Flightpath's User Experience Designer was published in iMedia Connection this month.  The article outlined four essential tips for creating social media that is usable and engaging including:

• Learning what your user's social media behaviors are.
• Creating a social media space that makes sense in your consumer's lives.
• Supporting ease-of-use with basic usability best practices
• Joining the conversation with your consumers in a way that is meaningful and supportive.

Read the full article here: 4 steps for creating usable social media

As my colleague Josh Blair mentioned in an earlier post, Flighpath was at SMX East here in New York City. With a slightly different perspective than Josh, going to SMX allows me to recharge and learn about emerging methodologies, share insights with my peers and hopefully learn about the latest from the big three. Here are 3 things that stuck with me now that the show is over.

1. PageRank sculping and nofollow

The first session I attended, moderated by Danny Sullivan, discussed the usefulness of nofollow for the purposes of PageRank sculpting—especially considering the somewhat recent announcement from Google regarding this particular tag.

Back in June, Matt Cutts announced that nofollow does not suppress link-juice, and hasn’t for the past year or so. What has this done to PageRank sculpting? Well a lot. In many ways it defeated the whole purpose.

For those not familiar with PageRank sculpting, it’s an SEO technique used to pass link popularity to priority pages within a site. Every page has only so much PageRank and the amount of link value passed on to other pages is equally divided through each link on that page. So, in order to redirect more link-juice to pages with more ranking priority, the less important links could be suppressed by using rel="nofollow".

And how has this affected websites? Well for smaller sites, PageRank sculpting probably has very little to no affect. But for larger ones such as Zappos.com? Well let’s just say that Adam Audette, President of AudetteMedia, announced that Zappos.com will stop using nofollow altogether.

Rand Fishkin, of SEOmoz, however still sees the value of nofollow. For pages you absolutely want to get indexed and thereby help with their overall ranking, nofollow can still be very useful to help prioritize these pages. He has a point.

2. Cross-domain canonicalization

This may not mean a whole lot to many, but why is this important? Well for those managing multiple domains with duplicate content, it means plenty.

Many sites by themselves have duplicate content. Yours too and you don’t even know it. Sites using dynamic URLs come across this problem often. For example, http://example.com/page.html could have the exact same content as http://example.com/page.html?trackingid=1234&sessionid=5678. In this case rel="canonical" should be used to consolidate link popularity.

Currently this isn’t possible across domains. However, during one of the sessions, featuring software engineers from Google, Yahoo and Bing, Joachim Kupke of Google announced that very soon Google will honor the canonical tag across domains. This resulted in a very nerdy cheer from crowd, me included. We manage hundreds of domains for some of our clients, some with similar if not identical content. This new rule will allow us to minimize unnecessary page competition throughout many of these domains.

3. Social media and attribution

Attribution came up more than a few times. Not only across media type, but also down to the campaign, keyword and query levels. The ability to get that granular and really know what works and what doesn’t makes our lives easier. I’m still enjoying Google’s new (well, actually it was released in March) Adwords interface. With the old interface, actual queries for broad match keywords were not available, at least not within Adwords. We couldn’t see the exact terms people were typing into Google. Now we can, and more importantly, we know whether or not those queries are converting.

So what does attribution have to do with social media? Well social media received a lot of attention at the show. As it should. Many organizations are using it in very useful and creative ways to help build and maintain their brands. But in certain organizations, especially in the B2B world, where marketing initiatives live and die through lead source data and ROI, questions are raised about how to quantify its value. 

Many tools that measure buzz volume, sentiment, etc. are great and convenient solutions for providing an aggregate view of online chatter. These tools are invaluable for reputation management, which can have a direct impact on sales. But it’s that direct correlation between social media and sales that seems to be the problem, or lack there of. There’s no tool to measure this, at least not the way we can with a paid search campaign. We do know however that a social media presence can drive more traffic to your site. And that social media sites are good for link-juice, thereby helping to increase your search rank. For now we just have to do the extra work to monitor this data. Is it really so hard to track traffic source? That or we’ll just have to see how Facebook ads pan out.

So there’s my take on this year’s SMX East.

I want to commend the folks at the Search Marketing Expo (Third Door Media) for putting on a great show about search and search as it relates to social media. The Javits Center has never felt so much like home as it did this week at SMX East which I attended with my colleagues John Lee and Deanna Jiminez.

There were many great speakers and presenters. Dan Morris (Brafton), Maile Ohye (Google) and Eric Ward (EricWard.com) really stand out in my mind as I write this blog entry.

As a student of search, as part of my role in Bringing it to Digital here at Flightpath, I take away some core themes that I wanted to share with the Digital Insight Blog Community:

1.    Like usability before it, Search is very much about putting yourself in your target’s shoes. This begins with personas and serious keyword discovery. Unless you are running the Hairclub for Men (No offense to Sy Sperling), remember that you are not your own client. So optimize for terms the client personas are likely to use.

