Candidates are increasingly using social media and many have a significant presence on several different social networks such as MySpace and Facebook. Fred Stutzman (TechPresident) has a great post on Senator Dodd’s use of the new social network aggregator tool, MyLifeBrand, which attempts to solve the problem of connecting supporters across multiple networks.

But as Stutzman rightly asks, is the attempt to connect these communities worth it?

It is only natural to watch the activities of various communities from a distance and want to **organize** those communities in ways that would be beneficial. For candidates, it would be especially useful to connect multiple communities across social networks and get them to coordinate/divvy up the work that needs to be done to elect the candidate. The problem is, organizing organic, Web 2.0 communities is a bit like herding cats. What is best for the campaign, what is best for the candidate, is not what generated the emergence of these communities in the first place. People connect for various reasons and unfortunately, those reasons usually have little to do with the goals of outsiders (candidates or companies).

Communities become communities based on specific shared interests, norms, values, etc. Multiple communities may share an interest in the candidate, but not connect in other ways – their communication norms, how status is awarded, hot button issues, etc. may vary significantly across communities. In other words, just because multiple communities share a common interest in a candidate doesn’t mean they will connect and coordinate with each other in ways that help the campaign.

Failure to fully understand how communities work in general, and the specific community one is attempting to communicate with, is a key reason that social media marketing often fails, both for nonprofit and commercial brands. ( Unfortunately, it takes a significant amount of time to understand a single community –and there are a lot of communities out there.) Rather than attempting to use the community for one’s own purpose, marketers are better served by figuring out what the community wants and helping them get it. That sort of engagement opens doors, builds relationships and paves the way for future initiatives.

Final Thought: Perhaps one of the reasons the audience centric approach Fred talks about (i.e., candidates going out to communities that already exist versus building their own and driving people in to “join”) has worked well for some candidates is that the interaction between the campaign and the community is taking place on the community members’ turf, which, in itself, may encourage less institutional, more personalized, and more respectful communications. When I visit someone else’s home, I look around, take note and interact in a way that is acceptable to my host. In other words, the environment in which the communication takes place shapes the communication. True, there are plenty of examples of companies and perhaps candidates who haven’t approached social media communications in this way – and equally as many examples of failed initiatives, or worse, swift consequences from the community.

If you haven’t had a chance to visit TechPresident, take a moment to poke around. There is some great stuff here. I love the the charts on supporters of each candidate across various SN’s and the tracking of increases and decreases, by candidate on each network.

I’m in love with reputation management. I think it’s of utmost importance to know what people are saying about you, your employer, your clients, and the places you send your business.

Growing up around a father who works in socially responsible investing, I’ve learned to think about environmentally friendly practices, fair labor and workplace practices, human rights, and community involvement. But for all of the good things being done by people in these areas, including by you and your businesses, vocal minorities can gain critical mass quickly, particularly when embracing social media. The sooner businesses embrace social media, the easier it becomes to manage the message, and mitigate damage already created by negative consumer reactions. Just make sure to check out how to avoid PR mistakes before you start engaging social media.

The viral possibilities of social media are not the only reasons to create content for placement on other’s websites. With Ask3d and Google’s Universal Search, and other search engines likely to quickly follow suit, spreading your corporate footprint through search results is quickly becoming a necessity. Videos, images, podcasts, blogs, news releases, maps, and stock quotes already pepper the SERPs in addition to your text-based pages. If Blendtec can have nearly 4 million views of a video at Youtube about a blender, and Southwest can fill SERPs with a Wikipedia result, news results, and a blog, so can your business or organization embrace video, wikis, news releases, and blogging, amongst the other aspects of universal results.

Reputation management is not search engine sabotage. It is about conducting your own positive campaign. Positive campaigns can include optimized press releases facing the issue head on, complete with apologies, if necessary.

Admitting you were wrong in a positive campaign may initially result in some highlighting of the negative information in search results, as seen in a search for JetBlue resulting in an article titled JetBlue’s C.E.O. Is ‘Mortified’ After Fliers Are Stranded. But there is no balance in search engine reputation management. In reputation management, one shouldn’t be balancing whether or not to address negative results. Creating positive campaigns to fill the SERPs will make it more difficult for future negative information to break into the top results and there is no easy fix to removing already high ranking negative information. You may end up highlighting the negative with a positive or apologetic aspect in the short term, but your long term efforts will sew up the results.

“THE DIRECT MARKETING ASSOCIATION ON Monday announced an agreement to merge its Email Marketing Council (EMC) into the Email Experience Council (EEC), and also said it will team with Return Path’s Sender Score unit to launch an Email Reputation Registry for its 3,600 member companies. ” (from MediaPost Publications- read the full article here)

Of course I’m all for Integration of online and offline communications, and companies working together to create standards for the industry, and even the need for better metrics to understand email user behavior and usage patterns. The above announcement that the DMA is merging it’s Email Marketing Council with Return Path’s Sender Score unit made me wonder what is going on and who is really to gain.

The DMA or email marketers?

Making a click/trip over to Return Path’s site, they announce that the DMA has acquired the Email Experience Council. In my mind and very recent experience, ‘merging’ and ‘acquiring’ – while technically the same thing – are vastly different. You merge with someone that you want to work with to make things better, you acquire something or someone when you want to dominate. Return Path states that the DMA acquired Return Path’s Sender Score unit. hmmm….

I don’t really see any huge conflicts of interest, or anything other than the DMA wanting to set more standards in the email marketing field. I’ve been doing email marketing for many many years myself, and am glad that some organizations are coming together (merged, bought, whatever…) to work through some pretty standard issues, metrics, compliance, best practices.

