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Aggregation is not a new concept for marketing professionals, but, it’s usage in Social Media is certainly a new buzz for them. As we understand from my previous post [on Social Media Marketing], the need to address this emerging market is fiercely felt. Companies are aggressively placing their marketing budgets to this newly created sphere.

In IT, we have been using aggregation in various forms. Drudge Report and The Huffington Post started the news aggregation while lots of other RSS feed readers started aggregating syndicated web content. These services played a big role in taking the web content easily to million of users who didn’t have time to browse websites one-by-one. After the social networking boom the next round of aggregation started in the form of Social Networking Aggregation. Lots of products / services were launched to cater this need. The new era on Internet is the era of Social Media. It has become the numero uno reason for browsing internet, surpassing the previous popular reason, porn. Plenty of social media sites are running and by each passing day it’s getting crowded more n more. Tracking each of these services is tough, hence, we need another form of aggregation, Social Media Aggregation.

Websites like Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, Identi.ca, Digg, Reddit has their own distinct features. Different set of people use these websites for different reasons. As a marketer I get a tough time when I try to track online presence of my brand across all these websites. In this scenario I would love to have an aggregator which can monitor all these social media websites and give me a consolidated report. ContextMine is one of such tools which does this aggregation. This market is also diverse in nature. For example, there are specific search engines to search content / messages floating on real time web. Collecta is one of those search engines.

Aggregated data which is contextual and real time, gives a real feel of your social reputation. Marketing professionals are already planning to utilize this domain, and owing to this need, there are plenty of services ready to cater. It would be interesting to watch out this space going forward.

In my last post, I talked about the power of information and how relevant information is still not a reality in web world. Taking that discussion forward, the next question is, if search engines are not providing relevant information, who does?  The answer is nobody does it at this point of time. But, there are many players who are working on this model, including Google. In third quarter of 2009, Google launched its real time search engine. While launching this new search they stated.

Search is a natural starting point for discovering the world’s information, and we strive to bring you the freshest, most comprehensive and relevant search results over an ever expanding universe of content on the multitude of devices you use to access it.

Our real-time search enables you to discover breaking news the moment it’s happening, even if it’s not the popular news of the day, and even if you didn’t know about it beforehand.

The point is, real time information may not be very popular but it’s relevant. There are many other players who are eyeing this market. Recently I was looking at a service socialmention. They have an interesting way to show search results. Along with real time search from across universe [that’s what they say]; they also show strength, sentiment, passion and reach of the searched object.

There is another service called whostalking. They have a different approach of showing search results. They categorize it with source. They have options like “Twitter”, “FriendFeed”, “Plurk”, “Wordpress”, etc. You can search your results from any of these sources.

If you look at many other small search engines, you will find they all are doing something innovative. They all are trying to grab a share of this emerging market. They all know – The Search Business is still open.

Around 26% of World’s population uses Internet and this phenomenon has grown 380% over last ten years. Billions of data are floating all over web but this technology is still into its beginning.  We all are moving in a high-tech society and those who have information will emerge as a winner. The concept is, Information is power – grab it as quickly as you can.

Information is power, true, but everybody doesn’t need everything available on internet. Digging into relevance, contextual information is the next step one needs to perform. Google, Yahoo, etc gives all the information you want for a specific topic but 90% of these results are not very useful. Also, they lack to provide categorical search.

For example, if I search for India in Google, it shows 42 billion results.

Do I need all of them? No – they all are not useful.

Then, how to get useful information out of it?

Can I have categorical information – something like, Sport, Politics, Business, etc?

When I search the same in WolframAlpha I get the knowledge related to India. Again, there’s nothing more than few statistical information. I tried this on search.twitter.com and all which I got was real time talks about India.  The point which I want to highlight is – they all are good in their own domain but users still don’t have lots of flexibility when it comes to internet search.

Going back to information – Internet is a major source. It has all the data we want but we do not have any tool to get relevant data out of it. Search Engines, Yes, they claim to crawl almost everything on Internet but that includes lots of junk data as well. They bring everything which they can. They can’t understand the context of search. Proactive search is something they simply don’t care to provide.

