Sharon: I don’t find them at odds either. I hope thats not how I came off. My goal with our clients here is work with them to try to always see things from the customers point of view. Really for me ‘find-ability’ isn’t instead of SEO, its really just a different way of looking at it and defining who were optimizing for and from that context, what optimized means.

Jason: I agree to a large extent. I will add though, that even if Im selling shirts, I may still not be going for just volume. I want to get the right people, to the site, and then, I want them to be able to find the shirt they love. And if they’re not ready to buy then, I want to make it easy on them to find the same shirt once they are ready. As for the Jive site. Im only tangentially familiar with Jive, so I can’t speak specifically to that, however, we are in the middle of the first complete rebuild of the Nemo site in a few years. In the early stages of this, we did a lot of thinking and research about who we’re actually talking to with this site and what they are looking for. Some things we found is that the primary people coming to the Nemo site are people in the industry looking for work. After that, it was people doing research on design and development firms, but they we’re the people who were actually in the position of making a choice on the matter. In both of these cases, it became pretty clear that it would be critical for us to make a site where it was easy to find the type of content each user wanted, and also for them to be able to pass this content around and find it repeated times.

For those of us who work in the industry, a lot of these things are second nature. For our clients though, it may not be.

me2i81sour2: yes. same old thing. You’d be surprised how many of our clients forget this though.

If I’m selling funny t-shirts, my goal is traffic. I’m selling a low-margin, high-volume product, and the more people to my site the better. In this case, my friends list is important, but not so much as a high SERP ranking for the big keywords. Now, I definitely want people to engage with the brand; i want them to come back and tell their friends, I want them to buy shirts over and over… But I’m still focusing on volume. And in that volume, I’m more focused on showing my product (as a channel– or old media) than communicating.

However, let’s say I’m Jive Software. Suddenly, one great lead or connection with a potential client or existing client can mean a massive opportunity for my company. Suddenly search is much less important, connections, relationships, sincere communication paths are vital. And in this case, a traditional broadcast message has little importance over a newer find-able paradigm based on relationships.

Now, to agree with Sharon, the two are complimentary. If I can take my t-shirt business, and get my audience to become my evangelists *in volume*, sending out messages to their friends lists, telling my story to their social media connections, then I get both: a sincere conversation at a high-volume, scalable level.

Beyond findability is discoverability. It’s nice to be in the path of someone search for you, but it’s even better to be socialized with someone that didn’t know they wanted to know you. To me, the *real* findability these days is in the social web. If I have a message that I want to get out there, I don’t turn to Google, I turn to Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, Facebook, and the places where people are. I don’t see me inbound links as my most important asset, I see my friend list as my #1 possession.

Getting people started in the social web has taught me a few things about how people come to understand the value of social findability. First, people connect with people, then they’ll listen to the messages. That means that the people within an organization become the most valuable link to advancing an organizations messages. If it’s people are well liked, then their messages will be shared. The biggest catch is that building up friend lists and trust takes time and social skills, which means most businesses lose interest before the value arrives. I help clients be patient by showing them timelines from previous projects and the success they experienced. If they are *still* having a hard time swallowing the value of social finability, tell them the interesting thing about being successful socially first, is that it leads to grips of fresh inbound links, which seriously strengthens your SEO.