In reading the article further:

“Return Path, meanwhile, will help DMA members gain access to third-party data about their email programs through the new Email Reputation Registry, which is scheduled to launch as a pilot program this summer before expanding to the entire DMA in the fall.

In addition to email authentication–and access to monitoring data, reports, and alerts for IP addresses and domains–the registry will provide DMA members with access to other key email marketing metrics, including compliance with CAN-SPAM’S 10-day unsubscribe processing requirement and end-user spam complaints. It will also include a resource center with free white papers on implementing email authentication protocols, as well as other best practices.”

The problem – or maybe just a caution flag – is — what is this Email Reputation Registry that will be created? Is this another hoop that email marketers will have to jump through to get emails delivered? I’m happy that it seems that it will be going after spammers and violators of the CAN-SPAM act, but what else will be a trigger to them?

I’m also a little concerned that my client data will be used to help competitors get data that I protect ferociously.

I’m eager to join this Email Experience Council to make sure that – as an email marketer – my client information and data is used correctly.

Google, Google, Google, was how Chris Boggs recently started one of his articles. He talked about Google attempting to invade every aspect of our lives, and he was right. Of course they have search, they’ve moved into the business documents business, they have social media sites, email, analytics, etc, and today they’ve purchased an email security firm. In the offline world they’ve been making moves, with varying degrees of success, in TV and print advertising, and now they’re even forwarding your phones calls. Yes, with Grand Central Google allows people to reach you no matter which phone you’re near. The first thing you have to do is get an invite, such as one of those being given out by Lee Odden. Then you log into the system, and tell it where you’d like a phone number from. It doesn’t have to be local, you can pick one from anywhere in the US, you can pretend to be exotic with an Albany phone number, even though you’re in Wichita. Of course, local charges wouldn’t apply. The system gives you a choice of 5 numbers, with the option of generating another set, should you so wish.

Once you’ve entered all your information, you simply enter your work number, your home number, and your cell number (there is an option for the system to disregard your home number during regular business hours). When someone calls your new number each of your phones rings. You pick the closest one to you, and answer it. The system even nicely tells you who is calling and gives you the option to not answer their call (just in case you really do want to hide from them). It seems like a nice system, and the best part is that it’s free. As to whether it will stay that way, other products that they’ve put out there have, so who knows?

I was in Europe when “I’ve Got a Crush on Obama” started gaining steam on You Tube. The first stop on my trip was Berlin and as I ran past what is left of the old Checkpoint Charlie early one morning, I pondered whether the Wall would have been possible if You Tube had been around.

Both my husband and my older sister spent several years in Berlin during the height of the military build up (my sister’s friend was caught helping people escape to the West and spent six years in an East Berlin prison) so I’ve always been enthralled with student activism during that time — the tunnel built by students that resulted in so many escapes over a two day period; the cars transformed into escape vehicles; the countless acts of bravery. Even the small acts of rebellion — a friend we visited during our stay recounted her many trips into the East during the Wall era, smuggling necessities into friends, bringing information in and back out again. One lone individual, on foot, a conduit of information between East and West.

As I ran through the streets of East Berlin that morning, I wondered what student activism here would have looked like in the age of You Tube. The best escape routes based on troop movements and police presence, how to build better hiding places into cars, how people in the West were living differently, atrocities in the East. Not that the Soviets wouldn’t have tried to limit access to such information. Still, I can see our friend, in an apartment on the East side, pulling out an iPhone from underneath her big, bulky, 1970’s style Granny dress while a small crowd gathers round to watch the latest escape intelligence on You Tube. A free flow of information across that Wall – between the prisoners of the East and the activists of the West – would have been simply unmanageable for the Soviets.

Humans create; Humans share; Humans connect. We’ve always done it. The only thing that has changed over time is how we do it. Social Media just makes it a lot easier for us. It’s a simple concept but the implications are huge.

Marshall McLuhan (The Medium is the Message) said almost 40 years ago that “Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.” Which makes me wonder… what’s next? What will the next iteration of Social Media look like and how will it shape the world we live in?

It used to be that you would have ten text search results in Google, of which only 1 or 2 could come from a single domain. So if you wanted to dominate your SERP (Search Engine Results Page), you’d need to get at a minimum 5 domains ranking well for your name. Why would you want to do that? Well, if there was an uncomplimentary result out there, you’d most likely not want potential customers to see it, so by dominating your SERP you can push those uncomplimentary results ‘below the fold’, onto the second page or even lower. Sounds easy doesn’t it? Of course, you then have the challenge of getting those domains to rank for your name, which involves link building, unique content, etc.

So what’s changed? Google. No longer content with just returning text results, Google has rolled out Google Universal Search. This now combines the results from the various searches that you previously had to do individually, such as image and video. So a search for your brand name may now show images, videos, news, patents, etc, along with the old-style text results.

How can you take advantage of this? The answer is to get out there and take advantage of those different search result mediums. Work with videos, push out images, get your company in the news, etc. By spreading your corporate footprint in such a way, you’re not only pushing your message through the main search, you’re also pushing it through these specialized searches, which still exist. As Tamar points out on Search Engine Roundtable, you should be proactive about your reputation management strategy, as if you’re reactive, the negative news / post / video / etc, will be out there and visible to your customer base until you can push it out. After all, the goal is that you want to have your potential customers know all the good things about your company and your products / services, not the negative things – perceived or real…