AOL is looking to boost its social media credentials with the hire of Matthew Knell as director of social media.

He’s coming on board from the successful online New York based moms community CafeMom where he was director of emerging and social media strategy.

Prior to that he’s spent sometime at MTV where he we was and was general manager of JetBlue Airways online presence Jetblue.com.

Interestingly, Cafemom, a kind of bigger US Mumsnet type site, was a Yahoo! bid target earlier this year. AllthingsD reported that Yahoo! was keen to close a deal for Cafemom with a $100m price tag being mentioned.

A deal didn’t happen, but it is exactly the kind of site that AOL, which recently added Techcrunch to its portfolio of blogs, would also have an interest in buying.

The news of Knell joining AOL seems to have pretty much broken on his blog:

“Tomorrow is my last day at CafeMom, and I wanted to take this opportunity to thank the team there for a wonderful time as their Director of Emerging and Social Media Strategy.  It was a very tough decision for me to leave, and I really enjoyed my time there.  They have (somewhat quietly as least in terms of NYC tech press) built something very unique within the industry, a product that major brands want to emulate, a team that genuinely cares about their product, and a niche that advertisers love into the #75 most valuable startup in the world (yes, worth even more than Foursquare at least by Business Insider’s evaluation).   It was a very tough decision for me to move on, and I will very much miss the amazing people who work there, and the amazing amount that I learned about startups, community and content marketing with social media.

As I wrote just over a year ago, I’ve always tried to diversify my career with amazing opportunities to work for all different kinds of companies, and as I thought about the next step in my career, something drew me to AOL.  I applied, somewhat on a lark, to see if they were looking for people like me to help their growing team, and I’m now extremely excited to announce the next step in my career.   It felt a lot like JetBlue to me in culture, vision and passion, and I realized just how much I missed that sort of team environment.

So, after many amazing conversations with smart people, and after seeing their spirit and their belief in the goals of the company, and more importantly, getting to see them for the people that they were, I was hooked, and floored when I got word that I would be their new Social Media Director. AOL has made amazing acquisitions, added smart tools, make great investments, added smart people and executed on great ideas, and I’m just flattered to be given the opportunity to join AOL at this point in it’s history.   AOL did a lot for bringing “Social Media” to the masses, with their little invention called AIM, and now I’m looking forward to helping the organization into the next wave of community and content marketing.”