The tug of war between trust and discovery

What is ‘a trusted source of information’ for you nowadays? If you’re in the majority, it’s a close friend or family member – someone in your social network who you can rely on to filter facts through an intelligent viewpoint and root out the interesting and relevant stuff. That’s the principle behind Google’s Social Search, launched this week.

The idea is that Google scrape the WOM from your contacts on the likes of FriendFeed and Twitter – any account you’re willing to add to your Google profile – to get their take on whatever you’re looking for. It’s a big step in the right direction for those of us who use our relationships with others as our chief filter in the great untamed wilderness of social media; many of us have been using Twitter to do that for a while.

However, there’s still a big search gap to be bridged between ‘high page-ranking official blurb’ and ‘stuff my friends happen to be nattering about’. As Matt Morrison, Global Head of Digital for Porter Novelli, aka @mediaczar, discussed in this morning’s presentation about Social Network Analysis for WOM UK, homophily (‘love of the same’) tends to mean that we gather likeminded folk around us, but also become more like them as we spend time interacting. It’s one of the chief social glues, but it also means we can get trapped in closed and self-reinforcing microcosms.

The truth is that search will never be the only, or even the best, route to discovery. Many of my passions – theatre, literature, Hitchcock films, gin – are only shared by few of my close friends, and the real discoveries I make in social media happen when I leap a couple of connections to find new global voices discussing these things. So often the best way to really find out about what you love is to socialise, not search – mine existing networks for interesting new members, click through the blogrolls of your favourite writers – the equivalent of bumping into people at a party in a place you love.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m having great fun playing with Social Search today and discovering just how much my mates like talking about over-the-knee suede boots – although it’s still very restricted on the ‘friends’ it can identify. But it’s also reminded me that word of mouth impacts on my life in incredibly disparate, random and amorphous ways, beyond the visible island of my ‘inner circle’ of trusted influencers.

Brought into the world on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 and filed under Uncategorized.