Part of my role as Director of Social Media and Interactive Technology at Worldways is to establish our social media practices and presence. This includes that sort of dream job most social media aficionados love: introducing our passion to those around us. So as I’ve been working on some “intro to social media” guidelines/best practices, I’ve come to this precise issue.

For most people, dipping their toes into social media means first finding some interesting conversation, reading, commenting, and then eventually, possibly, becoming more active and blogging themselves. But it occurred to me that with each comment comes an opportunity to be linking to a URL.

If someone does not have a blog to link to, should they leave that field blank, or is there another URL that they should reference? In the case of my co-workers, who may be planning to establish a more robust online presence, should they create their blog in anticipation of their future endeavours, simply to have somewhere to link to?

I suppose this is one of those questions of what the purpose of the URL is. I’ve seen the same thing on LinkedIn profiles where people have the option to list URLs - some people put their personal sites, others post their company URL. Is the point to offer supplementary information on yourself (according to Joshua Porter, the blog IS the new resume), or your employer?

I see social media as an interesting interplay between personal and professional branding. I use my own email address and URL when I post online, not my work address. Yet my ‘about’ page clearly calls out my professional affiliation. I know that clients have googled me and therefore my personal brand helps to contribute to the overall perception of my employer.

I suppose if one were commenting in relation to their job (current or desired), a link to a LinkedIn profile may be appropriate. I associate the comment with the person’s name, and therefore would want to see more personal information, as opposed to a link to their general company website. But that’s just me; what do you think?

It made sense, and I happily started tumbling quotes, links and images, primarily related to social media. However, it has occurred to me that the notion of “sharing with others” isn’t playing out as I had intended, as I am not really sharing, I’m simply collecting.

At the Thin Air Summit this weekend, one audience member mentioned that she is not as good a community player as she should be; she would like for people to stumble or digg her content, but she doesn’t think to do it herself often enough. A simple enough statement, yet so true.

Why do I use tumblr? To easily gather content I like and want to recommend to others. So why am I not leveraging the existing sites that do this well?

This weekend I installed the stumbleupon toolbar, and stumbled a few articles I’d already forwarded manually to friends. Yesterday I received notice from the author that the site had received some good traffic, in part due to my stumble. Fantastic! Isn’t that the point? To recommend and circulate quality information?

I asked my tweeps who all used tumblr, and received back a few comments:

Text-friendly version of the above:
@slimgoodies: @afhill I use it to collect interesting/inspiring stuff for later use, when the well runs dry http://slimgoodies.tumblr.com/
@cbarcelona: @afhill Shust (@getshust) uses Tumblr for a couple of his blogs as well.
@cbarcelona: @afhill I use Tumblr as primary blog. Have to admit I’ve been terrible about posting lately. Twitter hooked up directly to feed posts.
@jenjmeredith using tumblr to log all of the pretty things I see that I like: http://jenispostingon.tumblr.com.

I know plenty more folks on tumblr, who chose not to speak up Yet I’ve noticed that their frequency of posting has diminished somewhat in recent months.

When I worked the social media cafe at iCitizen last Spring, we showed off tumblr as an easy way to blog. Yes, it was stripped down; there was no commenting on by default, the API was clunky and I never managed to embed it properly where I wanted to. It occurred to me recently, though, that perhaps its day is done. As twitter ramps up with third-party services like TwitPic or TinyPaste, it becomes increasingly easy to get beyond the 140 character limit to push enriched content out to an awaiting public.

If an author blogs in a forest and no one is there to read it, does it really get posted? I believe there are many reasons to blog, and they don’t all have to be geared towards mass consumption. But my objective was to share found content with others, and upon reflection I’m not sure tumblr is the best platform to do so. I don’t really promote my tumblog, so its reach is minimal. I believe in the Groundswell POST approach: People, Objectives, Strategy and then Technology. Reviewing my objectives, it appears that tumblr is not the ideal solution.

I heard it once described that if a blog is a journal, tumblr is a scrapbook. That seems to be a good analogy: a scrapbook is something personal, it’s a piece of art. Yet is it an effective means to disseminate information.. perhaps not.

