Google’s most popular feature with searches is ‘suggestions’. The suggestions sometimes appear much before you have finished typing. Many wonder how Google knows what you are exactly looking for.

After a court in Italy held search engines responsible for suggesting offensive terms, Google had elucidated that “search suggestion service suggests words potentially connected to the words that users type on the Google search field”.

So that might be the reason when my friend typed ‘Arindam Chaudhuri’ on Google and it suggested the word ‘Fraud’ associated to the name. The user was surprised by the suggestion because Arindam Chaudhuri is the Director of IIPM (The Indian Institute of Planning and Management), a private B-School in India. He posted the screen-shot on Twitter (http://twitpic.com/5f6t8h) on June 22, 2011 for all to see.

Next I decided to do a quick search about IIPM, unfortunately the word ‘Fraud’ showed up next to the name.

Following this, somebody who claims may be representing ‘IIPM and Arindam Chaudhuri’  committed a fatal error, she shot a mail from her personal email ID to the user asking him to remove that picture, else face legal action. The mail further claims that they have settled the issue with Google, but Google gracefully refused to comply unless this picture is taken off.

I am skeptical if IIPM did this since they claim to be one of the premier B-Schools in India, with the so-called best think-tank heading them. Secondly any third-party who sends a mail on their behalf threatening legal action is only going to put the institution in bad light. It only endorses what Google is suggesting.

How can you hold the user responsible for what Search Engines suggest? The Management Guru should know that taking legal action on every negative comment is not the solution, since there are plenty of bad mouthing that happens on the Internet. And with the kind of suggestions that comes up during searches, it’s obvious that users will click on the forbidden combination and you further lose credibility. What you ought to do is to figure out why it is so, and then sort it out amicably. Your reputation is at stake and your prime concern should be to deal with negative contents about you on the Internet if you are really that great an institution; after all everybody deserve to keep their goodwill intact. Let sense prevail!

Facebook has finally rolled out the Timeline for all and all you have to do is go here and click ‘Get it now‘. The FB Timeline comes with a seven day grace period to delete stuff that you did (videos, photos, status updates) that you don’t want to be on your Timeline. Warning – When you first see the Facebook Timeline… you are in for a SHOCK!!

What you will see is every single thing you did since joining Facebook neatly arranged under a timeline of years and months. For users who have made the cheesiest status updates and other cringe-worthy quips( in hindsight) it will require a dedicated period of time to go back and decide what should be highlighted or removed from the timeline before its published for all to see. Yes, there is a ‘Publish’ tab to click after doing the necessary changes before the timeline goes live. So what are the advantages?

For the storyteller in you the Timeline is a chance to make a picture perfect string of events in your life all with a snazzy cover picture option that comes as a banner on top after weeding out what you don’t need. Here I’m thinking of celebrity reputation and their PR machines as the first converts in making the Timeline a personal saga – a wall of fame! For the rest of us, as the Timeline can be taken as far back to the birthday, it can be built up with Life events, maps with photos of places been to and so on… to a well-documented chronology of our life.

So, yes, there is a huge opportunity for reputation management with the Facebook Timeline and this can further move on to brand pages as well. Facebook has said that for now the Timeline is focussed on individuals and not brands, but its safe to assume it’s just a matter of time before companies and brands have their own Timeline of accolades!

With Google + and  Twitter coming out with brand pages and other changes being done in interface and Apps, it’s raining brand pages in all platforms. Google is maintaining that the Google + Vs Facebook race is not a social networking attempt to upstage Facebook.

While Twitter is flying high with fly.twitter – a swanky mobile interface and a better web page in the hope to bring back the users from applications like Echofun, Tweetdeck etc.,, not all Tweeters are happy! Avid Twitter users are left wondering if Twitter’s changed from what it was known for in the beginning – a free platform for people to microblog, begin trends, tweet to sport-stars, celebs, politicians, authors and journalists to make a change like it did in the Egypt crisis and revolution.

Write in to us about your Facebook Timeline experience and we’ll feature your comments in a follow-up post.

Have you given up on Google Plus, already? The Google+ rollercoaster has been nothing short of mercurial – The fanfare, the golden invite, the Google+ launch was on hype overdrive; then came the ‘is it dead’ questions and Facebook launching new features to stay in the game. Google is now talking about brand pages in Google+, yet another feature in Facebook; and hence the question – ‘Does Google stand a chance against the social media behemoth that Facebook is?’ 

