Prior to my to career in the Online Industry, I worked with the Federal Government and was always amazed at the copious amount of acronyms that government people would use for virtually anything. Now, after working in the Online space for a few years, I would have to say Internet Marketers would certainly be able to easily compete for the greatest amount of acronyms used on a daily basis:)
Just, if you are wondering, what the heck SMO and SMM stands for, let me enlighten you….
(SMO) Social Media Optimization and (SMM) Social Media Marketing and are two Web 2.0 marketing tactics I have been studying and implementing over the last few months in my own businesses.
While, there are some different definitions on these two tactics, this is the easiest way I can think of to explain them…
SMO is all ON-SITE activities employed to make your site more social search friendly. Whereas, SMM are all OFF-SITE activities used to leverage your business reach and exposure through social media channels. Rather then jumping to theoretical mumbo jumbo, let me give you some practical examples of the activities that could be employed for both SMO and SMM:
Social Media Optimization:
- Social Bookmark Tools - I would recommend utilizing a social bookmark tool like Addthis.com so that you can make your pages easily bookmarked and saved in such sites as Delicious, Digg and Stumbleupon.
- RSS Feeds - Implementing RSS Feed capabilities in order to quickly syndicate your dynamic content (Articles, Newsletter etc…)
- Blogs - Building a Business Blog with fresh "keyword targeted" content.
- Wikis and Social Networks - Creating targeted Wikis and Social Networks for your user audience to interact and contribute to your site content.
Social Media Marketing:
Imp note: I can’t emphasize enough that incorporating a "Hard Sell" approach with your SMM strategies could potentially back fire and cause negative brand exposure for your business. SMM is simply about engaging your targeted audience in a natural (non-salesy) way, dialoguing with your community at large and providing a relevant and appropriate contribution. Through those activities, you will find natural ways to talk about your business or service in a way that doesn’t bring a "hard sell" tactic.
- Interacting with targeted blogs and forums - One of the best way to see targeted traffic to your site is to regularly dialogue and provide comments on blogs and forums in your specific industry. It is important to build relationship, provide relevant insights and look for natural ways to talk about your own business. While this approach is not a "quick fix", it can definitely provide a nice targeted stream of traffic over the long term and ultimately improve your link popularity. Quite often, I will provide a comment for a blog I regularly read and just insert my URL under my name. Other times, I will actually reference my business if I feel it is appropriate and fits with the conversation. You might check out Google/Blog Search and Board Reader to help you identify the types of blogs and forums you would like to dialogue with.
- Wiki Contributor - You might consider perusing some relevant topics in Wikipedia (and other industry specific wikis) and contribute some content and look for ways to submit a link for your business.
- Blog Syndication - Recently, I have been using a great new tool, Web2submitter, to quickly syndicate my blog posts to top Social News sites (ie. Digg, Reddit), which has resulted in a nice new stream of traffic.
- Other Social Media - There are cool user generated sites like Squidoo, where you can build a "Lens" on a particular topic you are well versed in. This topic will likely relate to your business, providing yet another targeted stream of traffic.
- Podcast and Viral Video Syndication - This will require a bit more work, but to creating a relevant and interesting podcast and syndicating it through itunes or such networks as podfeed can be a great SMM tactic. Viral VIdeos certainly take some thought and discretion in order to make sure that your video gets passed around for the right reasons:) That is the slippery slope of SMM - the potential for bad publicity.
So, Just a few ideas on how you might use SMO or SMM in your own business endeavors… Until next time!!
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