Musings from GroupM: What's Your Share of Expressed Intention? - Chris Copeland - MediaBizBloggers

In preparation for this column, I asked the head of my research team to find a few data points about the difference between true search engines and places where people can not only search but perform other functions as well.

The subject line for his reply was, "Top 'Search' Properties." His response provided some of the data I'll cover in this column, but it also highlighted a major challenge we now face in the search space.

Take a look at the chart below from comScore for top "search" properties, noting the volume on sites beyond the Big Three engines:

Observers might not question the volume, but they could certainly question the worth of queries coming from some of these locations.

In essence, what we are facing in search marketing is a challenge of users expressing intent off search engines and, as such, a murky understanding of just how valuable and strong that intent is. Should we devote more time to YouTube since it outpaces Bing and Yahoo in searches done? Or does YouTube simply contain far more searching for fuzzy kittens and queries void of deep interest to the consumer and advertisers alike?

Even so, if nontraditional venues are garnering more attention and inherently building search into the mix, it changes a great deal for us. Take a recent string of queries from a B2B client around search. For years this client has focused its paid efforts on maneuvering around the category leader. In some cases this involved always being on when the No. 1 player was present, and in other cases it meant looking for specific opportunities to buy when competition didn't exist to differentiate. Now the client is asking about optimizing documents created for the Amazon Kindle store to show up in a prominent location when general searches were taking place.

Additionally, the client's content manifests itself in extensions of traditional brand campaigns complete with white papers, videos and even content disseminated to third party sites. In each of these cases, presence is a guarantee of nothing. Being there does not equal being found, and as such, an extension of SEO continues to manifest itself. Over the past year we have seen a stark shift where optimizing assets for non-traditional search experiences has moved from being a subset of SEO to being a category of solutions of which SEO is a part.

We call the approach we take to properly assess, develop, align, optimize and distribute brand-owned elements (video, images, text, press, website) to wherever consumers are searching "Owned Media Management." Over the past two years I've heard both Kevin Lee and Gord Hotchkiss speak about Google as a verb and the challenges that come with the ubiquitous nature of search and association to the dominant player. But for all of that talk – and there is a lot of truth to what they've said – the challenge facing marketers is much broader than just Google and it is happening less and less on the desktop and on a search engine.

Consumers express their intention throughout the digital graph, and our ability to position brands as a proper response is the key to success for advertisers. Today we focus on how much share of voice we can buy in traditional search locations. Every year, studies come out showing the lack of success major brands have in the SEO realm. This bodes ill if they are to take the premise of this column forward into their business. Because whether you consider YouTube or Facebook a "search" property or not, the reality is consumers expression of intent is being facilitated through searching and selection on every major site from FourSquare to Twitter to Digg.

The brand opportunity is no longer determining how a brand lives and is found through the sole volume of Google or the full search engine landscape. Rather, the opportunity for brands exists in a broader, more complex group of sites with vastly different approaches to optimization and exposure. The brands that invest in Owned Media Management will be the ones that get out ahead of this and enjoy the same advantages that some brands experienced in paid search circa 2005 and before. Because where audiences search and how we classify those sites matter far less than connecting that intent with your content in the moment.

Chris Copeland is CEO of GroupM Search for the Americas. Chris can be reached at chris.copeland@groupm. You can also follow Chris on Twitter @SearchBoss.

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