CorpComms Magazine

Up until now I've been concentrating solely on the impact on my professional life of quitting search engines in this column. But this week, I thought it'd be useful to take a look at the impact that this experiment is having on my use of the Internet in my leisure time, and what we, as business communicators, can learn from this.

As it turns out, I don't spend very much time online outside of work, which has kind of surprised me. And when I do, it's invariably through my smartphone, accessing the web mostly via apps or, to a lesser extent, via direct bookmarks. I virtually never feel the need to use a search engine when I'm not in the office (or, at least, 'at work'). And I'm left wondering whether this is the case for a lot of people.

There have only been a couple of occasions during the last three weeks that I've wanted to perform a Google search in my leisure time, and only one of these is significant enough to talk about from a marketing communications perspective.

My wife, daughter and I are booked to spend a week in a cabin in the New Forest at a place called Sandy Balls. Yeah, I know - I can't say it without giggling either. Anyway, when it came to finding out more about the immediate area without the use of Google, I was a little stumped. (Although goodness knows what would come up if you searched for 'sandy balls' - I bet it's got little to do with the New Forest.) Normally I'd have spent a good hour or two researching the area, what to do and where to go. But this time, I couldn't. So I did what I've been doing throughout June and turned to social media.

What I found was a pleasant surprise. Sandy Balls has a Facebook page, and a pretty good Facebook page at that. The community is engaged; posting photographs and comments, and asking questions. And whoever runs the page is doing their best to keep it that way - they're extremely responsive and they're running promotions via the page (albeit technically against Facebook regulations but hey, which small businesses don't).

So what are the lessons from this? First, if you don't have a Facebook page you might be missing out on the opportunity to inform, engage and influence your customers. OK, so that's not rocket science, but this is a real world example where a small business is doing a great job of communicating with customers and potential customers. Had they not had a page, or had that page been awful, where would that have left me? Unimpressed and frustrated at the very least.

And second, as I've said before, social communications enables you to go beyond search engines. It provides opportunities that SEO doesn't at a fraction of the cost. If there's one thing #NoSearch is teaching me, it's that, despite the pain of the time it takes to look information up without Google, the information that you find when you put that time in is often far superior. So if you're using social media as a marketing tool, you must ensure that what you're doing really hits the mark.

Read more about the launch of the #NoSearch project

Paul Sutton is head of social communications at BOTTLE. Follow his experiment on the #NoSearch blog, help him out on Twitter or Quora, and check back here every Tuesday for an update.

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