From Search to Share: How Google can win in Social Age

Google is one of the great success stories of internet age. Given its mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, it has achieved remarkable success by focusing on search results and monetizing clicks. But Google’s revenue model is under threat in the age of Social Media. Facebook recently surpassed Google in the US to become the most visited website (for more, see this and this).

Google should shift its strategy from Search to Share, to continue its dominance in the Social Age as people are more likely to pay attention to content from those they trust rather than ones suggested by search engines.

What should Google do to continue its dominance in the Social Age? Think outside the box, “Search” box that is! Google has done a great job focusing on its core competency of indexing content on the web and displaying most relevant search results without any “noise” or “clutter” on the screen. And this is what made Google so popular in the first place.

But this strategy of indexing web content and displaying most relevant search results will no longer work in Social Age as users rely more on Social Media channels and less on search engines to get relevant information. Google should shift its strategy from Search to Share, to continue its dominance in the Social Age as people are more likely to pay attention to content from those they trust rather than ones suggested by search engines.

Google should up the ante on Facebook by introducing “Social Plugins” that will help collect, index and display content based on Social links. And this transformation from Search to Share involves thinking outside the Search box.

Facebook recently introduced some great changes to its service in order to leverage the power of Open Graph and “create a smarter, personalized web that gets better with every action taken” (for more, see Mark Zuckerberg’s blog post here). Google should up the ante on Facebook by introducing “Social Plugins” that will help collect, index and display content based on Social links. And this transformation from Search to Share involves thinking outside the Search box.

I want to end this post by sharing with you this great CNBC Video titled Inside the Mind of Google that explains very well Google’s success story. Enjoy the video!

Hello there! You might also want to subscribe to the RSS feed or subscribe via eMail for updates on this blog.

Social Media: The New Front End of CRM System Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems have undergone a fascinating technological transformation over the last decade, starting as client-server apps, followed by web-enabled CRM apps (where...
Cognitive Surplus: Implications for Social CRM Clay Shirky is one of the leading thinkers on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies and is well known for his talks on...
How to Be a Social Media Change Agent Excellent video on how to be a Social Media change agent, an interview with Josh Bernoff, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research. Although...
Cognitive Surplus and Social Business: Win-Win Strategy Social Networking technology has made it incredibly easy and inexpensive for people to collaborate and work together irrespective of their physical location. Given the proliferation...
Social Media and future of Advertising What is the future of advertising in Social Age? Well, we may get as many different answers as the number of Social Media gurus and...