Last week Google announced the beta version launch of the latest feature to Google Search, called Google Social Search. In short, the new technology finds content from your social media networks and displays it at the bottom of a traditional search results page. Based on what social networking sites you link to in your Google profile, the Social Search results will update you with relevant content from friends and followers. For example, I typed in ‘climbing shoe’ to a normal Google search and found results from followers on Twitter and blog posts from my RSS feeds.
Some may argue that this will change the way users interact with search results and may limit the effectiveness of traditional seo. I think it has more importance to how brands and companies communicate their message(s) on the social web.
Social Search makes monitoring, engaging and providing relevant content on the social web even more important for brands that are active in this space. Here is a checklist for brands to keep in mind with Social Search;
– Expand the social media monitoring fishnet to include all products and categories for their business – check out SM2 by Techrigy (we use them).
– Dedicate some man-power to engage with users on the social web and deal with negative social mentions timely.
– Encourage customers to create and share content for products and categories. It appears that most types of social content is searchable, including blog posts, tweets, videos, pictures, etc..
Google Search seems to have fallen perfectly in the time-line of new products from Google – and is likely to be a key component to Google Wave and the centralization of content. For now, brands have just one more reason to keep tabs of their reputation online.