Link This | Email this | Blog This | Comments (0)

Getting the Most out of Social Media Optimization
July 31, 2007

The growing emphasis on social media (in all its myriad forms) means that marketers need to have a greater number of strategies at their disposal to drive traffic to their Web sites. What are the best ways to accomplish this?

It can be boiled down to a few basic tactics (expanded on below):

• keeping your content updated
• encouraging, enabling, and rewarding external linking to your site
• participating and supporting the online community

So why is this important?

Marketing experts are ladling out another helping of hearty alphabet soup for marketers and advertisers. SEO (that is, "search engine optimization") and SEM ("search engine marketing") are old news by now, even if many people are only now just hearing about them, let alone becoming proficient in exploiting them. But now comes "SMO" or "social media optimization," a term was coined a year ago by Ogilvy Public Relations’ Rohit Bhargava, who, on his blog, identified "5 Rules of Social Media Optimization."

SMO, in a nutshell, refers to a set of tactics for marketers to use to ensure that their own Web sites can be given exposure and linked to in the ever-expanding realm of social media (that is, blogs, online forums, social bookmarking sites, etc.). It’s not enough now to simply add some keywords to your site and wait for search engines to send eager and willing site visitors to it. Now the goal is to optimize your site for easy linking and bookmarking, the desired result, of course, being to increase inbound Web traffic.

There are several technologies and platforms to consider when thinking about SMO. These are:

• Blogs--If you're reading this, you are familiar with blogs, which are a type of Web site comprising journal- or diary-like entries that provide commentary or news on a particular subject, such as food, politics, local news, or making marketing work. A typical blog combines text, images, and, perhaps most importantly, links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic.
• Social Bookmarking Site--A Web site or service for storing, sharing, and discovering Web bookmarks. A popular one is del.icio.us. Another popular site is Digg, which is a community-based site with an emphasis on science and technology articles, though not eschewing such topics as politics and entertainment. Digg is a combination of social bookmarking, blogging, and syndication.
• Social Networking Site--A Web site that offers an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music, and videos. Popular social networking sites are MySpace, Facebook, and Friendster.
• RSS--Short for Really Simple Syndication, RSS is an XML-based system that allows users to subscribe to their favorite Web sites. A Webmaster can use RSS to put content into a standardized format, which can be viewed and organized through RSS-aware software. On the user side, a program known as a feed reader or aggregator can check a list of feeds and display any updated articles that it finds.

This is a short list, but you get the idea. The fundamental nature of the Internet--and, more specifically, the World Wide Web--is linkability. The key is get others to link to your site without your overtly saying “Hey, link to me!”

On Thursday, we will expand on this discussion and add a list of "action items" for marketers who seek to get the most out of SMO.

Posted by Richard Romano on July 31, 2007 | Comments (0)