Last week the Internet Advertising Bureau and Microsoft released a joint white paper on the connection between social media and search. It aims to show how arguably the two hottest sectors in online marketing relate, providing case studies and opinions from leading agencies and brands including Coca-Cola, Mindshare and Microsoft itself.

It’s an absolutely necessity, both from the search sector’s point of view – the area that’s long been the most accountable online – and the growing social media sphere. We’ve seen an increasing number of search agencies that say they ‘do’ social media, for example, but there are still very few case studies of how they actually interact.

But something we’ve begun to notice at new media age is the growing number of joint search and social media pitches. There’s a couple of things to note about this. First, that brands are already making the connection between the two disciplines; the fact that the search engines now integrate Twitter and Facebook updates within results is an obvious factor.

However, it seems brands are also making a point of differentiation by saying that pure social or pure search agencies will not be considered for these accounts. If you can’t do both, you won’t get in.

The reason is partly because there’s still such debate about exactly what ’social media’ is. It seems every agency has a social media expert these days, regardless of whether their expertise is traditionally search, creative, pr or whatever. To paraphrase Microsoft’s Bing campaign, it’s getting to the point of social media overload.

So if you’re a brand, how can you quickly slash a large percentage of agencies from your pitch list? Currently it appears to be by connecting social media to a more established channel. Search works, and usually works very well, so while social media is still a grey area for many, why don’t you put it in the hands of those who’ve already succeeded online before? Seems logical.

The question then is what this means for agencies that don’t do search. I’d think we’ll start seeing more strategic partnerships between independent pr and creative agencies that provide social media management with independent search agencies – there are countless numbers of all.

Of course, this is assuming the social media and search connection continues, but with moves like that made by the IAB and Microsoft last week it’s clear that it’s likely to for some time yet.

Will is the resident search expert and News Editor at Reputation Online’s sister publication, new media age. Image via WSJ.