You can always count on social to give us a development that leaves everyone wondering what this new flavor of the month will evolve into or lead to. The flavor of interest for this month appears to be Facebook’s newly announced Social Graph Search.
Most compelling is the wealth of social data Facebook has been able to accrue from willing users over the course of 8 years, and this new initiative to put that valuable data into play as a usable feature.
Facebook Social Graph Search lets a user enter a query such as “Friends who like Italian restaurants in New Orleans,” and get a list of friends (and friends of friends) who have engaged in some way around Italian restaurants in the Big Easy.
So there we have a much different algorithm at work than your friendly neighborhood Google or Bing search, which is keyword, link, and other SEO trickery-driven. Fueled mostly by social check-ins and Likes (at least for now), the power of trusted peer review and peer recommendation is now being surfaced in a quick and easy search function.
Facebook advertisers have long been able to target based on Likes, interests, etc., but soon the Facebook user base at large will be able to drill down and discover brands vetted and heralded by social connections who have nothing to gain by not telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
For brands who are strong in the quality of their products and services, and who largely generate happy, satisfied customers, this is really good news. It does nothing but further amplify the voice and influence of your social brand ambassadors. Fans you’ve already won over will lead new customers who are specifically looking for what you have to offer right to you.
On the other hand, detractors of brands will be equally amplified and influential. What once was mostly unutilized, obscure information will now be mined and put on display in the search results of relevant queries, good or bad.
This makes your brand’s mission to use every social relationship management tool and social engagement & moderation tool at your disposal to effectively generate the social satisfied customer, that raving fan who’ll gladly post they ate at your Italian restaurant in New Orleans and can’t wait to go back. That Like, that check-in, that tagged photo of their entrée will now be paying perpetual dividends search after search after search, rendering every social fan acquired a significantly bigger ROI proposition.
And then there’s the big data that can now be mined from Facebook’s legion of users and from the Social Graph Search queries themselves. Know who’s searching your product category, know where they are, know what time they’re looking for it, their demographic information, even their overall likes and interests. If you’ve constructed the socially enabled enterprise, that’s the kind of big data that can be pulled into the CRM, used to inform future marketing, content creation, sales, UX design, product development, etc.
It’s a new kind of big data, but it won’t be the last new big data source to present itself. Fortunately, you can have social fully integrated across the organization to fully capitalize on Social Graph Search, as well as the other data opportunities that no doubt lie just around the corner.
@mikestiles
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