Some of the results of Google’s move into social search (called “Search, plus Your World”) are already clear. Local business searches, for example, will become more reliant on recommendations from the people you follow in Google+. Knowing that a friend has used a local florist or restaurant will help reinforce a search engine ranking result.

Other implications are less immediately obvious, since this is the first time that social media and search, the two major silos of the digital world, have been integrated in such a seamless way. Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land argues that Google might have compromised the neutrality of its search results by playing favourites with Google+.

Google’s social search will continue to evolve, but this collapse of the digital world will require companies that rely on search marketing to start moving to a centrally planned, multichannel approach to content marketing. Until now, social media has generally been treated as a separate but parallel marketing strategy for B2B lead generation. Google’s new approach will require businesses to ensure their SEM and social media strategies intersect and intertwine or risk losing visibility. At the same time, this shift will also reinforce the value of a distributed community strategy.

Without a two-fold approach, B2B companies that optimize around keywords may find their current search strategies far less effective. Successfully adapting your business to social search will require you to:
• Maintain organic search visibility through new, granular approaches to keywords
• Conduct ongoing experiments to determine the right amount of strategic content required for Google+ to maintain traffic levels
• Look for new digital customer narratives by tracking conversion paths such as:

Google search –> Google+ content –> your company website.

So, for example, if your company specializes in cloud computing you might need to take a careful look at the content marketing assets that currently reside on your website. Do you have existing blog posts that can be adapted for use on Google+ in order to drive more traffic to popular landing pages? Are there certain aspects of the implementation process that would benefit from further discussions with your Google+ followers? You might also post a key diagram from a white paper as a teaser that will encourage potential customers to fill out a form and download the entire PDF document.

Is your business unsure about how to create and measure strategic social content for Google+? Are you trying to determine the optimum content mix to ensure your Google+ page matches your intended customer experience activities? Drop us a line and sign up for a webinar on January 30 on how to measure and plan for the impact of Google’s social search strategy.

Image credit: Sean MacEntee

To help sort out the Facebook likes from the Google+s, our sister company Environics recently hosted a panel discussion entitled The B2B Social World with Ryan Poissant of MaRS, Samantha Morris of Backup Heroes, Rob Maurin of Wave Accounting and Amrita Chandra from Sequentia Environics.

Check out the event on YouTube, including insights such as:

• Why Google+ might be an overlooked but effective B2B tool
• How Facebook can be used to improve intercompany communication
• When to use a blog to establish thought leadership

What social media channels have successfully met your particular B2B needs? Feel free to share with us some of your recent experiences.

I’d like to introduce a new feature you will start seeing regularly on our blog – where we share with you the tools, website and media that Sequentians are using at work and at play.   Consider it a more personal look at the digital space we live in.

Who: Buyosphere

What: A website self-described as “People Helping People Shop”.  Essentially, it’s a site where you can share your purchases or your “wishlists” with people you choose to connect with on Buyosphere.

Where: I use it mostly on my desktop – there is a button you can drop into your toolbar so you can add products to Buyosphere easily.   There is currently no iPhone app which doesn’t feel like a hindrance to me since I normally don’t surf for products on my mobile.  But if you do, you will probably not like their mobile experience.

When: I started using Buyosphere months ago in another incarnation – they have since gone through a rebrand and some product updates which has made it easier to use.  I now see it as something I would use once or twice a week as I am surfing the web, perhaps more around the holiday shopping season.

Why: I use it in a couple of ways – mostly, to keep a wishlist of things I want to purchase.  I often browse the web for products that I am not ready to buy and this helps catalogue my finds using a very visual  interface.  It’s also a cool way to discover other products that people I follow have either purchased or wish to purchase.  For example, I found some holiday gift ideas for my extended family by seeing what other similar people have bookmarked in Buyosphere.

I do find parts of the UI a little clumsy, especially around editing product information, and I would not use it to send in my receipts and track purchase history, as they suggest. I also wonder if I will continue to use it in the long run as one more digital channel to manage or get social network fatigue.

The takeaway: Whether or not this is something that appeals to you, it is a great example of how buying behaviour is changing; it’s no longer about just typing something into Google and finding the top results, which nowadays can often be the most SEO-friendly sites and not necessarily the best sites for you.  It’s about seeing what people in your network are recommending, which has more influence than what a company says about their own products.

What do you think?  Would you use Buyosphere?  What social shopping sites do you use, if any?  And yes, if you feel like purchasing that Ned Pratt photograph for me, please go ahead!