Google+ syncing seamlessly with Android devices: Google+ of late seems to be more about bringing all your web presence onto a single platform with easy icons and circles. So from easy instant upload of photos from your Android phones to video chat hangouts, its about getting you organised the Google way. The best part about this is that, the photos that get instantly uploaded are not available to your Google+ circles by default; you have to make it available or shared on Facebook etc manually. Google scores on privacy which has always been a sticky point for Facebook always.

Facebook popularity to stay: Facebook and its numerous Apps are the rage worldwide and is not likely to make a difference to its millions of users as far as social media activity goes; and the Facebook ‘likes’ will continue to to be popular and people will continue to share and upload images from Facebook. So on a social networking level there is no way that Google+ will replace Facebook.

Brand building and search implications: For Google+ the focus is on brand building and this is where small companies or professionals should focus on as well; and the SERP privileges of having Google+ page is sure to mount as the days go by. Being the giant search engine that it is, the SEO implications could be phenomenal in the future.

The trick in appreciating what Google+ could be, is to look at it as NOT a social networking platform but as an organiser of all your web activities, contacts, chats, professional meetings (Hangout) and as a means of brand building.

I’d definitely recommend having a Google+ page for your business as Google eventually gets around to what it originally planned in terms of web content importance with more applications coming under the Google+ umbrella.

Here you have another product of Google to hit the trash. Well, I wouldn’t say Google Sidewiki is a complete failure, but relatively a Google product that failed to keep up with the expectations”.  Google has finally decided to close it down, and is offering its users to export all of their data. December 5, 2011 is the day Google will discontinue Sidewiki and erase all the content. Users’ can visit http://www.google.com/sidewiki/  and follow the manual to retrieve the data.

I believe Google Sidewiki didn’t catch on with everyone simply because of the fact that it was a complex tool. Not only that you have to install Google Toolbar, you had to ensure it was turned on.  It looked pretty promising in the initial phase along with other Web Annotation tool and this would have clicked had this been user friendly.

If  Sidewiki had implemented “reviews” for businesses, to be frank it would have been a reputation nightmare. Sidewiki could prove to be a potential tool to damage your business reputation. As the algorithm works, pages that attract maximum visitors would experience incessant flow of spammers. Webmaster trying to get rid of negative comments on their website might take longer days to erase all the negative comment.

Well! As of now Google Sidewiki will go off the air on 5th December 2011.  I doubt Google’s reputation as the king on the Internet, this latest development only reiterate that they have failed products, and the latest is Google Sidewiki.

Wikipedia began with the noble intention of providing all with free information on anything under the sun. So yes, the content should be impersonal or neutral and in an openly editable model. So unlike an encyclopedia, which is written by experts, the Wikipedia content is largely written by volunteers who do so without pay.

The big advantage: By virtue of being a favoured site by Google, the SEO or ORM implications of having a Wiki page for your small business are huge. Wikipedia pages usually rank on the first pages of Google and other search engines.

Should you have a Wikipedia page for your small business? There are a few risks to keep in mind -Wiki pages can be edited by anyone and there are numerous people who keep a tab on new pages. If you look at the way people with an axe to grind keep at forums to deliberately malign a brand or name, one should tread carefully as this is also the case with a Wikipedia page. So there is no rule-for-all from a small company reputation management aspect and we would advice a case-by-case decision for creating a Wiki page.

What if you already have a Wiki page? If you already have a Wiki page for your small business and do not have negative content issues with it, it would be best if you don’t make too many changes.

What do you do if you have too many negatives being added on your Wikipedia page? If you do have a Wiki page that is being regularly updated with negative content, there are still a couple of things to be done. First of all make the tone very neutral; and add a host of new info on your page to water down the negatives or push it down further.

So there it is, depending on how well your business is doing in a certain area and taking into account the added publicity a Wiki page will bring in and with the help of reputation managers to watch your back you may have a Wikipedia page for your business with the positives far outweighing the risks.

Professional Recruitment Consultants worth their salt go through rigorous Candidate preparation throughout any placement process. This includes advising the Candidate on interview techniques, coaching on environment specifics, and how to handle ‘the counter-offer’. The counter-offer can see deals worth thousands of pounds fall through in an instant and ultimately there’s little that can be done after a Candidate’s mind is made up.

External factors in Recruitment will regularly work against you and seeds of doubt, once planted, can sprout into insurmountable objections. And while you have absolutely no control over the relationship between a Candidate and their current employers, everything the Client sees and hears about and from a Candidate has to be your responsibility. Which begs the question; have you Google’d your Candidate lately? Your Client? Have you Google’d yourselves? As it turns out, the internet can end up costing you money too. And we don’t just mean your line rental.

