Social Media Optimization (SMO) is an obsolete term. Used, abused, over and out !

When I posted this on facebook, most of the people were taken by surprise. “Are you serious” went a comment.

I’m not surprised, and here’s why I think SMO is an obsolete term.

1. Its four years old now.

Well, you could argue that its not a valid reason to call a term obsolete. Because if that was the case, SEO is already obsolete. But before arguing, let me clarify that its not just about the age. Its about what happened after it.

When Rohit Bhargava used the term first in 2005, he suggested the 5 rules of social media optimization. At that period of time, Search Engine Optimization was doing really good and SEO was a hot term ! And I can only assume that Rohit was influenced from it. But even if that wasn’t the case, there have been lot of changes in the concept of social media – and that’s my whole point.

2. Social Media four years ago is not the social media today.

And you know that better than me. Twitter wasn’t even known at that time. Facebook wasn’t. Honestly, social media at that point was more about social bookmarking sites like Digg and it was more of an extension to the “Content is King” idea. Websites had content. Content was King and SMO proposed a new way of “packaging” content that was more share-able on the social bookmarking/networking websites.

3. Content is not the king anymore – Users are.

Today, the scene has completely changed that “Content is King” is nothing more than a cliche! Of course, content is king but that isn’t everything. The user, or the viewer/consumer whatever you want to call him, has more powers that he used to have earlier. He’s not just a consumer, nor he is a sharer, he’s more of a “producer” today. He can make or break a story. He can decide what shows on CNN headlines tomorrow. That wasn’t possible four years ago. Period.

4. Social Media Optimization has its limitations.

Honestly, if you think about it. Social Media Optimization is only about “packaging” your content to various social bookmarking/networking channels. I’m more concerned about the term “Optimization”, because that’s like putting two huge brackets around the whole thing.

“You got some content ? Okay, tweak it, rewrite it, tag it, hook it up and you’ll get links and possibly some traffic !”

That was the whole idea. And there’s clearly limits to what you can do there. Heck..that’s not even what we are doing today on social media. We’ve grown bigger, broader and smarter. And SMO is clearly stuck in the olden times.

5. Its not anymore about Optimization, but about Integration.

In my opinion (and you are free to disagree) Social Media is not to be optimized for, its to be integrated. Social Media is out there, its huge, and its for everyone. If you are still thinking about not embracing it and worrying about how you can “optimize” your content so that you can plug it into some social bookmarking site and get some attention from the bigger crowd, I’m sorry you’re going to go nowhere with it – unless you take the plunge and integrate social media into your systems, however small they are.

And, I understand that many people still use Social Media Optimization in the broader sense calling anything we do on social media as social media optimization, like we used to call search engine optimization. I don’t call it wrong, but I’d like to clarify that SMO wasn’t about the social media we see today. Please don’t get carried away with the terms and think everything social media as social media optimization – that’s nor entirely right. Its only a part of the bigger social media strategy we have these days. And I have nothing against Rohit, he’s a pioneer in social media, and did a great job with coining the term, but unfortunately many people “perceive” SMO to be everything social, that’s where everything goes wrong in context.

So essentially, the idea is that “optimization” is so yesterday and gone are those days. We have outgrown ourselves, bigger, better and smarter and we have bigger social media platforms today, we are not limited to social bookmarking sites at all. What we need to think of at this point is to try and transform our online entities go social, rather than trying to fix it. Its no more an optimization exercise, but an integration exercise. Social Media Integration is the right word.

source: dailybloggr

5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO)

For years now, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for websites has been honed into a fine art with entire companies devoting considerable effort to defining best practices and touting the value of SEO for raising a site's performance on organic search listings.  While I believe in the power of SEO, there is a new offering we have started providing to clients which we call Social Media Optimization (SMO).  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.  Here are 5 rules we use to help guide our thinking with conducting an SMO for a client's website:

1. Increase your linkability - This is the first and most important priority for websites.  Many sites are "static" - meaning they are rarely updated and used simply for a storefront.  To optimize a site for social media, we need to increase the linkability of the content.  Adding a blog is a great step, however there are many other ways such as creating white papers and thought pieces, or even simply aggregating content that exists elsewhere into a useful format.
2. Make tagging and bookmarking easy - Adding content features like quick buttons to "add to del.icio.us" are one way to make the process of tagging pages easier, but we go beyond this, making sure pages include a list of relevant tags, suggested notes for a link (which come up automatically when you go to tag a site), and making sure to tag our pages first on popular social bookmarking sites (including more than just the homepage).
3. Reward inbound links - Often used as a barometer for success of a blog (as well as a website), inbound links are paramount to rising in search results and overall rankings.  To encourage more of them, we need to make it easy and provide clear rewards.  From using Permalinks to recreating Similarly, listing recent linking blogs on your site provides the reward of visibility for those who link to you
4. Help your content travel - Unlike much of SEO, SMO is not just about making changes to a site.  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.   
5. Encourage the mashup - In a world of co-creation, it pays to be more open about letting others use your content (within reason).  YouTube's idea of providing code to cut and paste so you can imbed videos from their site has fueled their growth.  Syndicating your content through RSS also makes it easy for others to create mashups that can drive traffic or augment your content.

Source: rohitbhargava.typepad

How Much Is A Facebook Fan Worth?

According to a new study by Vitrue the average Facebook fan is worth $3.60 in earned media. Vitrue calculates the value of a Facebook fan based on impressions generated in the Facebook news feed. It then applies display banner advertising pricing to the number of Facebook fans you have and viola, an instant metric.
From the Vitrue blog:

This means our 1 million Fan Facebook Page can average 1 million impressions with a single post to the wall. Factor frequency; a two post per day strategy would garner approximately 60 million impressions per month. Now here’s a metric all marketers are familiar with – we’ve been buying impressions since the dawn of the Internet.
These impressions are practically free, similar to earned media – that we are all familiar with. So our last step is to place a CPM value to our earned media. We factored a very conservative $5 CPM – how much would you pay for highly targeted impressions?
This final assumption gives our 1 million fan page $300,000 in earned media per month or $3.6 million annually.

Here is a recap of the formula used to calculate the valuation:
1M impressions x 2 posts x 30 days = 60M impressions
60M impressions / 1000 x $5 CPM = $300,000
$300,000 x 12 months = $3.6M
$3.6M / 1M fans = $3.60

What do you think of this formula? Is it an accurate way to measure the value of Facebook fans or is it simply an agency trying to put a metric on social media marketing?

Source: social-media-optimization