The term “inbound marketing” tends to bring together the tactics of search and social media under one umbrella.  To me the theme that binds them all together is that they reach people during the natural course of whatever they may be doing online rather than interrupting that process with “Hey pay attention to me now” messages.  So here is my argument for a way to look at search as a social media activity.

1.  “Isn’t search a personal act, not a social one?” First of all, not all social media activities have to include interaction with others.  Search is a fundamental way that users interact with the web.  That is the social activity of search.

2. “Doesn’t search marketing place paid ads in front of users?”   Yes but for the most part these messages are helpful tools that reach people while they are in the process of looking for them.  If I’m searching for tennis shoes and I see a search ad for a great pair then the ad is helping me and adding value to my interaction with the web.

3.  “Isn’t social media about two-way communications?”  Yes but search has always been and continues to be a very subtle form of two-way communication.  Attentive search marketers have always looked closely at what forms of content win the elusive clicks of their audience.  The user’s decision to click or not to click is, in itself, a social act that “votes” for that content.  since the search marketer studies this data and makes content decisions based on it, the user’s decisions result in action by the marketer.  This is the two-way communication.  Ok this argument may be weak because we do the same things with paid ads online.  However, increasingly, search results pages give us the tools to actually vote for the content that appears on them.   On Google users can comment on, promote, or delete each organic listing on every page.  This definitely qualifies as a social activity.

The reason I focus on creating these linkages between search and social media is because we are in the midst of a marketing and communications transformation that will de-emphasize (though not eliminate) interruption messaging while placing greater emphasis on how we weave or communications into the fabric of people’s daily lives in helpful, entertaining, and interesting ways.  Maybe it it is wrong to argue that search is social media marketing.  Maybe we need a bigger concept to refer to non-interrupive communication.  The conept of “inbound marketing” comes the closest of any that I have seen but perhaps you have an even better way of referring to this game-changing trend.