I’ll admit it. I grated and mashed my teeth at the thought of yet another social media profile to complete!

However, I’m nothing if not open minded and despite its relatively late arrival, I’ve decided that Google Plus makes sense.

What may not be immediately apparent, but will play out over time, is the deep strategic connection between the new Google Plus social media platform and, its sister, the ever present search engine.

There’s been much talk about personalized search results in internet techie circles. For anyone unfamiliar, here’s how it works. Google has enabled their search engine to deliver results that account for content generated and recommend by your social media connections. It’s not magic, however. These results are fed by your Google account, including any links you share to your ‘non-Google’ social media sites. Now, supposedly, personalized search results will only be delivered when you are logged into your Google account and only if you are opted in to this process.

This is a very powerful idea.

Google has figured out a way to benefit from all the work that competitive social media sites have already done, successfully.

Here’s where it gets really interesting. Without any improvements to your search engine optimization strategy, your content will automatically rise in importance for any searches conducted by your social media contacts. It won’t just rise, mind you, it will dramatically rise.

There’s a caveat to my thumbs up –

While I’m sure that we will all benefit from, and maybe even enjoy, the availability of personalized search results, this direction will only work if Google fulfills its promise to turn it off, as promised. Delivering on this promise will not only be critical to earning our interest and participation in this new direction, but our very trust.

After all, what’s the point of a world wide web if it becomes confined to those with whom you’re already connected? That’s not a world wide web, that’s a bubble. While many of us may want to network or play in a bubble, we would certainly want to maintain our rights to come and go at our own free will.