Much has already been written about the importance of the use of technology in the U.S. election.

Election Night Sketchbook from Social Signal

Change.gov has been applauded as an important nod to the importance of engaging with people, yet has still received some criticisms about how open it really is. Still, it is a fantastic indicator of the effectiveness of technology to empower and mobilize passionate constituents. Just as social media is increasingly important in our everyday interactions with brands, we are able to engage with our government in this efficient, open, collaborative manner.

So I was saddened and surprised to read that Obama may have to give up his blackberry (and not just to exchange it for an iPhone or an Android!) Evidently there are concerns about government record-keeping.

Wow, didn’t poor Sarah Palin get roasted online for the use of her yahoo email account for “official business”?

The concerns of internet privacy and documentation of online activities isn’t limited to government officials. We should all be aware of the potential long-term implications of our online activities. At the Thin Air Summit last weekend, the comment was made that you should consider if you would wish anything you put online to be read by family members or splashed on the front page of the newspaper. If not, a) don’t do it, or b) don’t document it.

The world would be a better place if we all took the first option above. Unfortunately, it appears that by cautioning president-elect Obama not to carry a blackberry, we are advising him to go with the latter.

We all need to learn how to monitor our online activities to protect our personal and professional brand affiliations: should we not expect our President to be able to do the same?

Yesterday at the Thin Air Summit, I attended a panel entitled “Search Engine Optimization with New Media.” Panelists were Brett Borders, Elizabeth Yarnell and John Fischer, and the session was moderated by Micah Baldwin.

The presentation consisted of a slide overview by Brett, some general recommendations by the other panelists, and then a few brave audience members submitted their URLs for review.

This is the second time I’ve heard Brett speak, and I am always impressed with his depth of knowledge. At lunch he’d mentioned that he’s actually looking to shift from reputation management and SEO to social media promotion.

This shift makes sense to me, although I don’t feel as strongly as Micah, who, after the conference, boldly stated on twitter that If you do SEO for a living, you will be out of business or irrelevant in 3 years.

He elaborated in a blog post today, that he feels that “the act of SEO - adjusting the code and content of a website with the primary purpose to be ranked highly in search results, is on its way out.”

For me, a site optimized for a search engine that employs clear language, semantically-correct mark-up and content that can be interpreted by a non-human reader is going to offer a better user experience for everyone.

One of the fundamental premises of social media is the notion of reputation and recommendation. Before the Internet, we looked to our local social circle for advice or guidance. With the Internet came this glut of information, and we had access to much more information. The challenge is no longer “search”, it’s “filter”. I can find hundreds or thousands of results to my query, but how do I find those that are most relevant or informative? We are now looking back to our social circles for guidance in these matters: the difference is that our social circles now have the possibility to be significantly larger.

So is SEO still relevant? Yes, because someone still needs to be the initial “finder” of the information. Optimizing a site for search engines can help humans find and categorize content, as well. How often do you run a search for a specific article or site you know you’ve seen before? Search is not only for the discovery of new content, it can also serve to recover previously visited content. Yet if you don’t recall the exact terminology on the site, or all the content of the site is cloaked in images, your task will be more difficult.

As content providers, do we not want our content to be available to anyone who wishes to find it? Therefore, we would do well to optimize: for search engines, for screen readers, for human consumers. It’s not just search engines that benefit from a well-crafted title tag, so too do the people you want to attract.

Some of the folks I heard from this weekend stated simply that SEO was boring, and social media was more interesting. But the enjoyment of performing a job should not be correlated with the necessity of its completion. Creating a site that is easily indexed and recoverable is never a negative thing, although I will admit that there are other factors that should also be considered in site design, development and promotion.

Micah’s perspective appeared hinged on the fact that SEO should not be the duty of an external consultant or agency, which does fall in line with my views of user experience and accessibility. These are core principles that should be considered throughout the project, from inception through implementation. But I feel it is not suffering from death, but rather on the cusp of a rebirth of legitimacy, wherein planning for accessibility and indexability will become standard practice.

On Oct 21, I attended my first meeting of the Mile High Social Media Club. The speakers were Brett Borders of Copy Brighter and Jason Cormier of Room214. They did a great job talking about social bookmarking. Their presentation was geared to a broad audience, serving both to introduce the topic and also to offer some more advanced tips and tricks. Brett was particularly engaging to listen to, as his enthusiasm colored his speech with comments that social bookmarking was like heroin!

You can view my live-time Twitter updates, which I tagged with #mhsmc. (not sure what the “#” is? Read my previous post “What’s the deal with hashtags on twitter?“)

The meeting was sponsored by filtrbox, although at Columbus web analytics Wednesdays meetings, being sponsored meant we didn’t have to pay for our own drinks I hadn’t heard of filtrbox before, but many in the room had. It strikes me again that despite the fact we’re engaged in an online space, proximity and geo-location do factor into what we’re exposed to. I spoke with Patrick Cameron of filtrbox afterwards, and was quite impressed with their service. They do brand monitoring and classify their sources as mainstream, blogs or social media. Individual sources can be blocked, or ranked within the app as more relevant. The app was built with flex, and when one of the founders, Ari Newman, showed me an iPhone-friendly report I thought for a brief moment I’d met some geniuses who’d managed to get a flex app on the iPhone! Alas, the guys seem great, but they are mere mortals.

