Jason Calcanis’ recent Mediapost column from the halls of OMMA Global hit a chord. While he’s right on the mark about user intent on social nets vs. search – there are many vehicles in the social media stratus that lie in between the “dinner party / social network ” and “research / search” associations he highlights.
Type a query into a search box and its fair to say, that as a consumer, you are at some stage of the purchase funnel, whether that’s initial product discovery, researching options or actually making a final purchase. As Jason says “search works” but it works precisely because it captures intent and capitalizes on it by driving users to points of purchase…. otherwise known as the last mile or the bottom of the funnel.
But what is lost in Jason’s analogy is the time the consumer spent on content or the brand impressions seen by the consumer as they engaged with that content, and which ultimately contributed to that final decision. It’s the critical middle phases of the funnel, in which consumers are getting answers and refining their choices all while going to the experts (aka publishers) they know, that will help them get to the final decision.
Our research with Jupiter shows that consumers depend on blogs at critical stages in the purchase funnel with 59 percent using a blog to refine and get answers related to their purchase and 54 percent using information gleaned to decide and execute that buy.

And while, Twitter does offer a new way to reach broad audiences ala Jason’s Superbowl commercial analogy, it isn’t necessarily capturing audience intent or precisely targeting the right audience, at least not yet.
Two factors make advertising (and specifically display advertising) in blogs a unique and valuable part of any marketer’s ad mix:
1) The dialogue that bloggers are able to have with their audiences is one that is both unique and personal in nature, thus making blogs highly influential and trusted by their readers.
2) Display ads heavily and positively impact other online campaigns, such as search. In fact, the majority of search queries occur on branded keyword terms – studies have shown that after seeing a display ad, consumers are 54% more likely to search on an advertisers’ brand keyword- proving that display advertising, not only impacts other consumer behavior, it can actually push consumers further down the purchase funnel to the last mile.
Combine those two factors and you have an effective way to reach audiences gathering around their trusted authors’ content and more likely to be impacted by brands they see.
If social networks are the dinner parties, and search is the cash register, then perhaps blogs are the farmers markets inspiring the recipes.
Food for thought. (sorry couldn’t resist)