Hosted by Environics Communications, this invitation-only event is an open conversation among experts who operate in the trenches, sharing their stories and advice on what does and doesn’t work when it comes to social media engagement for more agile B2B technology-focused companies. Come join the conversation.

The Panel

• Ryan Poissant – Senior Advisor, IT, Communications & Entertainment (ICE) Practice at MaRS
• Rob Maurin – Community and Marketing Manager, Wave Accounting
• Samantha Morris – Community Manager, Backup Heroes
• Amrita Chandra – Vice President, Marketing, Sequentia Environics

The conversation will be moderated by Andrew Berthoff, Senior Vice President of the Technology Practice at Environics Communications.

Where it’s happening

MaRS Discovery District

101 College Street

Room CR-3

Toronto, ON M5G 1L7

How to let us know you’re coming

RSVP by October 28^th, 2011 to Kyla Kryski KKryski@environicspr.com or call her at 416.969.2729

At Sequentia, you’ll work with a super smart team of community and content strategists, writers, developers, and client services consultants. Your amazing people and communication skills will be put to work managing active communities and developing new community strategies.

Skills and experience required:

• 2-3 years active online community management/moderation (experience with forum-based communities is a plus)
• Strong familiarity with social media concepts and current events
• Strong familiarity with common social media platforms (blogs, forums, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, etc)
• Strong writing skills in English (French is an asset)
• Light HTML/CSS (for example ability to properly format blog posts)
• Familiarity with the Lithium and vBulletin platforms is a plus
• Familiarity with Enterprise software is a plus

Sequentia is located in a funky office space near Queen and Spadina in beautiful downtown Toronto. Sequentia has a unique and supportive culture. We’re smart people, working hard, and making a difference.

If this sounds like you, please get in touch

What you’ll do:

• Gathering qualitative data through Advanced Google search and tools such as Sysomos and Scout Labs.
• Assisting in qualitative interviews and coding interview data.
• Working with the Strategy and Research team to analyze data and develop insights.
• Analyzing and reporting on quantitative research.

What you’ll have:

• Academic degree;
• Past experience in online qualitative research;
• Proven ability to effectively manage your time and deliverables;
• An eye for accuracy and attention to detail;
• Hands-on mentality;
• Experience using advanced Google search;
• Excellent communicative and written skills in English;
• Experience using Social Media Monitoring Tools is a plus.

If this sounds like you, please get in touch with your resume and references.

Brands that tap into the emotional drivers of their audience have a definite advantage over their more rational, Spock-like competitors. We have seen proof of this time and again with brands that develop nearly identical products yet experience dramatically divergent success rates: Nike vs. Reebok, Dell vs. Apple and Red Bull vs. any other energy drink on the market.

I also witnessed this firsthand while conducting competitive research on three major car manufacturers: Kia, Mazda and Volkswagen. I was interested in finding out how their social programs stacked up, expecting to see Mazda and Volkswagen take the lead history in connecting with their audience and making their brands culturally significant. Instead I found the opposite.

All three competitors have social programs that span the usual suspects of social platforms (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs), they all run regular contests and sweepstakes and are all fairly engaged with their audience. But Kia was mentioned over three times as often as any other competitor and had far more on-platform engagement, despite having less than half of the reach of a brand like VW. Why? The reason appears to be that Kia was the only brand that did an effective job of tying their content strategy, contests and brand messaging to the emotions and motivations of their audience.

Kia’s brand attributes hinge on environmentalism and social responsibility. This resonates loud and clear throughout every piece of online content and contest. Social content that touches on these attributes, connecting with the emotions of their audience, receives the highest amounts of participation and engagement. Kia has managed to outshine their much larger, older and well-known competitors by understanding the emotional drivers of their audience (what makes them tick, what they care about) and then developing social and content strategies that align with these values. It’s not brain surgery but it can have a big impact on driving social engagement and relationships.

Are you currently planning content or social strategies? Are they aligned with the emotions and motivations of your audience?

Image credit: Oddsock

Sequentia Environics, a digital marketing agency with a focus on building online communities and generating leads, is looking to find a Designer with strengths in front-end web design and general graphic design for ongoing freelance work. At Sequentia, we help clients like HP, The Globe and Mail, Bell, and Microsoft turn their audiences into their communities.

At Sequentia, you’ll work with a super smart team of community and content strategists, writers, developers, and client services consultants. Your design skills will be put to work on a variety of internal and client projects, ranging from info graphic design to illustration to PowerPoint decks to web design.

