, only offer to write a testimonial if you are genuinely happy with a supplier’s service! Happy link building.

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1. First - grab a good Twitter name (just park it if you have no immediate need) – more often I’m seeing companies losing out on securing their name for a Twitter account – act fast if its already not too late!
2. Once you create a Twitter account, be sure to apply a logical logo/image (don’t simply use the default icon) and provide a short, useful description and a url to your website. Start following your competition, your customers and clients, and some interesting Tweeple from your industry
3. Once ready to start tweeting, determine if your Twitter account will simply be a corporate twitter account that pulls feeds of your news or if there’s to be a person or team of people manning the account to provide useful updates. Consider adding secondary Twitter accounts that target a specific topic (i.e. technical support, developer network, marketing etc…) As an example, I use @gletham for a mix of Geo Technology and personal Twitter posts (this is my most widely used Twitter account and has my face associated with the account), although I also manage @gisuser for GISuser.com specific topics (news and job postings with GISuser logo as icon) @lbszone.com for LBS related news topics etc… Each account has been designed in a way that it is quite clear to potential followers what kind of updates they will be getting when following.
4. Consider using real people to manage your social media accounts. A Twitter account managed by real people will get you more attention than a “robot”. Don’t be afraid to let your “Tweeple” mix a little personal information with business (Twitter users accept this and enjoy it) although some discretion should be used. Companies should consider creating a formal policy on what’s cool/not cool for people to do with Twitter and other social media outlets.
5. Assign a person to monitor activity on Twitter to see who’s saying good or not so good things about your company, your products, or services. Search.Twitter.com is very useful and is very easy to use and create RSS feeds of posts that mention your company.
6. If you have multiple Twitter accounts to manage, consider using an application like HootSuite (currently in R2 Beta) or Seesmic (I suggest this one), enabling rapid and effective management of multiple accounts.
7. Encourage your social media “experts” to also learn how to Tweet via mobile. This is very useful when attending conferences, trade shows, training events and other events outside of the office. your customers and potential clients will appreciate live updates from events with useful information – it also makes you look more like a “Twitter Pro”!
8. Consider sharing other media, like photos and videos with your Twitter followers. Several excellent media sharing applications are easy to use and very effective for sharing multi-media and will automatically “Tweet” when you make updates. To start I suggest the following mobile applications: Shozu (for data crunching and sharing); Qik.com or Flixwagon.com for live video streaming/sharing; Flickr and YouTube are very useful for hosting and sharing your product demonstration videos, product images etc… Finally, become familiar with Twitpic and TweetPhoto are very useful for sharing photos with your Twitter accounts.
9. Finally, share your Twitter name and address with your clients, colleagues, and anyone else who is listening. Mention your Twittername in press releases, have employees add it to their email signature, post it on your website and blog (Twitter has some great widgets) and spread the word!
10. For more information on the corporate Twitter environment I suggest you follow @mashable and @joelcomm @chrisbrogan @mattsingley for some useful tips and tricks. There’s also loads of self-proclaimed “Social Media Experts” out there who maintain useful blogs with tons of goodies. Once comfortable, be sure to investigate some of the many fine 3rd party add-ons that will make your Twitter experience more valuable and fun!

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For example, Google results heavily feature YouTube (owned by Google, of course) and Wikipedia pages in against almost every search we make.

Let’s look at some of the advantages of big business, and ways the small guy can counter them.

Advantages Of The Big Players

Unlike the small business, large businesses have access to significant amounts of capital. They can use this capital, indirectly, to buy position.

They can run large ongoing media campaigns that ensure visitors, links and attention, and all the resulting ranking advantages that provides. Big business can cross promote their properties, which makes it easier to launch new sites. They can buy out competitors (Google – YouTube) and trounce the competition, even though they enter late. They have many employees they can throw at problems, and waves of lawyers to throw problems at others.

What does the little guy have?

An internet connection.

Google Has Devalued Easy Tricks

The low hanging fruit is gone.

Google will always be a moving target. As the structure of the web changes, Google changes with it.

In the last few years, Google have devalued on page factors, they’ve made link building a lot more difficult, and the playing field is far from level. When the big guys get caught out using aggressive SEO, they’re often given a free pass back into the index, because to not have them showing would devalue Google. The little guy is likely to be excluded for some time.

What Can The Little Guy Do?

The big companies have one major problem.

They’re big.

Because they are big, they can often only operate in tried and tested ways. For example, there’s a Telecoms company that have just wasted tens of millions of dollars on a website that most bedroom SEOs could have beaten in their sleep. The site has recently been shut down.

The site was uneconomic because the only way this big Telecoms company knew how to operate was by using the biggest and “best” suppliers. So that meant hiring in consultants from the big consultancy firms. That meant employing large vendors to do their programming. It meant above-the-line advertising at prime time, and saturation advertising across newspapers and radio. It meant hiring teams of people and organizing them in the tried and tested organization structure.

Because that’s how they’ve always released products and services.

Also consider that a lot of Web 2.0 operations, lauded in the media for the past few years as “the bright young things to watch”, are now crashing to earth as their big-money funding dries up. Turns out that was the only thing keeping them going. Meanwhile, a lot of SEO-aware webmasters are enjoying a growing income because they’re always had the revenue equation right.

In both cases, the access to big capital was a disadvantage. It meant these companies didn’t need to be smart.

