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So: what comes after Google, in an online cosmos where online bookmarking and tagging and rating are booming, scaling up almost faster than we can comprehend...and where the visual is the new king?
This week Thomson/Reuters announced a hint of what’s to come: a “cloud” search result for all text relationships to reportage of a given news event.
Thomson Reuters has partnered with Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society to launch the Media Cloud, a set of research tools for tracking online media coverage. The joint effort is meant to bring some clarity to the vast tangle of news and information on the Web, attempting to answer questions about what types of stories are covered by which media sources, where stories begin, and how blogosphere coverage compares to that of the mainstream media.
As reported in Mediapost.com, TR and the Berkman media wonks at Harvard set themselves an interesting problem: which “drives” news, the blogosphere or the mainstream media? And how best to visualize the results?
Well, fellow doughheads, take a gander for yourself at the Mediacloud website. TR's Big Heads realized a graphical representation of the momentum of a story is far more valuable to grasping what’s actually happening than a simple Google-based hierarchical “blue-underlined” page result, the PageRank result we all know and love.
That’s relevance. That’s engagement.
At Fresh Baked, we’re convinced that relevance is everything in creating engaging content. We spend a fair bit of our time not only in building relationships with our clients and assembling new comedy strategies but also in parsing what our clients are really telling us.
Here’s one HUGE client-side message: how is the audience going to find your work for us?
Google is failing, incrementally, in answering this question. Why? Because although Google is “aware” of a Milky Way’s worth of URLs [over a trillion now, and counting] but the algorithms stand literally zero chance of actually indexing this supernova of information.
Ladies and gentlemen, social network analysis is the Next Big Enchilada: analysis of the network of networks of people who are totally connected to each other.
To understand what this means is not only to understand the meaning of search post-Google but to grasp the very guts of marketing itself.
Why, you ask? Because, just like search—the science of information retrieval on the web—marketing is all about cognitive psychology, language, statistics and relevance, relevance, relevance.
Problem is, web search was never conceived for the commercial and visual medium the web now indisputably is.
Tapping graphically into the “search wisdom of crowds”—just as ThomsonReuters/Berkman’s MediaCloud has done—is to begin to understand how web search must evolve new “tools of engagement,” without which the new signals we humans are sending one another—the online multi-voice dialogue around user-generated content, from photo-sharing to video—the web will be so much…noise.
Point is, Fresh Baked thinks the future of marketing on the web isn’t so much about clicks…but about cliques.
More on that next time, doughheads. Meantime, want some great further reading?
Download The Economist's superb insight about marketing strategies in These Difficult Times. Now: it's terrific.
Be well.