Social Media and its effect on Search Engines

I work for a Web Development company in New Braunfels, Texas and was doing SEO on one of our clients when I came across something that interested me and thought I'd share it.

For a catering company in New Braunfels, I was trying to get them higher in the rankings for the search query "event catering new braunfels". They were 10th on the first page, once I google+1'd them however immediately they hopped to 5th on the first page. How? Well it appears that I came across another one of the many factors in Google's algorithm for search engine rankings. Further investigation showed that it went even further. For friends of mine, who follow and friend me on twitter and facebook, were effected by the search rankings as well.

Search engines are taking notice to the authority that social media have in today's world and rightfully so.