So what, specifically, can the smart, little, SEO-aware guy do?

Big Bets?

You can take big bets.

The big guys tend to be conservative, but we don’t need to be. We can have a crazy idea one morning, and make it a reality by that afternoon. We can ask ourselves “Is this idea crazy enough!”.

The big company finds it very hard to do that.

Big company people often fret about their jobs and reputation, they have to convince a lot of stakeholders, and there’s always someone waiting to stab them in the back.

So they play it safe.

Read why Seth thinks “safe” is bad idea.

Small Niche

The big company might not be able to make money out a small niche.

In the Telecoms company example I used above, their bloated structure and operating methodology drove costs way above the potential return. However, a smaller company with lower overheads could have made a success of it.

There are thousands and thousands of small niches the big companies can never compete in.

But you can.

Personal Trust Networks

Big companies have problems personalizing their services and relationships.

The web is about to change again. And when the web changes Google changes, too. The big change is a social one.

Twitter, social media, bookmarking sites are all about “the personal”. They’re hard for a big company to centrally control. That suits the small guy.

Look to build up a high degree of trust with small, tightly linked networks of people. Use a blog to keep in contact. Not just any old blog – really work it. Make it unique and own your ideas. Have an opinion and shout it loud.

Try to talk to those one hundred people in your little niche who make a difference. Talk to those 100 people who think the same way you do. If they know you and trust you, they’ll do a lot of your marketing for you. There remains no more effective marketing than word of mouth.

Ask your friends to help out. Cross promote their stuff. Go into joint ventures. Really work the personal, trusted relationship side, because that’s the way the web is going. Trust is being decentralized.

This is one area in which the big guys are going to have a lot of problems competing.

Friendgine – Friend Search Engine

Aaron has a great idea called “Friendgine”.

Set up your own, personal Google or Yahoo search engine that includes the sites of all your friends and personal network colleagues. If you ever need to link to an external article, search your friendgine first, and link to your friends if they have relevant content.

This is a subtle way to keep in contact. They’ll also likely reciprocate the favor. By creating these mini trust webs you’ll make it difficult for other people who haven’t established such relationships, to follow. You’ll have your own nepotistic closed circle

If you want to see a presentation on this topic, check out Aaron’s Beating The Big Guy

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Most advice on how companies should be listening to the social web with minimal cost involves monitoring individual services, which is inefficient.  Premium social media monitoring services do this much more effectively but can be expensive.  Here are 6 free social search tools that may help small businesses make their initial foray into searching the social web more productive while keeping costs to a minimum.  

Delver is a “socially connected” search tool in alpha, that is based on your friends influence on content, i.e. drawing upon the “wisdom of crowds” to filter the universe of search content. You first identify your social profiles and can then add more specific information to then identify your own social graph. Facebook is emphasized. Search results are then influenced by your network.  If Google ever buys Facebook then this service might be an attractive target.

WhosTalkin? not to be confused with “Who U Stalkin”, is a social media search tool by Joe Hall that allows users to search for conversations around topics of interest.  Queries are performed against all sources but you can search on specific social services organized by: Blogs, News, Networks, Videos, Images, Forums and Tags.  The list of practicing SEOs that beta tested this tool includes some genuine smarties so this one may be worth watching since saved searches, RSS feeds and other features found in the tools below are not yet rolled out.

Samepoint is a social conversation search engine that segments search by: Social Mentions, Discussion Points, Bookmarks, Wikis, Network,s B2B Networks, Groups, Life Casting, MicroBlogs, Reviews, Podcasts, Documents, Video, Images, News and Web or all.  Each search result extracts sentinment and keywords as well. In fact, there’s a trending social search term page which I think is very interesting.  The Discussion Points feature is interesting because it shows the most commented content in the search results according to your query and the number of sources.

socialmention allows you to search a term on specific categories of the social web including:  Blogs, Microblogs, Bookmarks, Comments, Events, Images, News, Video or All. There’s also a Social Rank score based on the number of mentions every 4 weeks and you can subscribe to search results via RSS.

Serph, from ACS, has been around for several years and searches on blog search engines, social news and bookmarking websites such as Bloglines, Digg, Google Blog Search, YouTube, Topix, Sphere, Yahoo Answers, Flickr and Delicious. Serph is a bit slow but can be useful to cross check queries with other services and you can subscribe to search results via RSS.

OneRiot is a bit like Delver in that it uses your social network to influence the search universe for your query but takes heavy consideration of what’s currently popular within your network when sorting search results.  Topics that are “emerging” or “surging” are indicated as such in the search results. OneRiot is alpha at the moment, but has promise.

Nearly all social media monitoring tools are keyword based and use some kind of crawler or data aggregator to harvest information and then various schemes to organize and sort as search results or monitoring reports.  Each social search tool has unique features, whether it’s crawling the social web at large or filtering by your network. One or more of the 6 tools above might be right for you to start tracking conversations about your company, brands and even your competition.

From a marketing standpoint, social search tools like those above create additional content and marketing opportunity discovery options for real-time situations, that most standard search engines can’t compete with.

There have been numerous efforts made with tools like Custom Google Search Engines, Yahoo Pipes and home grown programming to create low cost or free social search tools, but what other free tools have you found to be effective at searching multiple sources of social content on the web?

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