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?

Mobile Marketing: Is It Really the Next Big Thing?

You’ve probably read recently that mobile marketing is next big thing. More than one executive, seeing the cell phone as the key to a portable, omnipresent one-to-one relationship, has called it the “most powerful marketing tool in history.” That day may come, but make no mistake: We’re not there yet–not even close.

The above quote, from ChiefMarketer.com, seems to accurately sum up the current state of affairs: we are on the edge of a dramatic shift, the introduction of a powerful new platform that will fundamentally change the relationship between consumer and brand.

The article was written in 2005.

At the Thin Air Summit this weekend, I had the pleasure of listening to Kim Dushinski, author of the upcoming “Mobile Marketer’s Handbook” speak on “Why Mobile Matters When Using New Media”. I am really fascinated by this subject and am eager to learn all I can about it.

Kim mentioned that mobile is considered by some to be the seventh mass media channel, which struck me as odd. What is “mobile”, really?

Coming from a development background, I see it as a platform. We can build applications to run on the platform, and we can leverage its portable nature.

In her presentation, Kim specifically mentioned tools (text messaging - SMS, MMS), mobile web (advertising, SEO, pay-per-click), proximity marketing (bluetooth), mCommerce (physical goods) and mobile apps (software, widgets). She also drew a distinction between the mobile web and the Internet.

I have plenty of thoughts on this matter, so I’m going to limit this post to the mobile web: Internet on phones.

With the iPhone and Android, many seem to think that the mobile web is available and ubiquitous. Yet I would argue that mobile development may actually be stunted by the “fully-featured Safari browser” of the iPhone. It is possible that developers will cease to consider the intricacies of designing for this portable device. Yet the simple fact that the iPhone does not support Flash should be enough of an indication that designing for mobile is still a valued skill.

Although I don’t have statistics to support this, it has been suggested that people search, rather than browse, while on their mobile phones. Based on different visitor needs, therefore, a different user interface may be preferable. A simple example? If I’m accessing the website of a retail establishment on my phone, I am likely looking for store hours, a phone number, or an address. I’d like to access that information quickly and easily, rather than having to scroll past slowly loading images (or worse, be met with nothing, as all the content is in Flash!)

Beyond the iPhone not supporting Flash, there are MANY more challenges associated with developing for the mobile web. In fact, I’d argue that mobile development in 2008 is similar to web development in 2000. Do you develop in WAP, XHTML Mobile Profile or XHTML Basic? What browsers are you supporting, what resolution?

Some services like mofuse can take your content and make it “mobile-accessible”, but this does not mean the user experience is ideal; this is akin to those automatic translation programs like babelfish. The content may be translated, but are ‘cultural’ distinctions accounted for?

Is the mobile web the next big thing? To differentiate it from the plain ole Internet, we need to consider the differences we can capitalize upon: the location of the site visitor and the implications to their desired tasks and outcomes. Only then can we hope to design an optimal experience that will signal a true change.

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.

I don’t, officially, but I can speculate, and I also googled

When DMOZ was brought up at the session, I volunteered that I had been an editor back in the day, and I guessed that the recent update to the guidelines was due to the lack of democracy-an editor can maintain their section autonomously. Indeed, I was solicited to serve as editor when I submitted a site I maintained. When the volunteer pool is folks who have a vested interest in their own site(s) being promoted, how objective can you really expect the directory to be? While there are certainly ways to “game” digg and stumble-upon, at the very least one some level the wisdom of the crowd should offer some level of checks and balances.

A secondary consideration is the whole basis of google - the PageRank algorithm (math and stats and computer science). I’ve read a fair amount from the google folks, and it appears their preference is to automate, automate, automate. Yahoo! was a human-powered directory that was super-ceded by Google because Google was able to offer better, more accurate results, more quickly. PageRank is based on authority: inbound vs outbound links, and the quality thereof. As a directory, DMOZ links out far more than it’s linked to. The algorithm must therefore be tweaked to assign a weighting to a directory like this. So how much ‘authority’ do you assign to a listing in DMOZ, when they let anyone, even Canadian college kids, be editors?