2.    Have a strategy that seeks to meet some long term goals. Search (and Social Media) goals are not necessarily standards yet, so take time to "agree to agree" on what you are trying to accomplish so you can come up with ways to measure.

3.    Be prepared to resource appropriately to manage and monitor. Jon Fox and I like to poke a little fun at our former President’s “Trust but Verify” slogan but I think it is clear that it is a wise philosophy to apply to Search. I can recall attending conferences in the '90's when Jakob Nielsen was preaching website "gardening"; now one must be equally, if not more vigilant, with SEO and SEM.

As my frienemy David Berkowitz said at the closing session of the conference, there are beaucoup tools out there with all kinds of crazy names to help execute and measure search campaigns, but I believe these three things must come first before you consider which cool tool like Google Webmaster tools, Facebook Lexicon or Wordtracker to use. Who knows? Pretty soon all of us may end up on Twitterholic.

For more on the conference, John Lee and I were tweeting from the event via @flightpathny with the hash tag #smx.  I saw many other great tweets from the event as well, so I encourage you to check it out.

And, no, I’m not a client of Hair Club for Men….yet. 

PS – Special thanks to Katie Gausephol for loaning me some charge for my blackberry so I could use twitterberry :) from the sessions. Sounds like I am some kind of twitterholic, doesn’t it :)  

From the Cin Chili Website: Hello Cindy, my name is SPC Stoner and I never go into combat without my Cin Chili! Thank you for the packages. Good to know people still remember us. See you at the Chili fest when I get home! Thanks.

Last month I attended the Food Marketing Institute’s Seminar on Consumer Affairs, Communications & Social Responsibility in Baltimore. Not surprisingly, there was a lot of talk about websites and social media from luminaries such as Phil Lempert, expect more on that in my blog soon, but what I really want to highlight in this post is the Social Responsibility angle.

Lane Bailey, President of Global Public Affairs from GolinHarris shared some very interesting statistics and ideas about trends in corporate responsibility, especially for the food and beverage industry.  74% of people surveyed by GolinHarris indicated that they felt strongly Corporate Responsibility should be a high priority for business.

So even in this rough economy (or perhaps because of it) people expect more from companies in the community. This fits in so well with the “altruistic impulse” to participate in groups on line discussed by Li and Bernoff in Groundswell (p.61).

Today, during my routine daily linkedin searching, I came across a company associated with one of my linkedin groups, “Food Events, Festivals and Sponsorship”, that is doing some good for our brothers and sisters in the Armed Forces protecting us everyday: Cin Chili. Through the web you can send chili care packages to a loved one in the service: for free! 

I was particularly touched by this because as it turns out, today (I learned through a facebook message), one of my Basic Training Battle Buddies is on his way to Alaska so I’m going to send him a Cin Chili care package. That should help him stay warm.

I’m very proud of Keith Colbert (pictured here with his lovely wife Karen) who has been in the service since 1992 when we ate MREs together in the foothills of Ft. Sill, Oklahoma as trainees. Now he is a First Sgt. if not a Command Sgt. Major (correct me if I’m wrong Keith after you get off the boat at Dutch Harbor, Alaska :).

There’s a streak of brilliance in what Cin Chili is doing. If you’ve ever eaten an MRE you know they taste better with a little hot sauce. I can recall trading the small bottles of Tabasco the way prisoners use cigarettes as capital when I was in the field.  So it’s an excellent place for the Cin Chili brand to be sampled.Here is what they are doing (www.cinchili.com/ambassador.html):

But Cin Chili goes a step beyond just sending the care package by sharing a small piece of their lives through the web. Spc Stoner wrote: “Good to know people still remember us.” Need I say more to explain the power of the gesture?It’s not even 5 minutes of fame but it’s a warm stomach and a nice thought we all can appreciate as a community which is what the web is great for. More importantly, we can all share the moment. It’s great to see the photos and read the clips from the soldiers.

We should expect to see more and more of this kind of sharing through the web and especially through social media. We should also see more of this kind of corporate responsibility around food, because food is about family and friends. The smell of food reminds us of good times with good people; and heck, what better than a little chili to warm a homesick soldiers soul – even if he or she is in Iraq.

It’s also a good way to create fans of your brand. I will certainly be telling everyone about this program. And if you look at the caption with the picture Sgt. Kyker of the 345^th Infantry, it tells us that he and his troops will be spreading the word too when he says: “We are enjoying the diversion from our "Job" as Cin Chili spokesmen.”

Thanks to all the soldiers.

I salute Cin Chili, and its leadership for taking corporate responsibility seriously here and for spicing things up for the troops. I guess a little chilli goes a long way. And I’ll finish it like I started with an Oklahoma OOOOOSHAAA!

PS - If you are interested in supporting our troops and vets through your regular shopping routine or if you are a business looking to get involved in this kind of corporate responsibility, I encourage you to check out: www.beyondtribute.com as well.

PPS – Keith, let me know if you can really see Russia when you get there.