Social Media Optimization (SMO)
The rise of blogs, social networks, social bookmarking and other social media has created a new source for traffic for websites. A top story on Digg can drive much more traffic than a top search engine ranking. This has created a new process called Social Media Optimization (SMO).
Social media optimization is a form of word of mouth marketing through the use of social networking, social bookmarking, and media sharing (photo, video) websites. The essence of SMO is giving people a reason to visit and link to your site because of great original content.
Social media optimization is different than search engine optimization. Social media markets directly to your target audience and search engine optimization markets to the search engines. SEO is about building rankings while SMO is about building a community.
5 rules of social media optimization (from Rohit Bhargava)
- Increase your linkability: Increase the linkability by adding new, original and interesting content that others will want to use as a resource. Look at adding a blog, white papers, statistics, and lists key information.
- Make tagging and bookmarking easy: Include “Quick Add” buttons or links making it easy to del.cio.us, dig, etc.
- Reward inbound links: To encourage more of them, we need to make it easy and provide clear rewards. From using Permalinks to listing recent linking blogs on your site provides the reward of visibility for those who link to you.
- Help your content travel: When you have content that can be portable (such as PDFs, video files and audio files), submitting them to relevant sites will help your content travel further, and ultimately drive links back to your site.
- Encourage the mashup: In a world of co-creation, it pays to be more open about letting others use your content (within reason).
Good info. I like the fact that you included the mashup mention. It is a huge trend especially where corporations are concerned. And social media, marketing, and networking are also growing fast in corporate America. Some corporations have parts of their PR depts active on social sites across the web, spreading branding like fire.
Comment by Eric Brown — May 20, 2008 @ 8:06 am
Great info, can you give more details on Mashups
Comment by Valod Amirkhanian — May 20, 2008 @ 12:18 pm