For example:

a/ Public Indescretion
A Financial Controller is, after a long and gruelling recruitment process, offered a job. Great. They then proceed to hand in their notice with their current employer, only to find out at the last minute their prospective new employer has rescinds their offer due to an indiscretion from a drunken night out posted on a public Facebook wall. Game over.

b/ Misinformation
Misinformation about the Client is posted on-line from disgruntled ex-employees or poor quality competitors with similar business model. This impacts on a ‘Volume Recruiter’ as negative content reduces recruitment retention by 40%. Often malicious fiction and hearsay becomes accepted as the truth in the eyes of potential applicants. Upon discovery of this misinformation, proposed placements fall through as Candidate interest/confidence is lost.

c/ Review Sites
Having ignored the power that review sites have on perception, the internet displays predominantly negative content/comments about a Recruiter/Recruitment Agency. As with most companies, they don’t promote the positive reviews and stories from the majority of their satisfied customers; instead a few unhappy customers dominate the review sites. They focus on the negatives, from sales technique to problems with products and after-sales, and as a result Candidates and Clients go to your competitors in pursuit of a more reputable agency.

“Okay so I have an issue there are negative comments on-line?”

Try these simple steps:

1. Where possible, talk to the person off-line or via private message and resolve the issue amicably.
2. If the person has a genuine issue, don’t engage in conversation. Adding activity to the page will pushes the forum up higher the search engine rankings. If input is absolutely required, a short “Our company takes all complaints seriously and we will try to help where we can, so please contact us at [contact@company.com]” statement is the most you should contribute.
3. Check the rules of the forum/review site that the person has posted to, many of the sites will remove posts that are threatening, defamatory or libellous.
4. If still unsuccessful, don’t ignore the problem. It is easier to push down negative comments if they are recent; if the page is left for more than a few months like a stain they become harder to remove. And when left alone, they can gain a life of their own if others start to add their own comments.

Protecting your reputation:

Recruitment is about delivering results and Candidate & Client trust is a critical part of a successful placement. Investing in on-line branding is becoming more critical as many professions including Doctors, Lawyers and top sports figures are now more frequently targeted for negative attention.

If you have a distinctive name you are more at risk of being singled out on-line which can be both positive and negative. You don’t have to turn into a social networking addict, just produce a few well written social networking pages so people can find you on-line and make more balanced judgements about you or your business. Link this with an SEO campaign and it will be enough to protect your brand and be ready to deal with any unforeseeable circumstances.

Yesterday we did a piece on the Top Ten Reputation Management Tips, detailing 10 things you really should be doing to preserve your own/brand name on t’internet. And, while we freely admit that the list wasn’t exhaustive, there are also some things which – equally as importantly – you should NOT be doing. Whilst amicable that you should wish to fix any issues that may arise, within you is the potential to make things a whole lot worse, too.

The following are examples of the top 10 things not to do to manage your own reputation. When they say the road to ruin is paved with good intentions, they’re talking about this list:

1/ Don’t Engage In Bad Business Practices

Yeah, like, duh. You shouldn’t even need to be reminded of this (and most of you don’t), but the quickest way of landing yourself in hot bother is by making bad ethical business choices. But it’s not just your archetype evil business tycoon that’s prone to doing this, it’s pretty much anyone that runs a business. The economy is utter trash at the moment and making cuts is necessary for a lot of people, but you need to be careful what you’re making cuts to. If you’re cutting corners on normal business procedures, customer service, customer aftercare (for example) – it will reflect reflect badly on you and it will get out. The safest bet you can make is that nothing you do is guaranteed to stay private, or behind closed doors, and that for every irate customer or business partner it’s a potential bad story appearing on the internet. Just think “Should this get out, how would this reflect on me/the company?” and you’ll make far fewer bad judgement calls.

