In the past few months, two new buzz phrases hit the radar of most SEOs: social media optimization and social media marketing. Already there is a somewhat informal list of rules that apply to this new approach to marketing your web site. But how much of it is new, and how much is really old school? Keep reading to find out.
As near as I can tell, the term “social media optimization” first hit the Internet on August 10, 2006, when Rohit Bhargava, vice president of Interactive Marketing for Ogilvy Public Relations, coined the term in his blog. The original post now has more than 80 links, translations into four languages, a Wikipedia entry (as does social media marketing), a new blog devoted entirely to SMO, and more. So what is it, and why are so many SEOs and marketers taking notice?
Rohit Bhargava explains in his original post that those engaging in SMO “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.” I have even seen one commenter on the phenomenon (thankfully only one) refer to it as Marketing 2.0. There’s more truth there than you might think, because many of the rules for SMO sound very much like the guidelines for good SEO – or even good marketing before the advent of the Internet.
I don’t say this to put down Bhargava or any of the other people who have posted online about SMO. There are many of those, by the way: performing Google searches on the terms “social media optimization” and “social media marketing,” with quotes, yields more than 100,000 for the former and more than 80,000 for the latter. Rather, I think it’s useful to look at the principles of SMO and see in what ways it is an extension of what many site owners and marketers have already been doing.
It also lets us look at what aspects of SMO are genuinely new. That should help those trying to understand the new model avoid the kind of missteps made by Wal-mart. In case you missed that story, a couple was supposedly writing a blog about their travels across America in an RV. They stayed each night in a Wal-mart parking lot, and usually said something positive about the company or its employees. In mid-October, it was revealed that the blog was part of a Wal-mart public relations campaign, and the couple’s expenses (including the RV) were paid for at least indirectly by Wal-mart. Readers of the blog felt duped, many in the blogosphere felt outraged at the publicity stunt, and Wal-mart suffered a serious loss of goodwill.
Search Optimization 
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