Paul Dunay, the Director of the Global Field Marketing for BearingPoint in the United States, interviews Adam Lavelle, Chief Strategy Officer of iCrossing here. They discuss the pre-Search and post-Search society and its current transition. Lavelle and Dunay call traditional search engines “reputation management systems”. Lavelle predicts that methods of search for the average consumer are evolving from open-ended exploration to a more established collaborative sharing.

An online Search used to be the map that a searcher wrote herself. The virtual world was wide and uncharted. A self-motivated Searcher chose her terms and clickedthrough to her consequences. Then adwords rewrote the rules, subtly shifting the unchartered territory in favour of those communities with the best technology and technical know-how.

But Search is no longer a lone spot of civilization on the online map. While we haven’t stopped expanding the virtual world, we’ve civilized the territory, erecting our online databases, networks, and communities. We’ve established highways and byways that constrain but also simplify life for the online traveler.

But signposts have been (and are ever being) erected along the highways and byways of the information superhighways.

These signposts are erected by social media. These signposts are the brands, products, services, and ideas that the original searchers carried with them from the real world to the virtual. These signposts now dot the online landscape. Communities cluster around them, discussing, buzzing and bickering about the brands that delight and bug the people back home.

This is what Lavelle refers to when he stresses the changes wrought by social media in the realm of search. Now communities want networks of shared experience to validate the expertise offered by the trailblazing technology of Search. Social media offers this combination of expertise validated by shared experience, making these conversations, this buzz, both authoritative and influential.

Tracking these communities is essential for any successful brand. Its new territory out there and you need to know where your brand stands (or rather, where it’s been stood).