2/ Don’t Rush To Admit You Are Wrong

Seems a bit of a u-turn on that last one, doesn’t it? Well, no, not really. We’re not suggesting that you intentionally hide mistakes, mishaps or unfortunate coincidences, but rushing an apology doesn’t always help either. If something happens and you’re perceived to be at fault, showing a bit of humility and holding your hands up might go a way towards clearing your conscience. But that’s about all the benefit it’ll have, as admitting liability publicly is the only thing anyone’s going to hear. Sure, you might have a solution – you may have already sorted the situation out – but the minute you say “Yeah, our bad”, the only thing you’ll hear about is that you/your company has admitted complacency. And regardless of what the problem was, or how great you were at rectifying the situation, the headlines will all read “[Company Name] Admits Fault”. IF something happens, don’t feel like you have to be brutally honest and hope people will respect you for it. Sort the problem, and issue holding statements (i.e. “We are aware of the issue and are working towards resolving it. We will be issuing a full statement in due course.”) until you can confidently say that the issue is behind you. At which point, acknowledge the existence of the issue, explain what the issue was, how you fixed it, and what provisions are in place to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

3/ Don’t Ignore Misdirected Negative Content

“He aint talkin’ about me” logic doesn’t work. Not when it comes to businesses, and not when it comes to preserving your reputation. It’s all well and good safeguarding against your brand/company name receiving negative attention and taking measures, but is that enough? Well, say you ran a company called Big Mike’s Tyres and had a solid reputation. Congratulations. Unfortunately, a few streets away some guy is running a company called Big Mike’s Tiles and, well… his reputation isn’t as good. In fact, he’s pretty much a cowboy; he rips people off and does a terrible job installing new tiles. So naturally, a lot of people take to the internet to complain about him. But, because of keyword similarities, his bad press is appearing on searches for your company. And, if anyone sees a story saying “Big Mike Ripped Me Off!”, you think that each of them are going to take the time to distinguish between different companies? It’s also not completely beyond the realms of possibility that somebody’s going to see the article about Big Mike ripping people off, assume it’s talking about you, and write their own piece criticizing your company. I hate the use of clichés, but don’t let yourself be put in the position of ‘guilty by association’.

4/ Don’t Threaten Legal Action

Speaking of clichés, I also strongly dislike the “exception to every rule” concept. There are undoubtedly going to be exceptions to this one, but you should at least know what you’re getting yourself into. There’s ultimately no definitive answer to the prevention of negative content arising, but there are certainly rules about how you should conduct yourself when it does. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is threatening legal action against authors/publications out of anger. What they’re saying might well be defamation, it might be inaccurate, it might be a whole lot of things that make you look bad, but you can’t get angry about it. Or, at least not outwardly so. You might even have legal grounds  to have it removed, but have you consulted legal counsel? If there are legal implications, leave it to the solicitors to sort. That’s what they’re paid to do. Once you threaten legal action, you make it a far bigger story. Bigger stories attract more attention, and not just from readers. Once a topic becomes popularized, everyone will want a piece, and so instead of one piece of negative content, you’ve got ten people writing about the original story with the extra bit about your ill-advised response. It used to be a concern that when a story got out, people would hear about it. Now though, you need to be far more concerned with who writes about it. Don’t give them the ammunition they need to make their story any better.

5/ Don’t Try To ‘Pay-Off’ Bloggers

Generally speaking, Bloggers write about whatever they want. A lot of amateur writers also feel that in order to maintain a ‘cutting edge’ to their work, they can only do so by being overly and often cynically critical of others. So yeah, you might at one stage find yourself at the receiving end of a good tongue-lashing, compliments of RandomBlogger569. His article is highly critical, unfairly bias and at points is blatant fabrication. How dare he?! Right, what can you do? Well, as established above – threatening legal action is out. What about trying to pay him off? This guy writes blogs as a hobby, and using his words to try and get attention and is rambling on hoping to cause a scene. How much bigger do you think the ‘scene’ is going to be once he’s written a follow-up post about the guy he wrote about trying to bribe him to remove his content? The best advice is not to respond (rather than fan the flames) and take the usual RM steps to ensure it doesn’t get the attention it deserves.

6/ Don’t Argue On Review Sites

There are review sites all over the internet covering practically every subject under the sun (and some above it too). This is the by-product of Web 2.0 and the User Generated Content generation. This is mainly because people have found they can make a lot of money off of hosting a platform for people to share their experiences/opinions. It requires very little effort, as people will now actively seek out a website they can share their thoughts on; and the more people who share their thoughts, the more people will look to the site as a point of reference. And, with that kind of traffic, comes advertising revenue. So these sites are out to make money and they don’t care who is made to look bad in the process. As such, there might come a time when people take to one (or many) of these sites to write about you. Which, you know, if you’re perfect in every possible way, is most likely to be positive content (though still not guaranteed). Sometimes though, people just want to rant. Let them rant – they’re doing what they think they need to do to feel better. If you start replying in an attempt to refute what’s being said, you’ll look petty. It doesn’t matter if you’re right or not, there can be no good from arguing with somebody on the internet. Under any circumstances. It will look unprofessional, it’ll grant greater credence to what’s being said and you’ll make a bigger thing out of it than it needs to be.

