Are the social tools we are using the right tools for our businesses?

Let’s start with a couple examples…

It’s Sunday afternoon and a man walks into Robins Brothers, “the world’s largest engagement ring store”. After having a great experience with the clerk and making a selection, he’s prompted to share the store by a kiosk on the door. Elated about the experience he quickly “validates” the store by liking it through Facebook. Before he makes the 5 minute drive home his soon-to-be fiancé’s friends have all posted back congratulating the two on an engagement that hasn’t happened. Whoops.

Fast forward a few days… the same man heads out with his [now] fiancé to watch a movie at the local theatre. The film is considered a “chick flick” but he likes it. After the movie, fandango asks him to post a review through his choice of social sites… all of which use his real name. Concerned from his last incident that he’ll get caught by his buddies he says nothing. Opportunity lost.

The next day the woman’s wife who works for a large corporation that was presented in the movie in a less than great way gets a call from her bosses’ boss asking about a comment she made about the brand integration on her new Twitter account.  Realizing that what she had said was public, she turns off the feed from the site where she posted to Twitter.

None of these are far fetched, in fact, they’re all based on real stories that have happened and you can bet there are millions more out there. From a casual comment on a “like” of a particular brand to noting a review on a product a friend would not have expected you to buy, people are increasingly aware of the association between their lives and their postings.

While there’s inherent benefits in forcing real identity around social content like accessing someone’s friend network, or even seeming necessity, like detailed commentary, that’s a pro we’ve created without necessarily considering the impact of the con.

Thus it comes down to a decision: more content or better validation.

Luckily most brands don’t have to pick one or the other. With a host of tools it’s possible to allow both sides and with tweaking, even seemingly open tools can be made rather private. For example, Facebook’s basic like button posts right to the wall while the much richer UI share widget allows the user to select to exclude or include friends. Simple messaging to explain this may encourage a user afraid of exposure to hit share.

Give people enough choice to decide what and how while matching their own need for privacy, all while encouraging them to influence others – which accomplish your goal of creating visibility and buzz, even if it’s not quite in the way you wanted.

One of the chief issues I’ve always seen with search delivering the right results is the lack of insight into who is searching. With the introduction of +1 Google gains a much more real insight – what those around you are looking at. In aggregate this is useful in killing spam, building up good resources and sorting out poor / unliked results but when applied back to a search’s network whether it’s a contact or location based it becomes hugely powerful.

For example, if I search for “Miramar” result #1 is a city, #2 is a military base and nowhere on page 2 is the result I’m looking for – my former apartment community. Using location Google is able to infer some information about what result I may want, and even shows a map, but it’s not enough certainity to switch out the result set. With +1 data from local (geotargeted) networks they get a whole other dimension of insights to counterweight what is the most relevant (aka most linked too/ word weighted) with what is actually being looked at and suddenly the right result has a real shot of making it up top.

If Google is able to build enough of a profile network, +1 could become even more important in driving search results by understanding that all of my friends searching for a particular sports bar with a generic name or from within a larger chain were looking at the same venue and adjust accordingly, potentially even resetting the result in time given the type of listing.

Facebook is already doing this to some degree by leveraging your own likes, connections and your larger your network to suggest people, places and brand results in searches, and most of the time it’s right on (and with 2 million+ likes, that’s a big headstart). As Facebook and Google war over who is going to control searching, relevancy to the individual has got to be in the top couple of spots for importance and whoever understands the most about the person searching can deliver the best results to win their repeat attention and usage.

Google, while smart to bring in social feedback, is behind in a big way when it comes to making this applicable personally. Facebook and even youtube, twitter and others simply have them beat in connections per user and a partnership a la Amazon’s “your Facebook friends…” would have let them move quicker to incorporate individual social learnings into output. Even without the deep networks for users there’s a lot of implications to improving relevancy right now just by weighting down “-1” results, and of course there’s going to be a lot of blackhat attempts to leverage the tool to influence results too.