This is my second post in less than a week about Google.

I’m not obsessed I promise, but Google does seem to be rolling out a lot of new features recently (as well as spending a hell of a lot on advertising, no doubt taking advantage of cheap outdoor ad rates which it has helped to drive down).

Anyway, last week, following much anticipation, Google finally began rolling out ‘Google Real Time Search’. Real Time Search refers to the incorporation of ‘real time’ social media updates (from sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed) in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Of course, not all social media updates will be automatically incorporated in SERPs, but Facebook users will need to check/update their privacy settings to make sure their conversations are not being indexed by search engines.

So the question on everyone’s lips is – what will this mean for brands? If ever a brand was looking for a time to take social media seriously, surely this is it?

In a nutshell, yes. Whether you are a brand that commands one tweet a month, or one tweet a second, these real time updates will affect you. If you are part of a company which only gets tweeted about on rare occasions, each social media mention will act as a permanent fixture on the first page of Google until someone else decides to talk about you. And, if that mention has come from an irate customer, then I’m pretty sure that the ’someone else’ will be you!

Conversely, if you are a company which generates a lot of chatter online, then it will become important to ensure that overall sentiment is consistently positive. For example, for a global FMCG brand, one tweet will probably have a SERP-life of under a minute, giving individual tweets less impact. However, we all know how quickly things can escalate within social media, and 10 or 15 ‘retweets’ later, you may have a problem.

For trending news stories, I think that Real Time Search adds a new “emotional” element to online coverage. When searching for news about the BA strike, I was immediately confronted with tweets from real people who are being affected by the action.

And then, there is the issue of spam. Take a look at the image at the top of this blog post. I got Graphic Alliance to feature on the first page of google results for the term “google real time search”, which is a very popular search term at the moment. Will people use trending topics to promote things entirely unrelated to that topic? Probably. I mean, it’s already happening on a massive scale within Twitter (Twitter displays trending topics, and a number of ‘twitterers’ incorporate these words in their tweets to gain visibility for something else).

As well as acknowledging the impact that Google Real Time Search has on your own online reputation, you should also think about ways to use Google Real Time Search to your advantage. Ensure that you are having regular conversations with your audiences online, and responding to valid customer queries quickly, even if it is just to say “we’ll get back to you shortly”. Constantly monitor what people are saying about you, your products, and your competitors. Don’t rely on Google alerts to tell you when people are talking about you – tweets will appear on Google search engine listings before you get your update, trust me, I just tried it! Use a faster monitoring system, like Tweetdeck, to see conversations as they happen.

I’m not saying that real time updates are the only important aspect of search engine results pages; in reality, they are ephemeral and I would rather have to deal with a negative tweet about me than a negative news article with a permalink. Also, a live feed is not available for every search term yet, just popular ones, although, Google have stated that Real Time Search will become ubiquitous very soon.

To conclude, what I think real time updates have done is ensure that social media cannot be ignored. But exactly how people take notice remains to be seen.