Search is where it’s at

@CCSeed

The message that came through loud and clear last month at the New Marketing Summit was “search is where it’s at.”  

Yeah, but… Type a word into google and see what it serves up, right?  Wrong.  

For few weeks now I’ve been experimenting, asking questions and finding out that I’m not alone in needing to learn how to develop a “power search strategy.”   What I’m going to present here is not definitive nor are the tools I’m presenting necessarily the best.  What I’m trying to convey is simply an approach that can yield results over time.  

What’s your expertise?  What’s your niche?  How do you ensure that everything being published on those subjects passes through your browser?  What’s working for me is developing a strategy that utilizes detailed search, rss feeds of the results, and a reader that opens to new possibilities.   In the example presented, I use Google Blog Search and Google Reader.

My focus is Jungian psychology.  Thousands of books are in print on the subject, but the volume of information published in the blogosphere is not nearly as great.  By setting up a few focused searches I’m able to identify all that’s being written and published on the subject, and here’s the important part, as its being written. Note how that takes SEO out of the picture.  I can then visit the web sites, leave comments, build relationships.  Build community.  Build readership.  Build business.  

With two weeks of monitoring simple Jung and dream analysis searches I was able to identify six blogs that are now of import to me.  Today I realized it was time to go deeper and put to practice some of the tips I discovered over the last month.  In Jungian psychology there are certain key concepts, so I formulated a more advance search by stringing a series of terms together using the search term OR.  And using quotations I ensured phrasing integrity for certain terms.  The end search looks like this:

archetypes OR “transcendent function” OR “active imagination” OR “collective unconscious”     

This google blog search has fed seventeen new posts into my reader while writing this post and the initial results on the google blog search page offered five blogs that might be of interest.  Not everything is of value.  That’s where the sifting begins.  Like a fisherman who hauls up a net from the ocean, not everything will be taken to market, some stuff gets thrown back.     

Some takeaways:

The primary value: the content itself.  I learn more about what interest me, or at times, learn how mis-information is spread and how I might position myself to counter such issues. 

The secondary value: building community.  With Google Reader I can immediately click and link to any of the sites and participate through comments.  

The tertiary value: strengthening community.  I can share my valuable findings with those that subscribe to my shared reader feed or my FriendFeed account.   

It’s also important to recognize that similar searches can be set up in Twitter Search.  Try this: twitter search on a book you are reading.  Today I did this with “The War of Art” and was able to immediately connect with other twitter users currently reading the same book.   

Slowly I am getting to the place where I can claim that search is where it’s at.  Hope this moves you toward that place as well.  (Thanks to Chris Brogan for sharing his practice, so that others might be helped…)