What is the value of a customer? It is an important to many business owners. Last week, we discussed how both search marketing and social media can provide several benefits including driving awareness and providing communications channels for customers. And through efforts to reach out to existing customers and new prospects via the Internet, search and social can have profound influence on purchase decisions. However, going beyond the immediate to thinking long-term, there is another way of looking at the bottom-line value.

Bringing in new customers is typically an immediate and necessary goal for any organization. Customer retention and reputation management can lead to enduring success. However, over time, customers have their own intrinsic value beyond simply an initial purchase. Yet, the question remains – what is that value? Are we measuring our long-term efforts at search and social media marketing to uncover their true potential?

Customer lifetime value (CLTV) is typically an average of costs incurred, relative to the benefits (profits) received from attracting and converting a prospect to buy a product or service. Retaining customers and influencing them to buy more and to buy more frequently over their lifetime relationship with the company is an important measurement to consider. The formulas for calculating and measuring CLTV are too long and complicated to cover in this blog. There are many books and websites that can help understand and calculate CLTV.

However, search marketing and social media fit into CLTV in very unique and strategic ways. Driving awareness of new products or services, upgrades, special offers and package deals via search and social media can affect long-term profitability. Connecting and measuring sales conversions through these channels can also illustrate the viability and return-on-investment resulting from using search marketing and social media marketing as an influence and awareness technique.

The trick is to set up proper measurements and connect the dots as a customer follows the path through the sales funnel and over the lifetime of the relationship with your organization. There is an old saying in business circles that we believe applies – ‘You cannot manage what you don’t measure.’

Technological innovation between search engines and social media seems to have taken somewhat divergent paths in recent years. While search engines and social media have seen some integration, recent changes by Google adding a Google social search feature could make the blend between search and social even more relevant.

At Get Page One, we’ve monitored the evolution of search and social, and we are excited about the future prospects in technology and relevance to business. Because many organizations bring in new customers through a combination of online visibility via search marketing, SEO and word-of-mouth (or word-of-web), the latest innovation from Google can possibly be a boon to business.

Google Social Search, as reported by Mashable, feeds information from your social graph into search results. The information shown to the user stems from shared connections and shared information linked to Flickr, Quora and Twitter, social feeds with which Google integrates. In other words, if one of your Twitter friends shared a link to Get Page One, the share would show annotated below the search result.

Marketers and businesses realize the importance of how consumers share information via the social graph, including the trust they have in the recommendations of their Internet friends. Google Social Search adds an element of both visibility and word-of-web.

With the advantages come potential disadvantages. If your organization happens to be experiencing a public relations crisis, the negative publicity might not only feed the search engines, it may also feed more negativity into the social graph, snowballing when picked up in a Google search. At Get Page One, we can help you prepare for and react to an online public relations crisis via our reputation management services.

Despite any disadvantages, advancements between search and social media provide a unique opportunity for companies to extend their reach and influence.

Last week, MAGNA, Mediabrands’ global media forecasting and investment strategy unit, put out a social media “forecast.” After exploring the question “What IS social media?”, they delivered their definition by socializing in public as well as on the Wikipedia page for Social Media. They also posted a Facebook note with the information.

So why deliver the information this way? Advantages of social media, they said, were that “anyone can add to the conversation,” while its limitations are that “most people still consume most social media content in a passive manner — which begs the question of whether or not our social media content was in fact social in nature, or more akin to traditional media.”

The other definitions of social media MAGNA collected were quite interesting. “The facilitation of word of mouth with technology,” “trackable conversational content about brands, products or anything,” “consumer generated content that influences perceptions” — these are just a few, but it’s easy to see a theme with these specific examples.

What MAGNA deemed their preferred definition is what they wound up adding to the Wikipedia page on Social Media: “a set of technologies, tools and platforms facilitating the discovery, participation and sharing of content.” They make a point to say at the end of their forecast that the definition of social media will change as the industry evolves, and they’re still refining their own definition of it.

If you want to add your thoughts to MAGNA’s forecast, they welcome input at their Facebook discussion.

Google Me lets users fill out their very own profile, and it was released just a few days ago. Fill out enough information on it, and it’ll likely show up at the bottom of the first page of results when someone searches for your name at Google.com.

Another online profile? Yawn. Well, hang on a second. Google Me is useful for online reputation management.

If you do a Google search for your name, what comes up on the first page? Maybe it’s a mix of results for several people who share your name, maybe it’s all about you, or maybe nothing useful comes up. If you’ve never thought much about what shows up when someone searches for you, we strongly suggest that you start paying close attention to this. Whether you’re applying for a job or you’re an established professional, people will search for your name on Google. And you can bet that they’ll look at everything that comes up on the first page and will judge you accordingly.

For this reason we can’t stress enough just how important online reputation management is. The best thing you can do is start working on your online reputation right now, making sure that what comes up for your name on that first page (and, even better, the next couple of pages) of results is positive and factual. A false, inaccurate and/or harmful piece of information someone posts online about you, your product or your company can seriously damage your reputation. Don’t wait around to make sure your first page of Google results is factual and positive.

So take the time to make a Google profile. It takes only a few minutes, and it’s certainly an easy way to get that last spot on Page One filled out with good information about yourself.

Just don’t forget about the other first-page results.

By now, you’ve likely heard at least something about Twitter, the social networking website where users can “tweet” 140 characters at a time. People use Twitter for all kinds of stuff — keeping in touch with friends, finding out what’s going on at a particular place, joining conversations and, most important to this blog post, marketing.

How does a website where people seem to just be writing about everyday personal things — “What a beautiful day!” “Just saw a superlative movie!” “I’m eating food at a restaurant!” — have the potential to be a marketing platform? you may wonder.

Look closely at Twitter. Spend some time looking around at what people are saying, or, even better, type in a keyword at search.twitter.com. When you do that, you’ll start to notice something: Twitter has a ton of potential when it comes to marketing your business.

And businesses are no stranger to using Twitter as a marketing platform. Just look at Skittles — for one day a couple of weeks ago, going to Skittles.com brought up a search for “#skittles” on search.twitter.com, so any time a Twitter user mentioned Skittles, it’d show up in the search feed. Needless to say, a few jokers took the opportunity to write inappropriate remarks about the brand, but for the most part the chatter was positive. Skittles got exactly what they wanted: for people to talk about Skittles! And, hey, that’s exactly what we’re doing right now, so it clearly worked.

Countless other companies are already on Twitter, as they’ve quickly realized its social media marketing potential. Companies like Whole Foods, General Motors, Comcast and JetBlue use Twitter to actually interact with their customers, and they even provide customer service through it. That’s a brilliant way to use Twitter, since it seems customers truly appreciate when a human from a business actually takes the time to speak to them. A personal reply online seems so little and basic, but imagine how well this kind of customer service resonates with people.

It’s incredibly easy to make Twitter one-way and just send out self-promotional tweets, a mistake that countless businesses are making right now. Doing it that way is not only lazy, it’s a missed opportunity. Making it two-way (where you are actively replying to other users and engaging in conversation) is exactly how Twitter is meant to be used. Interaction is essential if you’re going to effectively use Twitter as a marketing platform.