The hype over the royal wedding is feverish—and we’re still more than a month away from the event (and I know the date because my go-to morning show is doing a countdown ad nauseam). But anyone who’s been married knows that it’s not the ceremony that’s important—it’s how the couple navigates the relationship after the cake is gone that predicts success. In Future Trends for Marketers in Search and Social Media, Lee Odden (who thankfully isn’t counting down to the royal nuptials) shares his vision for how the relationship between social and search will work.

Social media, he writes, is changing how consumers discover products and brands on the web. Engines like Google and Bing already consider social signals when calculating search results and Facebook recently patented a search that blends “search engine results with the popularity of each result among members of a user’s social network.”

For brands, that means that building a positive presence on the social web is becoming more important. Companies that want to build or maintain a competitive edge can no longer view social platforms as trends that will become nothing more than a footnote in some future marketing textbook. Their power is redefining how consumers discover brands online and marketers who don’t navigate that search/social relationship may find themselves with nothing but stale cake crumbs and fading fantasies of what might have been.

What role do you think the marriage of search and social will play in how businesses plan their social media and/or marketing strategies?