7/ Don’t Post On 3rd Party Forums

A successful politician will, when questioned, often ignore the premise of a question altogether and respond with an answer that sounds like it’s answering, but is actually deflecting on to different matters entirely. They do this not just to be awkward, but because they know that if they answer the question directly, they’re acknowledging that the question has a degree of validity. If negative content starts appearing for searches on your name/company/products in the form of forums, the worst thing you can do is respond to it. For one, it’ll just prolong the story. If you’re taking the proper Reputation Management measures, the story will disappear soon enough, but not if you answer/get caught up in active discussions. For every time you issue a response, you’ll get (at least) one response which counters everything you’ve just said. Your choices then are to continue arguing (with everyone) which is going to make you look just as unprofessional as getting into debates on review sites, or stop posting. At which point, they’ll have won the argument, you’ll have lost and you’ll look worse for it. It’s like thinking “water puts out fires, water is a liquid; paraffin is liquid, I’ll use paraffin to put out this fire”. Yeah, good luck with that.

8/ Don’t Fret Over Neutral Content

Wouldn’t it be nice if everything everyone said about each other was nice, supportive and gratifying? Well, besides from being boring, it just wouldn’t make an awful lot of sense. Nothing and nobody is perfect, and so if you wangle S.E.O. (Search Engine Optimization) to reflect nothing but positive content, it might look artificial and suspicious. Sure, get rid of negative content, but what about all the pieces that are ultimately indifferent? Some people are so paranoid about looking good that they’ll try and manipulate everything that doesn’t imply butter wouldn’t melt in their mouth away from the top rankings in the likes of Google and Yahoo. There are those that are of the mindset that if something isn’t singing their praises, it’s making them look bad. This is crazy. Not only does neutral content (or ‘Swiss Content’) make related searches pertaining to your name/company look more natural, but if it’s ranking high it’s helping to push the negative content down too. Leave it alone.

9/ Don’t Post Compromising Pictures

We said yesterday that it’s good to share pictures. And, while we don’t like blowing our own trumpets, we were right. Sharing pictures will at time help put a face to a name, make people feel a closer, a more human connection to your business. That’s great, you’re human too after all. You lead a life outside of work, just like your customers. You socialize, you have parties, you… Oh, wait! Don’t you still have those pictures from the Thanksgiving  party you had after-hours at the office last year? That was such a good party! Remember when Rodney from Accounts had a few too many to drink and tripped over the carpet and landed face first into Deborah? How you all laughed! Wouldn’t people think you were great people if you showed them you were just like them? No. Rightfully or not, when people give their custom to a company, they hold them to higher, professional moral standards. It’s due to a need for trust, and they need to trust that you’re being professional at all times and they can rely on you to deliver the goods/service they expect. If you show them any pictures which cast doubt over that trust, or cast any aspersions over the professional integrity of your business, they’ll likely not give you their custom/take their money elsewhere. And this is the internet, there’s nothing people like more than a potential scandal.

10/ Don’t Contribute To Wikipedia

Last on this list, but often the top of Google searches. A lot of people assume that if they can make a Wikipedia page, or add to a Wikipedia page, that’ll be a high-ranking page for related searches. This almost always backfires. First of all, it’s difficult to create a Wikipedia entry dedicated to a company or business that’ll pass the requirements to feature in the online encyclopedia. Most pages get removed pretty quickly anyway, making any effort to write a piece a waste of time. But then, we’re forgetting the main point of Wikipedia. It’s the ultimate UGC website. It’s comprised almost entirely of user-generated content as, the ‘beauty’ of it is that literally anyone can edit it. An email and password later, and any Tom, Dick or Harry could edit what you’ve written. You could have said the nicest, brightest thing about your company and an 11-year-old could edit the article, and add the story (or cited references to the story) you’ve been trying to cover up in the first place. And all of a sudden, there it is – at the top of Google results page. And we can guarantee you – as hard as it is to bury random bloggers or news columnists, getting rid of Wikipedia entries is infinitely more difficult.

Again, this list is probably not the be-all and end-all of everything-you-could-possibly-do-to-shoot-yourself-in-the-foot, but it’s a good start. The trick is just to keep in mind “in what way is this likely to backfire?” and a bit of common sense should keep you on the straight and narrow. Sure, doing any of the above would certainly be considered a mistake but not an unrecoverable one. If you have any issues and aren’t sure how to proceed, get in touch with us – as ever, details are on the home page.