I met a few folks (Rod Saunders of HumanFlow and Jonathan Sackheim of The Booyah Agency.) I was both a bit embarrassed and pleased by the street cred I got when I said I’d been a DMOZ editor back in the day. Jonathan said he’d never met an real editor before!

I made sure to speak with Brett and Jason and thank them for their presentations. I also have to say that Jason Cormier of Room214 officially has the best business cards I’ve seen! It was fun to ‘talk shop’ with others interested in the social media space, but I also enjoyed getting to know the folks beyond that. Once again I’m struck by the friendly nature of Coloradans. It wasn’t long before I had recommended sites to see, and I really enjoyed speaking
with Brett about languages: he can get by in Japanese, took Spanish in school and is now learning Hebrew. We discussed how different languages can really affect how you see the world, and drew a comparison to programming languages.

I haven’t blogged much since arriving in Denver and working to get my feet beneath me, but I certainly feel renewed after the event. I have a few new ideas brewing, and look forward to exploring them here. I missed Refresh Denver last week, but Patrick of Filtrbox recommended I check out the Boulder Denver New Technology Meetup, so I may have to do that as well. I look forward to engaging with some new folks (since I can only participate in the Columbus Tweet-up virtually!)

Do you encourage your site visitors to AddThis or ShareThis?

Facilitating content sharing is nothing new, and there are many services out there to help bloggers or site owners encourage the sharing of their content. In addition to the buttons mentioned above, there are also scripts such as mooSocialize, and there are numerous wordpress bookmarking plug-ins.

So how do you choose?

A few considerations:

1. prominence. how important is this feature to surface
2. site look/visual integrity. this may relate to prominence.
3. breadth of offering. how many services can you promote to, how many are relevant
4. ease of integration. can you add it to your site easily?
5. analytics. does this thing work? so what?

I will admit, I shy away from AddThis purely because I don’t like the button they provide. Yes, I’m that shallow. For me, social sharing is a service to offer my visitors, but it’s not that important to my overall goals. I wanted a solution that added to, rather than detracted from, the overall look of my site. I didn’t want to hit people over the head with it.

I currently use the sociable plugin for wordpress, which has a tremendous amount of services to choose from. You can customize which to show, the order thereof, and other aspects of the display as well.

As a wordpress plugin, it was very easy to add to my site. As a developer, this isn’t generally a breaking point for me, but it may be for others.

The one drawback that I see with this plugin is that it doesn’t offer the analytics that both AddThis and ShareThis do. ShareThis gives a site owner the opportunity to look at button views and clicks, as well as click-through ratios, most popular content and more. Obviously if a site is doing any sort of analytics they will be able to gather some of this information, but just knowing how often people are considering sharing your content, and to where, could also be of interest.

Those are a few of the things I think about when deciding on a social sharing strategy. How about you? What do you use, and why?

This month I read eagerly as the writers of two blogs I follow (Dave Knox of Hard Knox Life and David Griner of The Social Path) showed off their shiny new social media job titles. I yearned for the day I could make such an announcement myself, just waiting for the right time..

and so it is.

I am honoured and excited to announce that next week I will be joining Worldways Social Marketing as their Director of Social Media and Interactive Technology. According to their about page,

Social marketing is helping socially responsible organizations imagine their futures; create new programs and products; and connect with the people that need them. Social marketing is the use of traditional and emerging marketing techniques to bring about changes in policy, practice and behavior that improve the well-being of people and communities.

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve always loved technology for how it could be used to foster community and communication. Indeed, back in 2000 I worked as webmaster for youthone.com, a government-sponsored initiative targeted at local youth.

The idea is to strengthen and build a youth community so that young people can pursue their dreams and ambitions without being restricted by social barriers. It also provides a forum for young people in Edmonton to communicate with others their own age. One of the most helpful parts of the site is the crisis chat and the crisis forums, where teens can go to chat about their problems or see how others have dealt with their own. It’s free and can be used anonymously.

- from Youthone: not just another project by ‘the Man’ (2002)

When I first spoke with the folks at Worldways about their vision to really embrace social media and online communities, it was as though things were really coming full circle for me. This is why I got into working on the web in the first place: I saw the potential of technology as an alternative communications channel and a way to foster community regardless of physical proximity or ability.

Obviously, accessibility and social media are particular areas of interest to me, and they’re related. Technology can be used not only for entertainment, but also to facilitate communication and gather information, as well as to actually remove barriers for individuals. I am very excited about the opportunity to be able to offer my expertise in online community building and leveraging social media to effect social change.

I hold degrees in Combined Languages (French and Spanish), Digital Communications, and Computer Science. My interest in technology was always been centered around facilitating communication, in creating systems that could have a positive impact on people.

A decade ago I could have never predicted I would be taking a job in “social media”; the term didn’t yet exist. But if I could have described what I wanted to do, this would be it. I’m very excited to take on this new endeavour.

Edit: I forgot to mention that I found out about this position thanks to the listings provided by Forrester Analyst Jeremiah Owyang, whose blog and twitter feed I follow.. an example of social media success in and of itself!