Keynote: Charlene Li, How to Prepare for the Future of Search

Aug 13, 2009 - 12:00 pm 0 by

Below is live coverage of the Keynote: Charlene Li, How to Prepare for the Future of Search from the SES San Jose 2009 conference.

This coverage is provided by Barry Schwartz of the Search Engine Roundtable & Gaurav Sharma of Think Mantra.

We are using a live blogging tool to provide the real time coverage. You can interact with us and while we are live blogging, so feel free to ask us questions as we blog. We will publish the archive below after the session is completed.

Keynote: Charlene Li, How to Prepare for the Future of Search(08/13/2009) 
8:54 Barry Schwartz:  We are starting in about 5 minutes
8:55
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9:04 Barry Schwartz:  Still waiting for them to start this off...
9:05 Barry Schwartz:  Meanwhile, I had a nice kosher meal last night, more details on that at my personal blog http://www.cartoonbarry.com/2009/08/kosher_near_googleplex_mountai.html
9:06 Barry Schwartz:  Li Evans introduces this keynote.
9:07 Barry Schwartz:  Charlene Li is now up
9:08 Barry Schwartz:  She is talking about the future of search, of course, she goes back to the past
9:08 Barry Schwartz:  She shows a screen shot of Google's search results for a search

And now she shows the google search results page now, with universal search, much richer experience.
9:09 Barry Schwartz:  She said this didnt happen over night (well, maybe, they did launch universal search in one day and it flipped over, but there was one box, etc.)
9:09 Barry Schwartz:  She then shows off Bing's table of context on the left hand side.
9:09 Barry Schwartz:  Now future time...
9:10 Barry Schwartz:  People are connecting online and that allows people to use social technologies to get what they want from other people. "Groundswell" is a book that explains this.
9:11 Barry Schwartz:  She shows the united breaks guitar video
9:11
9:12 Barry Schwartz:  As you see, it ranks in the first page on a search for united in Google http://www.google.com/search?q=united&pws=0&hl=all
9:12 Barry Schwartz:  People need to be at the middle or center of your search strategy, not keywords
9:13 Barry Schwartz:  If relevancy is the big goal, connecting content, user internt and ads
9:14 Barry Schwartz:  Today, search engines today cannot make sense of social sites b/c it might be behind a wall and it is normally a bunch of links
9:15 Barry Schwartz:  She showed an example of the Starbucks Coffee Company Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/Starbucks
9:15 Barry Schwartz:  They did a campaign where they donate and then if you take part of it, your friends see it
9:16 Barry Schwartz:  Facebook now allows search on a specific post
9:17 Barry Schwartz:  "Real time web" i.e. Twitter has a lot of power in those tweets, but what is the value?
9:18 Barry Schwartz:  Understanding User Intent:
- Social networks will be like air, she said
9:18 Barry Schwartz:  The social graph will follow us where we need them to be, they follow us around
9:19 Barry Schwartz:  For example, the iPhone, Google Maps allows you to "search nearby"
9:19 Barry Schwartz:  or even "search on route" or change your search results based on "time of day"
9:20 Barry Schwartz:  How would this change if i integrate the social graph to see places with my friends' reviews? how cool would that be. What if you can find out where your friends are eating right now...
9:20 Barry Schwartz:  What if you can see the reviews at Amazon, but the reviews of your friends. How useful would that be?
9:23 Barry Schwartz:  This gives you a way to target ads in a new way, based on their social graph and behvaior
9:24 Barry Schwartz:  Media 6 http://www.media6degrees.com/ identifies who is closest to you, in your network neighborhood
9:25 Barry Schwartz:  They know person A buys from store X, so they want to find person A's friends and see if they also buy at store X and then show related ads.
9:27 Barry Schwartz:  Then we might seee the rise of personal based CPC and CPM

imagine google charging a CPC not based only on auction, but based on the person who clciks...
9:29 Barry Schwartz:  She said we have a lot of targeting in search engines, like geo, time, etc. but she said, wouldnt it be nice to add demographic, behavioral, social graphs (well, we do have demo)
9:31 Barry Schwartz:  How do you prepare for this?

Focus on the people, build the relationship (obama is a great example of this during his campaign).
9:31 Barry Schwartz:  How do you build the relationship? Well, it depends on the type of relationship you want to build.
9:31 Barry Schwartz:  Goals define your strategy....
9:31 Barry Schwartz:  Learn from your audience, what are they saying, listen to them and learn from them.
9:31 Barry Schwartz:  Start a dialog and then help them and then innovate with them
9:34 Barry Schwartz:  Listen? How do you do it? Use blog search, also search twitter, also look at delicious, etc. Some paid tools include a tool from Radiant 6.
9:35 Barry Schwartz:  Oracle changed their home page with a page that said "oracle listens" and asks their customer to give them feedback
9:39 Barry Schwartz:  Engagement pyramid: It starts at the bottom with "watchers," then comes those that "Share" information, then comes "commentors," then come the "producers" the content creators, then the very top is "curators." Curators are responsible for making a community and they cannot function without the community. They can be an employee or a customer, but they are deeply engaged in the product or service.
9:40 Barry Schwartz:  Most people want to start at the top, "curators." but that is wrong. You should start at the bottom, you need to.
9:40 Barry Schwartz:  How do you encourage customers to go through this pyramid process?
9:40 Barry Schwartz:  Many sites have "sharing" buttons to enable people to share products with others
9:41 Barry Schwartz:  Look through your pages, and see where you can add sharing features.
9:42 Barry Schwartz:  Southwest airlines had a blog post that they are now in a new city, so people commented on the blog saying thanks and aksing them to come to other cities.
9:43 Barry Schwartz:  Twitter can be used to drive sales, example Twitter http://twitter.com/delloutlet
9:44 Barry Schwartz:  It is not just a push out of a sales brochure or flyer, DellOutlet replies to customers and prospects ... happier customers.
9:46 Barry Schwartz:  When comcast goes down, she tweets to the comcast cares account on Twitter
9:46 Barry Schwartz:  Comcast is looking for tweets about comcast and reaches out to people who complain about comcast
9:48 Barry Schwartz:  Idea sharing, like MyStarbucksIdea.com -- Google Moderator is a tool that does this, Yahoo has tools like this tool. It is a great way to handle ideas, feature requests, etc.
9:50 Barry Schwartz:  Once you build those relations, the next step is...
9:50 Barry Schwartz:  Get your backend data in order through a single database, a CRM app, etc.
9:51 Barry Schwartz:  You need to integrate this data and then short it by the level of influence that person has
9:52 Barry Schwartz:  Citysearch partnered with Facebook and integrated the login with them.
9:54 Barry Schwartz:  She shoes a search for "family vacation," then does a query on "cruise" but she said it didnt figure out that she wants a family cruise, cause of previous query.

SORRY - Charlene is wrong, Google does take previous query into account.

Hmm, then she might have said Google does do this, so maybe she backed out of that...
9:54 Barry Schwartz:  The question is, how good is your data?
9:55 Barry Schwartz:  Last thing is to give up control if you are going into this space.
9:56 Barry Schwartz:  You cannot control relationships. It is built over time.
9:56 Barry Schwartz:  That is all folks... In 30 minutes, we have more live blog sessions.
9:57
 

 

 

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