Social Media Optimization

Let’s face it – I’m a little long in the tooth to be using FaceBook. But, as they’re attempting to increase their value, FB has opened up the network to people without .edu email addresses. So here I am, an SEO/SEM enthusiast, getting to know all about ‘the Book’ and maybe feeling a little creepy about it in the process.

FaceBook is a social media network – a very functional and cool one, and Social Media Optimization has become an important facet of Search Engine Marketing. Social Media is hitting the online marketing space faster than a speeding RSS feed. The concept continues to evolve, and more and more internet marketers are looking for the next major way to fully leverage Social Media strategies for clients, products and services. Here is a site I made devoted to explaining SMO in greater detail.

SMO has the ability to attract and engage customers and web traffic in a way that organic search results and ‘Sponsored Listings’ on a search engine never will. The emerging field will grow with the same speed that social media itself has grown, as new tools and practices are shaped into coherent SMO tactics. If you use social media tools like a blog, Squidoo or HubPages for marketing purposes, then your focus should be on attracting potential customers or clients to visit your site in order to participate in relevant conversations about your products or services. SMO is about increasing the volume and richness of those interactions.

So, since we’re here, let’s talk about FaceBook. Aside from the obvious banner advertisements, how else do you see the network being used for marketing purposes – especially since it is now open to the public? And will the backlash from faithful members unappreciative of the new wave of intruders and marketers spell the end of the network’s credibility and popularity? I think it very well might.

The SMO tag is so new, you can still see the mark where the delivery room doctor slapped it. The attending physician/blogger in this case was Rohit Bhargava who stated earlier this month: “The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs“. So well done for coining a phrase – but I think most folks are still a bit foggy as to what SMO actually entails.

Social Media Optimization has been defined in similar ways by a variety of noteable bloggers – so today I’d like to look at some of these definitions and then try and boil SMO down into my own degree of rational original thought. Best of luck to me. So again – what is social media optimization? How does it differ from SEO and SEM? Let’s look at the early ways in which search engine marketing pundits have attempted to pigeonhole and explain the new phenomna.

Mark Nenadic writes: “When it comes to communicating online, there is a definite unique technique that surpasses them all, catering specifically to Internet Culture“. At the bottom of his recent article on WebProWorld, the author then does exactly that by providing readers the opportunity to add the article to social tagging and voting networks like Del.icio.us, Digg, Yahoo & Furl with one simple click.

So the ‘catering’ aspect involves encouraging visitors to give you increased exposure through these social networks by making it as easy as possible. They’ll hang themselves if you give them enough rope, or something. Maybe I should have kept that analogy to myself. Regardless, Mark definitely practices what he preaches by including these quick links that make it easy to pump his content into news and link networks.

Lee Odden shares this opinion: Find ways to incorporate SMO tactics at the “template” level of document creation and as part of information distribution. Minor things like encouraging social bookmarks and rewarding incoming links as a standard practice across the organization can go a long way. I have already written an email to our development team here at SpiderSplat, asking them to include these sorts of shortcut links at the bottom of every post, and I suggest you do something along the same lines at your own company. Don’t cover your mouth when you cough. This can be considered the bare essence of SMO. Make it easy for the virus to spread, and do it by default everyday.

According to Hans Peter Brondmo: “1% of those involved with social media are creating content, 10% will enrich that content and 90% will consume it.” This is where the social element of SMO comes into focus, and contribution takes different forms. Squidoo and HubPages fall under social media because of the community and cross-pollination behind them – however lenses and hubs can only be edited by one ‘master’. WetPaint and Wikipedia, on the other hand, enable multiple authors to add to or enhance the same user-generated sections. Both models have their pros and cons, but both should technically be considered as new social media outlets due to their ability to get search engine and site-specific denizens buzzing about a subject almost instantaneously. Start a rumor, plant a seed and see what happens. You don’t have to do all the work anymore.

Whether you’re building a page with focused topic on BlueDot, submitting an older press release to Digg or finding a way to build a MySpace page for your company with a straight face – you’re participating in social media optimization. It’s a broad stroke and a very general term, however I do hope I’ve helped some people get their head around the newborn SMO acronym. Even though I’m not entirely sure if I have.