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You may receive a warning in Google Webmaster Tools, but you will probably not receive a penalty. However, as JohnMu says in a Google Groups thread, those "warnings" are mostly nudges that you should try to diversify the meta data. You should keep in mind that the terminology should "makes sense to your users." If that means you need to work with duplicate meta data, then that's how you should proceed.

Message Center warnings for hackable sites Thursday, October 16, 2008 at 8:28 AM Recently we've seen more websites get hacked because of various security holes. In order to help webmasters with this issue, we plan to run a test that will alert some webmasters if their content management system (CMS) or publishing platform looks like it might have a security hole or be hackable. This is a test, so we're starting out by alerting five to six thousand webmasters. We will be leaving messages for owners of potentially vulnerable sites in the Google Message Center that we provide as a free service as part of Webmaster Tools. If you manage a website but haven't signed up for Webmaster Tools, don't worry. The messages will be saved and if you sign up later on, you'll still be able to access any messages that Google has left for your site.One of the most popular pieces of software on the web is WordPress, so we're starting our test with a specific version (2.1.1) that is known to be vulnerable to exploits. If the test goes well, we may expand these messages to include other types of software on the web. The message that a webmaster will see in their Message Center if they run WordPress 2.1.1 will look like this:

Oct 14, 2008 at 2:19pm Eastern by Greg Sterling    YouTube Now Featuring “Promoted Videos” Perhaps the “third leg” of the new YouTube monetization tool, the site has introduced “promoted videos.” These ads are to YouTube video search results as Google paid search is to organic listings. AdAdge wrote about the new ads yesterday. This new ad unit joins “click to buy” and ads on full-length shows, which were also introduced within the past week. Here’s an example of the promoted videos (right column) on a search results page on YouTube: In this case the search was “puppies” and only one of the ads is relevant. This is likely a function of a limited number advertisers at this point. Because promoted videos are fairly unobtrusive and consistent with the appearance of YouTube search results, they don’t impinge on the user experience. And while they could be quite effective for Google, the challenge will be to get enough coverage so that they’re relevant to queries and users click on them accordingly.

How Do You Measure Social? Some great tools can help you monitor the online conversation, ranging from free (e.g., Google Alerts, Technorati Watchlists, FriendFeed, Yahoo Pipes, etc.) to, uh, committing (e.g., TruCast, BuzzMetrics, Cymfony). The more expensive tools are worth what they cost, but the free tools are easy to set up and, well, they're free. And sometimes getting started is the biggest hurdle. You may just want to get something going on the cheap, show the value of your effort, and lobby for a robust, programmatic solution to monitor online activity and engage your customers where they hang out. You'll be surprised how much you'll learn, and you'll probably really enjoy it. The real challenges aren't technological, but operational. You have to define the right governance policies to manage customer engagement through social media, and you have to build the right workflow to prioritize responses, route information to the right people, and manage your content even as you release it into the wild. Employees need encouragement to participate, and they need clear guidelines about exactly when, how, and where to get involved. It takes effort, but the payoff can be tremendous. So don't stop at measuring your marketing efforts' success, or even the sentiment expressed in the broader online conversation about your brand. It's great to monitor online activity, better to develop reporting around online activity, and better yet to engage customers in their native online habitats.