I came across an article today on E-Consultancy, Lifting Google Rank using social conversations which confirms this is the route which Google is going.

A year ago I wrote a blog post about how customer comments would influence your search engine listings. Ahead of my time I hear you say (comes with being in the industry for 12 years!)

When I did the blog post I specifically mentioned Google Search Wiki which was technology which Google seems to have sidelined. Perhaps they were just testing the concept with this technology and have rolled it out with mainstream technologies. With the growth of twitter, blogs and forums these have become mainstream technologies. Google can identify the different content types such as blogs, forums, books, twitter, video, images

From Google’s view if a site / company gets a lot of negative comments in the forums / blogs /twitter, then it makes sense not to rank them as high as companies that have positive sentiments online.

You need to take that leap of faith
Companies that are early adopters of this technology & marketing will create a competitive advantage which will be hard to catch up with. As the UK nudges out of recession companies need to look at innovative ways to build their business back up.

What better way than to engage with your customers and to listen to their feedback, so you are delivering products and services, in a manner that meets their expectations.

Start Small
Start listening and monitoring the conversations around your brand / market first, so you can map out the sites and influencers on the sites.

So what steps are you taking to start listening to your customer so you can create that competitive advantage through the social conversations?