I do agree though that social search is just another string to the bow and that reccomendations are the way forward which is why everybody is getting so excited about services like Foursquare etc. It also shows why Google were willing to put 500 million on the table for Yelp only a couple of months ago and why they are investing so much money and time in their own local business listings. Should be an interesting battle to watch unfold over the next couple of years and all I can say with certaintly is that Google will come out on top somehow!

With the increase in recommendations, opinions and social commentary published with and outside of social content sites, there’s an overload of information that calls for a filtering of signal from noise. Search is a great way to do that.

If content can be searched on, it can be optimized. That means text, images, video, audio and anything else that crawlers find, index and make available via search tools.

Content optimization for search and social media marketing are by no means mutually exclusive, which the vs. in the name of this post implies. It’s more like Yin/Yang as they compliment each other.

I think it will become significantly more important to recognize the opportunity for SEO with social channels as it is to leverage Social and SEO for each other.

However, based on those points, I think it’s the PAID search that might potentially suffer from this new convergence of search and social, since the more factual side of search is the side where paid results come in a lot less useful. I might not trust my Twitter friends enough to decide on who the best mortgage is quite yet, but I’d certainly ask for their opinion once I’d narrowed down my search. But I definitely wouldn’t trust paid results to make that choice for me, and I suspect a lot of consumers will feel the same.