This 2008 presidential campaign has been unique in many ways, but one aspect in particular that I have been fascinated with is how social media has become an influential part of this race for the White House.  I never would have thought that when Facebook and MySpace first were established that they would have experienced the tremendous growth that we have seen in the last few years.  Today companies, organizations, groups and even presidential candidates have profiles on social networking sites.  

These sites have been particularly valuable among the younger population and have played a significant role in engaging young voters during this election season.

Through online networks, candidates are communicating with younger supporters and are reaching out to voters in a way that hasn’t been available in the past.  Essentially, through social networks, presidential candidates are able to become part of voters’ social groups, their “friends”, in efforts to gain support.  A shift away from preaching and more toward conversing with supporters has become apparent.  This shows the power of social media.  It allows for a more intimate and personal connection, a relationship that can hopefully build trust.

The legitimacy of the presidential candidates and their message is also reinforced through social media.  If a candidate slips and is inconsistent with something that they say or their perceived message, it will likely be known in real time.  That is the good, and sometimes bad thing about social media, blogs and perhaps the Internet in general.  Information can spread very quickly and with active bloggers everywhere, this is inevitable. 

Not only do these sites open another channel for communicating with voters, candidates can also utilize them to observe their campaigns. Through blogs, the way in which voters are receiving a candidate’s message can be monitored. Demographic information about supporters such as where they live, their age, and other interests are all available. This can be leveraged and help the candidates to better understand who and where their key supporters are.

Today, it has almost become a necessity for candidates, and anyone trying to gain supporters for that matter, to have a presence within multiple social media networks.  They are able make use of these communities as yet another tool to build their campaign and individual “brands”. It is interesting; some people say that they would not vote for a candidate who didn’t have profiles in social media networks and other online communities, as it would indicate that they are not current with the times.  Would you?

We all know that there is value in participating in social media networks from a search engine optimization (SEO) perspective.  There is link and traffic potential, the benefit of additional organic listings, and the ability to reach a targeted audience. As this is becoming more important for SEO almost everyday, there are often obstacles that must be overcome when participating outside of the U.S.  Recently I read an article about social media in China and came across a few interesting facts. 

China, with a unique and highly regulated media market, has one of the fastest growing online populations in the world. The Internet is censored of sensitive political content; however, this censorship has not hindered the growth of social media and online communities among the population. One research study noted that China’s blogging community is the largest in the world, more than both the U.S. and Western Europe combined. According to China’s Internet Network Information Center, the online population grew by 56% during the first six months of 2008 in comparison to the previous year. With these types of numbers, well-known social media giants are eager to become big players in this growing market, but have encountered a few difficulties along the way.

Unlike in the U.S. where users can freely post and share any information they choose (within reason), social sites in China are held accountable for all content that is posted and shared. Mainly content that is politically sensitive in nature is scrutinized, but these types of regulations play a part in making it difficult for sites outside of China to become as widely popular as they are in the U.S. Not only is it likely that websites outside of China are less familiar with the regulations and political environment, but they are also competing with locals who may have government associations and the ability to better influence the system.

China’s social networking sites have been required to develop robust systems to filter, block, and remove any content that may be considered unacceptable.  Many companies also have employees that serve as censorship teams to supervise the content and manually make changes to prevent the site from being banned.  Although social networking sites in the U.S. also employ technologies to detect and filter inappropriate and copyrighted content, they are not accustomed to a regulatory environment like that in China. 

In an effort to become big players in this market that has such tremendous growth potential, social media giants such as MySpace and Facebook have made adjustments and agreements, often relying on the partnership and cooperation of China based companies. For example, MySpace China is hosted on servers in China and licenses the brand to a company who then monitors the content. A Chinese-language version of Facebook has been developed and is located on offshore servers, avoiding the responsibility of supervising the content. Google Inc. has partnered with Tianya.cn to launch the Chinese social-networking sites Tianya Wenda and Tianya Laiba.  

Not all companies have found ways to weave through these difficult regulations as MySpace, Facebook and Google have. Others such eBay, Amazon.com and Yahoo! all have lost market share as a result of local competitors.

Many companies today are starting blogs to help boost their SEO results. Blogs can be a great tool to introduce new content to the site in an easy to use fashion and without the resources of a web designer or knowledge of html. One great aspect of these blogs is the comments feature that allows users to post comments about your blog post. This is great because the comments are usually about the same topic as the post and can add a lot of good, indexable content to the page other than the main post.

But there is also a darker side of comments, the spam side. Blog comments are an easy way for people to spam links to their site because many people leave the option in WordPress “on” that auto approves comments. I know there have been many times that I had read a comment along the lines of “Great site, keep it up” or “Just surfed in and I love your site”. Sure they seem harmless, but comments allow the user to post his url and name with their comment. So the above two comments were posted by a person named “Buy Viagra Online” and were actually a link to an online pharmacy. This is not good for your site at all. Comments like this can put you into bad link neighborhoods and associate your site with theirs.

The problem is that not all comments are like this. The option to add your url is so other blogs can link back to their blogs. The idea of comments is great and the rewards of building a solid community outweigh the risks of possible spam. But if you are going to allow comments, you need to moderate them all. Check the users post; make sure it is relevant to the topic of your post and not a generic post. Generic posts can be a sign of an automated posting spider trying to spam blogs with open comments. Check the users name and url; you want to allow them to post their url because it is part of blogging but you should always visit the url a user gives to make sure you are ok linking to that site before approving the comment. Comments are one of the best things about blogging but if you are going to enable them make sure you moderate them properly.