What a Fantastic night at the first ever joint event for AiMA & SEMPO: Social Impact on Search. It is always a good night when I have the chance to see Dave Williams and other 360i alumni! Aside from having the opportunity to hob-knob with the Atlanta search high society, this event was very informative and eye opening. I also won a really cool Google jacket!

Held at the Park Tavern in Midtown Atlanta the lightning and severe thunderstorm did upstage the speakers just a bit at the beginning. But all in all, once things finally got going the panel of speakers handled the lightning, power outages and malfunctioning slide shows like seasoned champs.

The esteemed panel included Mike Ching: Principal Program Manager / Social Development Engineer from Bing; Walton Norris: Account Manager, +1 Evangelist from Google and Bert DuMars: VP E-Business and Interactive Marketing from Newell Rubbermaid.

It is always a pleasure hearing Mike Ching speak at events, his witty banter with Google rep Walton Norris was hilarious. Mike is so well natured and it is always refreshing to be in the presence of greatness. I like that he does not take himself too seriously. And while Walton had many interesting things to say about Google, social media and Google’s new +1, the real star of the show was Mike and Bing Social Search.

Bing really got the one up on Google this time. The partnership that Bing has forged with Facebook merging search and social media is huge. I predict this will absolutely show a change in respect to Bing’s market share and we will see more folks using Bing specifically for the types of searches where reviews or others opinions are important. Check out the Bing Social page for more info. Below are two of my clients that I have included as examples of what Bing’s Social Search looks like.

So you may be asking yourself, what does this mean and more importantly what does this mean for my business? The short answer is: It means that the opportunities to catapult your website and business to the forefront are here. But you need to jump now!

This article is the beginning of a multi-part series touching on the aspects of how to take advantage of Social Search and why it’s important.

Briefly I want to touch on a few topics that have sprung from the Social Search discussion:
Why does seeing the preferences of others have such an emotional pull on web search? When we are searching, whether it is for information or dinner, seeing that others have taken the time to put their “stamp of approval” on the site by “liking” it or “+1-ing” it, gives the site automatic credibility. The mob mentality has been a reality that marketers have been taking advantage of since the beginning of time. This is no different; we are just now able to truly apply the mob mentality to search.

What better way to begin to wade through all of the irrelevant sites that slip through the algorithmic cracks than to see an endorsement from your friend. And just like that your sites’ click through rate has just improved exponentially!

What does this all mean for local and mobile search? This will be the greatest impact for my clients in particular. Previously some businesses could get away with not having a website because all of their business was generated locally. Now with social search and mobile search it will be imperative to remain competitive for local businesses to have a website as well as run social media campaigns.

I will be discussing both of these topics in future installments.

In summary, again a great event put on by Dave Williams at BLiNQ Media, AiMA & SEMPO and we certainly all have a lot to talk about!

Nancy Roberts is the founder and Chief Strategist at Jump Marketing.
Twitter: @nancyaroberts
Facebook: Jump Marketing