As I mentioned in my blog posts on Universal Search and Personalized Search, Google has been working on personalizing its search results utilizing social media and networking sites.

Google Social Search is meant to help searchers find the answers to their questions from their own social circle, a set of online friends and contacts they trust.  The idea is that content from your friends and social contacts is more likely to be relevant to you.

Google uses various sources to identify your connections and the relevant social search results such as:

• Direct connections (friends, family or coworkers) from your Google chat buddies and contacts from Gmail or Google Talk
• Direct connections from links listed on your Google profile such as Twitter, FriendFeed and LinkedIn
• Secondary connections that are publicly associated with your direct connections
• Posts from your Google Reader subscriptions

Google keeps updating your social graph every time you make changes to your connections.

Google Social Search

The social results only show up on search engine results pages when you are logged in to your Google account.  Currently the social search results for a particular search term is being listed at the bottom of the results page under “Results from people in your social circle” heading.  The content shown within Social Search is publicly available on the web through Google and other search engines. Social Search simply uses content from your social circle to provide a more personalized search results.

Here are some of the types of content you might see:

• Websites, blogs, public profiles, and other content linked from your friends’ Google profiles
• Web content, such as status updates, tweets, reviews, from social networks that your friends have listed in their Google profiles
• Images posted publicly from your social circle on Picasa Web
• Relevant articles from the RSS feeds you are subscribed to through Google Reader

The impact of social search on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be huge.  This means companies need to be more involved in attracting audience to their social profiles, get them subscribe to their RSS feeds or add them to their social bookmarking sites.

Since the introduction of Universal Search (aka Blended Search), search engine marketers have been considering optimizing videos to rank high on search engine results pages as part of their SEO efforts.

Some of the techniques SEO specialist use to optimize a video are:

• Using a keyword rich title for the video
• Tag video with relevant phrases
• Add a keyword-smart caption to the video
• Surround the video with relevant content
• Provide a transcript of the video content
• Generate links back to videos
• Add descriptive meta data to videos
• Allow comments on videos

In order to maximize viewership, Internet marketers use third party video hosting sites such as YouTube, Metacafe and Vimeo to publicise their videos.  However, the challenge with the video files has traditionally been the difficulty search engines have had with understanding and ranking the content.

The introduction of Youtube Auto-Captions can change the way video production and video SEO are done.  Google software engineers have developed a solution that uses speech recognition technology to automatically transcribe what is said in a video and add it to the video as a closed caption.

YouTube Video Captions and Subtitles

The goal of Youtbe captions is to make the videos more accessible not only to deaf people and viewers around the world who would like to translate the video in English to other languages, but also to search engines.   Google can use the same speech recognition technology used in captioning and adding subtitles to videos, together with their ranking algorithm, to analyze video content, index and rank them accordingly.

Of course machine generated caption texts are still far from accurate.  Currently, like any other speech recognition application, auto-captions require a clearly spoken audio track. Videos with background noise cannot properly be auto-captioned.

The challenges caption generators face are issues such as various languages, a massive vocabulary, people’s accents, poor audio recordings and background noises.

Video captions are generated for a limited number of Youtube videos automatically. However, video owners can are able to manually request their videos to be transcribed. Nevertheless, they need to check to make sure the captioned transcript is accurate.  This can be done to all past video files uploaded to Youtube.

There has been so many talks about social media and its impact on our society, businesses and marketing.  Here are some interesting stats on social media gathered by Erik Qualman the author of socialnomics.

Statistics presented in this video shows the amazing growth of social media websites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

According to eMarketer, Facebook will surpass MySpace in terms of ad revenue this year, with Facebook expected to bring in $605 million in ad revenue compared to $385 million that MySpace is expected to nab.  With such a phenomenal growth in audience and engagement metrics, there is no surprise many online marketers have their eye on Facebook.

Omniture and Facebook announced that they have teamed up to provide online marketers with tools that help them with media buying and optimization on Facebook making Facebook a stronger marketing channel.

The outcome of this partnership, which builds on the Facebook’s wealth of social media data and Omniture’s analytics capabilities, includes an automated media buying process as well as a single dashboard to plan, deliver, measure and optimize advertising campaigns. Utilizing Omniture’s toolset, marketers can compare Facebook Ad campaign metrics alongside their other media channels.

This tool empowers online marketers to better engage customers/prospects on Facebook and promote the most relevant content, marketing messages, products and services.

Omniture clients will also benefit from this new partnership as it helps them generate reports specifically designed to understand the effectiveness of their Ads for Facebook elements such as Facebook Pages and applications.

Twitter seems to have finally found a way to monetize its social media platform. Following their deals with Google and Microsoft to provide them with real time search, there are rumours that they are ready to launch their advertising platform.

Google has been long a believer of ad relevancy and they pioneered the concept of Quality Score to promote and reward the most relevant ads. Twitter seems to follow the footsteps of Google.   According to Twitter`s head of product management, they are planning to make the ads relevant and useful so that they are seamless and users do not think of them as ads. 

We have to wait and see if they can succeed in incorporating the ads in the tweets without negatively impacting user experience.

Social Media Consultant