There’s one of two reasons you’re not laughing at the moment. Most commonly it’ll be because the joke wasn’t funny. Then you have the group of doctors who’ve just realised that the pictures they posted of last year’s New Years party might well cost them clients.

The internet’s a great wee thing. If you want an MP3 player, you’ll search for it on Google. Vintage cars? Google. Oh, what’s that? You’d like to find out a bit more about the person you’re trusting to reconstruct your nose? Yeah, Google will help you there too. In fact, people are becoming increasingly reliant on search engines for absolutely all their earthly needs, and – for better or worse – search engines are getting better at finding information too.

With new search tools such as Social CV and the long-running Xobni being able to scan dozens of social networking sites for personal information and internet behavioral trends, it’s never been more important to get a proper handle on your online presence. It’s more common just now for companies to use these tools to ‘vet’ candidates for employment or prospective business partners, but the information is there to be found by anyone.

Choosing a doctor is a big decision, and people need to have confidence that the people they’re trusting (often with their lives) are deserving of such trust. What does a Google search say about you? What does your Facebook or Twitter profile say about you? Your online social media presence, whilst usually intended to be personal, can be read into and used to form an opinion of you. And unless you’ve been careful to actively project a professional image of yourself, it could end up costing you. All it takes is for somebody to find a picture of you mooning a camera, 20 years ago in college, for a prospective client to lose confidence in you (or not to contact you to begin with).

An even worse result would be for somebody to find a picture, or see something you’ve said in a post (including, but not limited to,  participation in online forums) and they can repeat and relay this information for other people to find with greater ease. With the rapidly growing number of people writing their own blogs on anything and everything, it can sometimes be difficult to contain negative press once it gets out there.

Online Reputation Management is an industry which specializes in making sure that people see exactly what you want them to see. Using an extensive array of search engine optimization and positive marketing techniques, you can be sure that you can enjoy your personal life without worrying about pictures and comments being taken out of context. In turn, this will prevent your business from suffering and allow patients (prospective or otherwise) to evaluate your suitability based on proven medical experience, rather than your favourite football team or what music you listen to.

Google is to search engine and Facebook with social networking. Just like other website you can search on Facebook, but that necessarily does not make it a search engine.  On the other hand Google isn’t a social website.

But now reports have surfaced that Google wants it search to be more social. The reason behind this move is obviously they want to make a place for themselves in the social networking world.

After the Google Buzz social network fiasco, the search engine giant is stepping carefully with new social features. This time they have introduced “+1” button that will appear next to search results. This is intended to allow users’ to see what they liked and refer them or add them to their data. This is something similar to ‘Like’ button on Facebook.

The second reason to do so is Google thinks that information from +1 social search will provide them with important amount of data on the quality of websites and search results. Though Google say that data will not have any influence in search results, but the use in future is not ruled out.

Now it’s interesting to see how Google compete against the social networking giants. As it happened with ‘Buzz ’ when it was launched Facebook was already a household name and users had no plan to move to Google since their relationship have been there for years.

To rank first on major search engines is an objective most internet marketers and websites look for. Most of the companies optimize their websites to get on that first page of search engine results to invite visitors to their website. But is there anything other than SEO to get there?

Well, there are the Social Networking sites, and there’s enough evidence that SNS influences search engines. What happens, for example, when you have a facebook site with 10,000 fans and as many ‘likes’? Do they show up high on search engines?

There’s no doubt that Google closely monitors social media data with real-time Twitter updates integrated into searches. Now how they use it is a different story and it’s very hard to say because strong social media popularity usually converts high ranking on search engines. It’s a clear indication that Google uses it to determine what a trusted source is and this was something they had mentioned long time back.

Brand value of a domain was a ranking factor

It means you can probably improve your ranking in Google by promoting your site on social networks.

Social media is here to stay, because it is one of the most striking things to happen in a “free” market. All you invest is time. So take time to listen what people have to say about your business. If you are one of those curious types, make use of Google Alerts, YackTrack, Social Mention BackType and Trackur.

The year 2011 will be all about social media and the influence it has on search engines.  Remember when you share informative article and blogs with consumer, such interaction will only add value to your business. This in turn establishes you as an influence and fetches you higher rankings on the search engines.

Remember your company website’s success is as important to you as your marketing.  So do some research, look around and adapt to the changing technology and start applying new social media strategies at the earliest.  You will be surprised with the results, because a little bit of online socializing can take your business reputation to great heights.