Talking about Social Media to increase SEO for Vote From Abroad, photo by Democrats Abroad Cambodia

I’m just back from the Democrats Abroad Asia Pacific Regional Meeting in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. I was representing Democrats Abroad Malaysia and gave a short talk on using Social Media to increase site traffic to our online voter registration tool, VoteFromAbroad.org

One of the main points made in my presentation was that regardless of how people found you, they’re here now. Many organizations are warming up to the idea of embracing conversations about their ‘brand/product/company’ off site. We can’t assume that because we built a great website with community tools that people will always come to our site to talk. Conversations happen where people happen to be that’s increasingly on communities like facebook, youtube, forums, etc.

This is incredibly valuable because the authority (popularity/traffic/page ranking) of these sites and their links back to you provides a boost to your own search result rankings. When Youtube, Wikipedia, Facebook and blogs are all linking to you – google notices.

For a site like Vote From Abroad, the main goal is to be discovered by Americans living overseas and helping them with the process of registering to vote.

This requires a sustained social media campaign using social media optimization and SEO techniques.

Some of the recommendations I’ve made include:

• Link to votefromabroad.org in relevant profiles, media descriptions, web posts, forums & wikis.
• Use of micro-blogging tools (Twitter).
• Cross posting (TubeMogul, Ping.FM)
• Join or create Democrats Abroad groups on social networking sites (and link to votefromabroad.org).
• Community promotion of sites through social bookmarking (Digg, Reddit, etc.)

I also encouraged people attending to start a blog and touched on WordPress. WordPress can deliver great SEO results when configured correctly and provides all kinds of plugins and widgets for mixing in data from your social sites. Folks living abroad have some natural topics to blog about; living overseas, travel, exotic foods, culture.. The easiest way to start is by reading blogs. Should you find yourself following many blogs, look into an RSS reader to have all your blogs delivered in one shot for offline or easy reading later.

Note to Americans living overseas. Register to vote, your vote matters. Join Democrats Abroad to connect with some of the most dynamic, progressive and thoughtful Americans you’ll ever encounter. This is a great way to meet and socialize with other American expats while living abroad.

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Go to your YouTube My Account / Playback Setup page and choose “I have a fast connection. Always play higher-quality video when it’s available.”

Enjoy high quality video by default now on any youtube video and embedded video. I notice that the HQ videos also play faster here.

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Just saw this over at Joe Trippi’s blog,

If you haven’t already heard, a big win came over the weekend in the form of Franking Reform that will open the doors to allow Congress to log on and communicate over the web with their constituents and anyone else out in the cloud. One of the main advocates for the reform, the Sunlight Foundation has been pushing the issue through their Let Our Congress Tweet campaign and Open House Project, collecting hundreds of “signatures” in the first Twitter-based petition to take to lawmakers.

Thanks to the Sunlight Foundation, Congress can now use social media. This is a game changer. Very cool!

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Indeed, one of the more impressive achievements of Obama’s organization is the way it churns out video after video–more than 1,165 posted and 14.8 million views on YouTube alone. Much of that is the work of Obama’s director of field video production, 32-year-old Arun Chaudhary. Obama’s YouTube guru shared some of his insights at an event Wednesday sponsored by frog design, the NYU’s Tisch Interactive Telecommunications Program and Fast Company.

Obama’s biggest advantage, Chaudhary said, was that his organization took video seriously from the start. The campaign has 50 staffers shooting, editing and posting video, most of it for online. Where Clinton would have just one staffer videotaping an event in Iowa, Obama often had five to provide multiple camera angles. They posted new video constantly, and quickly — 19 minutes from shoot to post, in one case. And they’d ping community voters via email to alert them to new video.

more via AlleyInsider

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Photo by hessiebell

Today, TiVo started rolling out software upgrades to put YouTube video on TiVo Series3 and HD boxes. This takes away a slight advantage from AppleTV (AAPL), which already lets you do this (but doesn’t let you record TV and skip commercials).

There’s no direct cash payment here, but there is a marketing component to the deal, meaning YouTube will promote TiVo service, including a TiVo channel and promotion on the YouTube homepage. A YouTube spokesperson confirmed that TiVo “will receive promotional impressions on YouTube,” but said details had yet to be worked out.

via Silicon Alley Insider

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