Recently we saw how Facebook surpasses Google as the most visited website on Internet. What does this mean? People are relying more on recommended information than searched information.

Does that give a signal of how Internet search is going to emerge in future?

Yes, it does. We need more social search than static search. We need to involve context with our search results. It could be in the form of region, interest, source, gender or any other broad category. We also need to provide this flexibility to users so that they can get data as they want. They should be able to configure their own search results.

Google is a giant in this business but going forward the power would shift to those who can provide relevant search, contextual search.

Aristotle had once said, “Humans are social animals”. True, it is our basic nature. We can’t survive outside society. To fulfill our different needs, we have different people in our society? The role based arrangement is well constructed. We deal with colleagues at office while we share our emotions with our friends, families. We need people for each stage of our life and we need them on a daily basis.

One of the blogs at computerworld starts as “Remember back in the day when we worked from 9-5, nights and weekends were reserved for friends and family, and never the twain shall meet?” It further says that “Now that an estimated 23% of American workers telecommute, many use online social networks as a way to stay connected to co-workers and colleagues. Those who are chained to a company desk often use (or sneak onto) Twitter or Facebook to stay in touch with friends outside of work.” It’s a clear indication that the way we network with people is changing. There are many tools which supports our growing demand of less time and more connection. This can be termed as the birth of new social connection, widely known as social media.

Ever since humans started getting the feel of civilization they started living in group, amongst people. There were several changes in the way of living but the basic nature of socializing never changed. It adopted new forms, new mediums and new flavor but essence remained same. Even today when we all feel the crunch of time we love to interact with friends, colleagues, families.

There’s a long research going on the need of socializing. Even the least of social people cracks under the pressure of bearing too much time alone. Why does that happen? What, scientifically, goes on inside a person’s body when they are alone for a prolonged amount of time, forcing them into insanity?

Why we crave to express our thoughts, emotions and ideas? Almost as if we crave to blossom our being among community. Why do we experience loneliness? Why is it that one cannot find contentment, joy, and happiness remaining alone?

These are some tough questions. Human beings have in evolutionary terms always been a ’social group’. Without having access to other humans or cultures we cannot be human. Language, cognition, emotion, self are all closely intertwined with other people and shaped through numerous interactions from birth throughout adulthood. A very large part of our brains for instance, is mainly concerned with social interaction. Sociality is a defining feature.

Human Web which is also known as six degrees of separation, refers to the concept which says, a person in one part of the world is connected to another person in another part of the world at max six levels of connections. It means a person A from India can reach to a person B in USA in just six steps. This cogitation sounds impressive.  Malcolm Gladwell explains this concept in his book, “The Tipping Point”. He says, “Six degrees of separation doesn’t mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few”.  He further adds, “People who introduce us to our social circle – these people on whom we rely more heavily than we realize – are connectors, people with a special gift for bringing the world together”.

The word “Six Degrees of Separation” is associated with an experiment of Stanley Milgram. Milgram was a famous American social psychologist. When he was at Harvard, He conducted an experiment called “Small World Experiment”. This experiment was a combination of several small experiments of social networks across USA. Milgram’s experiment developed out of a desire to learn more about the probability that two randomly selected people would know each other. This was one way of looking at small world problem; other alternative view was to imagine the population as social network and try to find out the average path length between two nodes. Milgram’s experiment was designed to measure these path lengths by developing a procedure to count the number of ties between any two people.

There are many critiques of this experiment and there are several experiments done after this. Though, Milgram’s experiment still tops the list. When we see these experiments in the context of marketing we realize that connecting to people is not that though. We just need to learn few basics like –

How people are connected to each other?

Factors which influence people?

Who are connectors?

How to become a connector?

Difference between Marketer and Connector?

When we take these basic to social media we get few more question.

How Social Media operates?

How Social Media influences people?

Role of connectors in Social Media?

Social Media as a Marketing Tool?

I’ll try to touch each of these questions in my series of posts on Social Media & Connectors.  Suggestions / Views / Comments are most welcome.