Skills required:

* Strong familiarity with PowerPoint. Yes, PowerPoint. Keynote too, but mostly PowerPoint
* High degree of expertise with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop or equivalent
* Good working knowledge of HTML and CSS – hand coded, preferably
* Highly organized and able to manage multiple deadlines
* 3-5+ years design experience

Sequentia is located in a funky office space near Queen and Spadina in beautiful downtown Toronto. Sequentia has a unique and supportive culture. We’re smart people, working hard, and making a difference.

If this sounds like you, please get in touch with your resume and a link to your online portfolio.

As a Junior Content Developer, you’ll get to work with and learn from some of the best and brightest minds in the brave new content marketing landscape. Your days will be filled with writing, editing, interviewing and researching, while helping to execute highly effective content marketing strategies. We’re doing some cool stuff with content, and we need your help.

Skills required:

• Strong writing and editing, ideally with a background in journalism or PR
• Familiarity and interest with social media tools and networks
• Relentless attention to detail
• Highly organized and able to manage multiple deadlines
• Passion for development of audience profiles and editorial calendars

You’ll be working with us in our funky office space near Queen and Spadina in beautiful downtown Toronto. Sequentia has a unique and supportive culture. We’re smart people, working hard, and making a difference.

If this sounds like you, please get in touch with your resume and a link to your online portfolio.

Traditional marketing approaches fall short in the new customer landscape

The answers are clear: marketing has fundamentally changed and many in the profession are struggling to catch up. The framework by which they understand marketing is not set up for a non-campaign world where they don’t control timelines, only experiences. The so-called sales funnel, if that was ever an accurate metaphor, no longer looks even remotely like a funnel.

Companies are used to viewing the sales and marketing process as a systematic approach of between seven and nine steps that begin with initial contact and push the potential customer through sales lead, need identification, prospect qualification and so on through to closing the sale and then maintaining the customer relationship.

But that is how sales and marketing teams structure the selling process. The buying process, from the customer’s perspective, is nothing like that. This how buying more accurately works now in the era of social media and online communities:

It is a complex process with multiple stops and starts and options, and each potential customer will move through in unique ways (although in aggregate, demonstrating certain patterns of behaviour). It is linear in that any two sales will end in the same result, but no two routes to that sale are the same. The same is true for any type of engagement decision (i.e. join an email list, follow on Twitter)

The best marketers can hope to do in this environment is manage the process so that, while all roads may not lead to Rome, eventually all roads lead through digital “toll booths” of content and information exchange.

Why don’t most marketing organizations view that process as a coherent customer narrative? There are three reasons:

1. Marketing is structured around campaigns, not customers
2. Marketers don’t measure a linked sequence of customer actions across all touchpoints yet—they still think in terms of pre-sale post-sale, not a relationship that can last a lifetime
3. Marketers have been determined to control the narrative, rather than create digital touchpoints of content and experience, and then measuring how people interact with those touch points

How the new customer narrative works

There are many ways a future customer can first engage with a potential purchase, whether it’s a new pair of shoes or a new VPN. It could be a billboard with a URL that they type into their smart phone’s mobile browser, or by clicking a Facebook wall post from a friend’s feed, or searching on Google. These are all examples of entry points to a research experience that could initiate a longer relationship with the brand: a relationship that begins with the brand getting permission to communicate more and progresses toward one sale and possibly many.

What happens between those start and end points is where it gets complicated, and are almost never connected, especially when activity begins through a discussion in social media or an online community.

Consider an online relationship with a customer where she makes two appliance purchases over 4 years, and twice shares content.

Today, those start and end points are not connected. By setting up measurement beacons that customers interact with, we can understand what each digital customer narrative looks like. And by shaping these experiences with content and the addition of community engagement, the context and experience of research and customer care is measurable from the first interaction and throughout the relationship. In this context, the true measure of influence is how many people take up your shared content.

If you have unlimited marketing budgets and don’t care how they’re spent, then maybe this approach won’t matter to you. But if you’re a results-driven marketer with limited resources who wants to really understand how each part of the marketing mix contributes to progression via either relationship and/or sales conversions, parallel but intersecting tracks that must both be viewed and measured in order to understand customer buyer and audience dynamics.

This ties directly into small movement marketing: by measuring how people progress and move through digital properties we can quickly see which marketing investments are performing and which are not.

In my next post re-examining the sacred cows of marketing, I’ll take a look at the role of content in measuring small movement marketing, and why it’s not the message or—gasp!—even the copy that matters most anymore, but utility. In our final installment, I’ll examine how you manage brand in a completely fragmented media world of vastly shifting customer expectations.

This article first appeared on Marketing Profs.