Kevin Ryan on Social Search

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Just as Eric and I were having an involved conversation about where search is headed now that everybody's tagging stuff, Kevin Ryan comes out with a nice piece on iMediaConnection.com that will give you the skinny on where things are headed. If you think about it, the Google currency has been built in part on inbound links, a concept which has been mostly fair and mostly accurate. What's the next step, accuracy-wise? Tallying the classifications that people who actually use the content give to it, and determining relevance appropriately.

Fortunately, this keeps the concept of a Google bomb workable. Just get everyone to tag a pic of President Bush with a "jerkwad" tag.

Claria Exiting Adware Business

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Linky-link. Full disclosure - Claria is a client of Underscore's (we handle their trade media on an ongoing basis and consulted for them a few years back.)

I did speak with Scott Eagle a few minutes ago, and he seems quite excited. However, there's an embargo so he hasn't told me anything I can really blog about. He did say things should become clearer next week, though.

Personally, I'm very excited and can't wait to learn more. Claria has some very exciting technology and I can't wait to help Scott and Claria market PersonalWeb and their company in general.

Solid Piece on Conversational Marketing

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Chas Edwards put out a great piece via Mediapost yesterday. I thik it speaks more to the participatory nature of things like group blogs and community sites, but it touches on a number of principles we've incorporated into our Conversational Marketing practice. (Oops, I've already said too much...) ;-) My favorite part:

Lenovo figured laptop buyers would have a greater inclination to buy a product they had a hand in designing. But instead of flying wannabe industrial designers to company headquarters at Raleigh, N.C., Lenovo set up a site that allowed buyers to vote for the color (black or titanium?) on the next line of ThinkPads. A small but significant step toward conversational marketing: the company gave its customers a mechanism to talk back. As I write this, 183,394 people have voted so far.

This example mirrors the one I've been talking about for years with DigiTech and the GSP-2101 Discussion List. In case I haven't mentioned it yet, that community was so persuasive that it ended up being the catalyst for a meta-language written by tech-savvy list members that allowed people to share programs and save them to external devices. Additionally, list members directly contributed feature ideas to future product releases. A customer has got to be pretty dedicated to pull off something like that.