Google introduced another new addition to its suite of products this week – an add-on to certain organic results dubbed Social Search:
From a rep management perspective, this particular stage of Google’s social search isn’t likely to have much of an impact. For starters, it’s only part of the search experience for people logged into a Google account (iGoogle, Gmail, etc). It also really doesn’t delve too deeply into any of the social networks it targets; Facebook’s privacy policies are going to limit most of what the spiders crawl.
We already advise most of our clients to maintain profiles on all the major social networks as a defense mechanism, if nothing else. The internal workings of Facebook currently ensure that only the bare bones “public” profile ever gets indexed in the first place, which is actually ideal for a professional looking to exert a degree of control over his or her online reputation. Sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter already perform very well in typical organic searches. The new Social Search only underscores the importance of being out there, but being smart about it.