President Barack
Obama's move to create a transparent and tech-savvy administration will put Google product manager Katie Jacobs Stanton in the driver's seat as "director of citizen participation" in March.
Search engine optimization gurus, industry experts, ad agency executives and Wall Street analysts provided insight on the move.
Danny Sullivan, search engine optimization guru at
Search Engine Land, said having someone like Stanton who knows Google's products and services may prompt the Obama administration to further adopt them.
The Obama administration has already
begun to rely on some Google tools. Stanton--a group product manager at Google who co-founded the company's election team--worked on Google Moderator, a tool the public used to submit questions during
the presidential debates. Obama's transition team also experimented on Change.gov.
"Obama has a YouTube channel, and that's an incredible endorsement that I don't think people totally
comprehend," Sullivan said. "It's equivalent to the White House saying 'we are going to broadcast all our messages on NBC, sorry ABC and CBS. It also will be interesting to see if they use Feedburner
and Google Analytics to track metrics."
Obama has made it clear that technology will remain a priority--specifically broadband access. The notion of involving an advisor to facilitate
participation of citizens in his administration via electronic or offline media is a smart one, according to Shar VanBoskirk, principal analyst at Forrester Research.
"If we think about Obama's
administration like a corporation, the smartest corporations are ones that put tools in place to help them listen to, speak with, embrace, energize and support customers," VanBoskirk said.
Managing the forum, however, will become a challenge for Stanton. What comments matter? How will the administration handle responses? How should advisors incorporate forum feedback into advice to
President Obama? VanBoskirk said Stanton will need to create a strategy to weight insights learned through offline monitoring, too, to represent an older generation of adults not present in online
forums.
David Berkowitz, director of emerging media and client strategy at 360i, said Obama's administration has shown an understanding of technology's potential. "Stanton's appointment is one
way that Obama shows us he will connect with people and that his administration's take on tech is much bigger than one form of technology," he said. "It's great to have one more person in the
administration that gets how online advertising and major online publishers work."
Berkowitz said the industry might not see immediate change, but the "big message" sent with the appointment
relays that Obama gets that "online marketing is a two-way channel."
Obama wants more transparency in his administration, and Stanton is just the person to make it happen, according to one Wall
Street analyst who requested anonymity.
When asked if the appointment disadvantages Microsoft and Yahoo, the Wall Street analyst said: "I don't think anyone is disadvantaged. Google might have
a slight advantage because they have someone inside the White House, which might stumble across a trend that makes its way back to Google first."
A Google spokesman declined to comment on
Stanton's transition.