{"id":4240,"date":"2010-03-02T12:32:31","date_gmt":"2010-03-02T11:32:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uk.cision.com\/?p=351"},"modified":"2010-03-02T12:32:31","modified_gmt":"2010-03-02T12:32:31","slug":"google-facebook-and-the-need-for-a-social-narrative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/blog\/google-facebook-and-the-need-for-a-social-narrative\/","title":{"rendered":"Google, Facebook, and the need for a social narrative"},"content":{"rendered":"

Charlie Brooker\u2019s Newswipe<\/a>, whose third series has just finished its run on the BBC (second series now showing again on BBC2 and the iPlayer<\/a>), isn\u2019t just enormously entertaining \u2013 it\u2019s also enormously important. Like Lenny Bruce reading from Flat Earth News<\/a>, Brooker and\u00a0an impressive\u00a0supporting cast –\u00a0notably Adam Curtis<\/a>, Tim Key<\/a> and Doug Stanhope<\/a> – skewer both the content and the presentation of television news,\u00a0and seldom fail to explain just why things have come to this.<\/p>\n

One of Newswipe\u2019s key themes has been the broadcasters\u2019 need for a news narrative, and how this narrative leads to the exclusion of stories that, while\u00a0of great public interest,\u00a0just don\u2019t fit<\/em>\u00a0–\u00a0with\u00a0such exclusion\u00a0leading in turn to\u00a0distortion of reality.<\/p>\n

Of course, it\u2019s not just mainstream broadcast news that suffers from the need for a narrative.<\/p>\n

A couple of weeks back, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on midnight chimes\u00a0sounding\u00a0at the Googleplex<\/a>. According to the report, web measurement firm Compete had published data showing that Facebook had\u00a0overtaken Google to become the top source for traffic to major portals\u00a0such as\u00a0Yahoo and MSN, and was fast catching up as a referrer to other types of sites.<\/p>\n

This trend has been evident for some time, but the Compete data prompted\u00a0a number of\u00a0high-profile bloggers\u00a0to proclaim\u00a0a coming \u201cFacebook decade<\/a>\u201d,\u00a0in which search engines would give way to social networks as the main route for people to discover content.<\/p>\n

Maybe this is true. But what really strikes me is the way in which this trend is reported\u00a0without noting\u00a0the continued disparity in the volumes of search and social referrals. In August last year, for example,\u00a0ad network Chitika published data that showed that search was still way ahead of social sites<\/a> in the total volumes of referrals. Really, not-even-close ahead – by not one, but several orders of magnitude.<\/p>\n

Yes, Chitika\u2019s report\u00a0appeared six months ago. Granted,\u00a0the network’s 60,000 or so\u00a0sites\u00a0might\u00a0contain some inherent bias. And of course, it\u2019s not all Google \u2013 internal site search plays a significant role in these statistics.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s notable that a Google search for \u201cChitika\u201d + \u201creferral traffic<\/a>\u201d returns just a couple of hundred results \u2013 many from Chitika itself and none from the big name bloggers trumpeting the latest Facebook data.<\/p>\n

Search isn’t diminishing in importance; overall volumes of search continue to grow steeply, even in the most mature digital markets<\/a>. What’s more, Google has never been a dominant\u00a0referrer of traffic to the kind of portals and video sites described in the Chronicle report \u2013 perhaps best evidenced by the fact that advertising only appeared on Google News this time last year<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Search is all about fulfilling users’ specific intent, not supplementing their browsing habits. But you wouldn\u2019t know this from the bloggers\u2019 coverage of the social referral statistics –\u00a0because, I suspect,\u00a0it doesn\u2019t fit their narrative.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Charlie Brooker\u2019s Newswipe, whose third series has just finished its run on the BBC (second series now showing again on BBC2 and the iPlayer), isn\u2019t just enormously entertaining \u2013 it\u2019s also enormously important. Like Lenny …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":289,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[184],"tags":[97,103,722,1147,2903,3525],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4240"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/289"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4240"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4240\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}