I do recall a bit of an uproar months ago about a blog post that claimed that Google was to punish pagerank for digg stories. Although it’s never really been verified as coming from a legitimate Google source, the warning seems to make some sense: sources that were found to be manipulating social bookmarking sites to unfairly promote sites would be blocked. Don’t be evil, kids, and you’ll be fine.

What I feel makes the story really interesting, however, is the buzz shortly following that Google was planning to acquire digg. Was the “leaked” blog post a way to devalue digg in the eyes of SEO folks? Or does google really recognize the importance of social bookmarking? A Stanford 2008 survey actually found that 25% of the sites posted to del.icio.us have not yet been indexed by the major search engines. That’s pretty amazing. I would love to have seen if Google incorporated digg rankings into their algorithm, or kept digg as a complimentary service and simply used it to help find new sites to index more quickly. Assigning authority to individual users would be very, very interesting!

So why did Google update their guidelines? Hard to say. But it may be because:

1. Google sees directories as having equal credibility as other sources, so there is no need to distinguish them in the guidelines
2. Google sees human-classified directories as having less credibility than other sites
3. The Google algorithm needs to take into account many more sources than simply directories like Yahoo! and DMOZ
4. Google wants the demise of all non-Google entities

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!)

Anyone who knows my background knows that I have a love-hate relationship with Flash. Years of focusing on accessibility, reuse and search engine optimization had me a bit jaded when I started at Resource. Yet working with a team of strong developers with an awareness of the shortcomings of Flash lead me to a grudging appreciation of the power it did offer.

In 2008, would I advocate an entirely Flash-based site from an agency? Only if it were built in a progressively enhanced manner to account for the different platforms people are using the access the web. Sure, many people have the Flash player installed on their computer.. but what about those of us who love our iPhones?

The folks at Adobe are doing great things to allow Google to index content within Flash.. but it’s still in its infancy. With HTML, you can use semantic tags such as headings to indicate the relative importance of your content. There is currently nothing similar for content that is rendered inside your Flash experience. Google may index it, but it has no idea what’s most important, which may have a negative effect on how your site is ranked.

Can site visitors deep-link into your Flash experience? Even if Google does manage to dig into your content, can site visitors easily find what they’re looking for once they hit your site? Schematic does a good job at this, although I wish having JavaScript disabled didn’t throw you into a stripped down site (looks like this may be their mobile fall-back).

Schematic's website with JavaScript disabled

Resource Interactive's Website with JavaScript Disabled

I’ve written enough on this blog about Flash and accessibility and how it kinda-sorta works in certain environments. Does your target audience really not include anyone with visual, motor or cognitive impairments? Are you willing to ignore them on the off chance they’re not using Windows/IE with JAWS?

Flash may seem engaging and appealing to a client, but can you afford to put all your eggs in a rich internet application basket? Sadly, many clients aren’t aware of the intricacies of the techniques that ensure your site is accessible and usable by all shades of your target audience. Is your agency doing you a disservice by selling you the shiniest car on the lot, with no information on what’s under the hood and how it performs?

I do want to be fair: I took a look at the Razorfish site that Brian posted about, and it degrades gracefully with JavaScript disabled. Indeed, Razorfish (or as it was then known as, Avenue A Razorfish) are the folks who published the white paper on SOFA – Search Optimized Flash Architecture. They know their stuff, they are not building Flash sites at the expense of the other things I’ve spoken about today. But are they educating their potential clients on the quality under the hood?

RIA is about interaction.. make sure your agency can explain to you how different audiences on different platforms can interact and engage with your site and brand. Otherwise, you can just go ahead and print up a few old brochures.

I just came across this old photo from the iCitizen conference held by Resource Interactive last May. I’m working the social media cafe, speaking with David Griner and another conference attendee about lifestreaming.

We discussed wordpress, tumblr, flickr, twitter and digsby.

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?