Do you exist if you’re not on Google?

Sitting around various round tables at this week's Social Media Club event at SAP, "Social Media to Corporate Media," one topic kept coming up: the power of the search engine. The top destinations on the Internet, before anything else, are Google, Yahoo! and other search engines.

Keynote speaker Robert Scoble, former Microsoft "brand evangelist" and now the journalist behind the blog Scobleizer, said search engines are critical to the success of social media work.

"What's really going on out there is ‘How are people going to find your stuff?'" he said. "It's got to be on Google. That is something you really need to understand: where the traffic is going to come through outside [Silicon] Valley - it's going to come from the search engine."

"If I was a plumber in San Jose and I didn't come up on ‘plumber, San Jose,' I would not be in business anymore," he said.