What follows isn’t a necessarily revolutionary concept, merely my account of how I interpret some of the brand interactions I have online.

If you’ve been logged into Google since October 26, 2009, you might have noticed your search results displaying a little differently. Since last fall, Google’s been experimenting with a feature they’re calling Social Search (watch the :30 second snippet of the video from the Official Google blog post that’s pertinent to this discussion right here).

Upon reading the Social Circle FAQs, it seems that any links listed in your Google Profile show up in my search results. The only way to disable this feature on your own search results is to log out of Google when searching. Why is it important that a Twitter update I posted about having a great time at my local bowling alley-slash-bar-slash-themed karaoke room megalopolis shows up when you do a search for “The Highball?”

In marketing parlance, the collective references a consumer interprets of a brand are referred to as brand equity; online references you make about the things you consume are a part of this equity—and the online references only increase with the more tools we use online. I’ve added sixteen versions of my online identity to my Google Profile, which includes links to this blog, social network profiles, my photos and to top it off, my location—that’s a lot of data and a lot of value I add or detract from a brand’s equity when you see one of these references in Google and anywhere else we’re “friends.”

Although I’ve positively mentioned The Highball many times on those personal channels, they don’t have to pay me to write good things about them when I Twitter about an event I’m attending (which I do a lot of) or do something like post a photo on Flickr—my attitude towards the brand is already favorable, I love it more every subsequent time I visit and I want to share my good experiences with my friends (negative mentions of course would affect a brand’s equity negatively).

As the internet grows and more and more of our social interactions occur online, companies need to recognize that the best advertising comes right from your users (in the old days, we called that “word of mouth”—and it’s just as immeasurable now as it was then). And when people are talking about you online, you should reward them: both by engaging and talking back when they say something online where you’re allowed (positive or negative—this is key), but also with a great experience in real life—one they won’t care checking in to and tweeting and blogging about.

If a company isn’t approaching their online presence this way, they’re going about it all wrong and their customers will call them out for spamming. Done right, it can prove to be a good investment. At least this 18-32 year old American male thinks so.