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FairWinds Partners, a leading Internet strategy firm, released a new white paper this week detailing the importance of social media for businesses and brands. Specifically, they focus on building the right kind of online foundation by grabbing the domains and profiles most valuable to your identity, which is at the heart of the RepEquity social media strategy:

With these kinds of numbers, failing to at least secure usernames in social media sites simply is not an option—the question is, how does a company work to develop a clear social media strategy? For FairWinds, the connection between domain names and usernames is clear—they are both critical digital assets that protect and promote a company’s initiatives online.

What follows is an in-depth case study looking at some of the most powerful brands in America, and how they’re using social media to fully engage their consumer bases. It’s a good read, and worth the download.

By now, skepticism about the revenue potential of today’s most popular social networking sites is a well known bromide. Sure, the doubters say, go ahead and push your membership and your traffic into the stratosphere, but, in the end, how does that make you money? Translating usage and eyeballs into dollars: it’s a problem facing the likes of Twitter, Facebook, and every other star in the social universe.

But a report from the most recent issue of the Economist argues otherwise, pointing out that social network advertising is not only growing in importance, but also effectiveness:

Why are the networks becoming more popular when their click-through rates are so low? One reason is that advertisers are being drawn to the leading sites by their sheer scale. “Facebook’s audience is bigger than any TV network that has ever existed on the face of the earth,” says Randall Rothenberg, the head of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB)…. The other reason more money is heading the networks’ way is that some advertisers are seeing a great return on their investment.

While the Economist article focuses mostly on the growth potential of advertising on social networks, it also includes a telling graph that speaks to the entire field of online reputation management. Take a look:

What jumps out there to me is the incredible relative strength of online sources as compared to traditional advertising. Clearly, “friends recommendations” dominates the chart, and that’s an indication of how important viral messaging can be. But brand websites, community forums, and editorial content are all also found online and subject to the rules of ORM.

The lesson I’m taking away from the Economist’s study is that everything we do in the world of ORM has a significant impact on people, and is essential in building trust with the consumer.

Google introduced another new addition to its suite of products this week – an add-on to certain organic results dubbed Social Search:

From a rep management perspective, this particular stage of Google’s social search isn’t likely to have much of an impact. For starters, it’s only part of the search experience for people logged into a Google account (iGoogle, Gmail, etc). It also really doesn’t delve too deeply into any of the social networks it targets; Facebook’s privacy policies are going to limit most of what the spiders crawl.

We already advise most of our clients to maintain profiles on all the major social networks as a defense mechanism, if nothing else. The internal workings of Facebook currently ensure that only the bare bones “public” profile ever gets indexed in the first place, which is actually ideal for a professional looking to exert a degree of control over his or her online reputation. Sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter already perform very well in typical organic searches. The new Social Search only underscores the importance of being out there, but being smart about it.