Technorati, Google and Influence 2.0

The blog world has been praising Technorati for their relaunch today. Google launched its Universal Search last week. Both events share a common impetus: the realization that the form of content is irrelevant to the searcher.

Technorati has done a nice job with the redesign -- if you haven’t seen it yet, take a look a look.  But the real changes here are much more significant. Your first page of results now includes listings from blogs, visual media and audio sites all on the same page. Tabs across the top let you drill down to view just posts, blogs, videos, photos, music and events.   

With this new approach, Technorati has acknowledged that social media is much bigger than blogs.  This move was foreshadowed back in April when Technorati’s David Sifry changed the name of his “State of the Blogosphere” report to the “State of the Live Web” to represent a wider array of rich social media content. 

You might also have seen the launch of Google’s new “universal search” redesign last week. Google is now blending content from their multiple databases, so with one search query you can now view results from their web archive, blogs, news, books, maps, local, etc.

Bringing together a wide variety of media forms that are relevant to a search is certainly a step in the right direction for these two companies. But it till falls short of users' needs. 

Technorati is still hoping people think “I need to check social media for that” when they are doing a search.  In addition, without any connection to the traditional media web, Technorati’s users are only looking at half the picture.

Google adds search across "traditional Internet" web archive with Google News. But each form of media is still siloed in a different tab. Google is giving you more options, but they are still forcing you to think about your search through a different lens each time. The onus is on the user to draw the connections between these disparate forms of data.

And none of them provide any view into the vast amount of offline data that, for all the growth of the Internet, still accounts for the vast amount of consumer media consumption.

While this may be sufficient for the average consumer looking for the best digital camera to buy, marketers and communications professionals who are trying to wrap their arms (and minds) around this exploding world of content still need more. They need help drawing connections between all the articles, posts, videos, and podcasts about their brands. They need to distill this into a holistic view of how their brand is perceived, how engaged consumers are with it, and what threats are in the wings to undercut it. They need to understand the paths this influence takes so they can allocate their budgets most effectively.

Just about a year ago, Cymfony launched our vision of the Influence 2.0 world where tradtiional and social media fluidly influence each other -- and consumers seamlessly mash-up bits of information with no regard to whether it is traditional or social; text, audio or video; a well-known media brand or the latest viral sensation.

We continue to expand on our vision of Influence 2.0, and it is a continuing work-in-progess as new types of media evolve and consumer behavior continues its evolution. We're glad to see these other leaders validate a principle that is at Cymfony's core!