Congratulations to the Reddit team for moving to incorporate video and more additional user-friendly capabilities into the ten year old platform.
Reddit was among the first social platforms I leveraged when the communications industry was moving to incorporate web and community sites into marketing and SEO campaigns. The platform was also a very important part of the early and fast-moving Web 2.0 story that drove consistent headlines throughout a good part of the last decade.
This is when I was when managing industry analyst and media relations, webcasts, and in-person Privacy Summits in Basel, Berlin, Brussels, London and Washington DC to tell a Web 2.0 story from a security and privacy point of view.
I was also experimenting with Reddit from the communications perspective, leveraging the relatively new platform to highlight quality blogs and news created by experts in the security and digital identity management industries.
While the Reddit landing page always looked a bit clunky – and it looks just as clunky today – one of the Reddit features that impressed me the most was how easily content shared on the platform could influence online search results.
Influencing search was one of the reasons I included Reddit as a platform I discussed when I began holding training sessions for technology and communications teams on blogging and social media best practices.
One of my first training sessions took place in San Francisco in 2006 when I showed a group of clients how sharing and sharing buttons on websites worked. I demonstrated how a blog could almost immediately show up at the top of a Google or Yahoo search page after sharing the content on sites such as Reddit and Digg.
This was an exciting proof point for showing how early Web 2.0 technologies were playing a role in SEO programs and how the Web 2.0 phenomenon was laying the foundation for a whole new world of visibility and community building opportunities.
The San Francisco strategy session also marked the unofficial launch of my blended approach to integrated global communications, which I developed based on my experience guiding clients through all phases of the new media and social networking evolution.
I’ve analyzed and worked with hundreds of social tools, networking, sharing, and community sites over the last decade to stay on top of the social media industry and to ensure I am always maximizing client visibility, search and online reputation management opportunities.
Many of these sites and initiatives have come and gone over the years. This is why it’s so good to see Reddit, after ten years and growing to 170 million users, still driving headlines and evolving to offer new services. – Russ DeVeau