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 published in LED Digest 2267: Natural Search ROI Falling? From: Mike Banks Valentine Subject: Social Media Optimization (SMO) Are any LED members putting the same energy and enthusiasm into "Social Media Optimization" (SMO) as they do into the old school SEO techniques? No judgment there, just an acknowledgment of the evolution of this medium. I'm very aware that the basic building blocks of SEO are still important, but it is growing to include new techniques, including SMO. The relatively new term SMO refers to making it easy for your site visitors to use social bookmarking services, RSS feeds and social media sites by providing links to those services from your site or blog. The term SMO was coined by Rohit Bhargava of Ogilvy Public Relations in August of this year in his blog post titled 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization. Wikipedia has an entry defining and describing the term. I had been attempting SMO but was frustrated in tedious job of collecting code and "Chiclets" from all the feed readers and blog search engines for use in my blogs, and didn't like the way that collection of buttons looked when assembled. I recently signed up with FeedBurner for a single source of my blog feeds to replace that collection of "chiclets" from the various services and love that resource and especially love the stats that go along with their service. But FeedBurner doesn't offer the same type of thing for the social bookmarking services. I just discovered a press release for a new service called AddThis.com which facilitates using a single button that allows visitors to subscribe to both RSS feeds or the dozens of social bookmark sites to bookmark my site from a single interface. I contacted Dom Vonarburg, the co-founder of the AddThis service, and interviewed him for an article. That interview is currently on my blog (in my signature below). I have been updating my site template at website101.com and have decided to include the AddThis bookmark option there to test it, along with Digg and Del.icio.us links. I'd be curious to know what others think of the value of SMO in promoting your business web sites and blogs. Also if you agree that a single button and social media service makes as much sense to you. Mike Banks Valentine http://realityseo.com Moderator Comment >> I added these social bookmarking tag / share buttons (aka "chicklets") to LED-Digest.com a few weeks ago. There have already been a few stories showing up at the various sites (Digg, delicious, reddit, etc) from subscribers tagging and sharing their posts. Check it out at the bottom of each issue. These are a good idea because they make it so easy to quickly pop an article into the bookmarking / tagging sites. Most of them require a free account to start using. When you click on one of the buttons at the bottom of the LED Digest, a small pop-up window appears with input boxes for the page content to be shared. The possible downside is that newer users will be flummoxed by all the different buttons, one for each service. It would be better from a usability perspective to just offer a single button that would "feed" all the social media sites automagically. (The tool I'm using actually gives the option of using more than twice the amount shown on the site. I have whittled it down to these 10 as they've been getting the most use so far: Delicious, Blogmarks, Connotea, digg, Furl, Magnolia, Newsvine, Reddit, Shadows, and YahooMyWeb.) Speaking of feeds, I'm also going to add my RSS feeds to Feedburner so that I can track stats. I just found this useful article on burning a feed with their service yet retaining your original RSS link, thereby keeping current subscribers on board seamlessly. That's the way to go if you want to use Feedburner but keep your RSS subscribers. Thanks for the post, Mike. I'm looking forward to hearing what other LEDer's are doing with this. -Adam From: Lee Odden Subject: Social Media Marketing (SMM) Great question Mike and I'm sure you know what my response might be about SMO or SMM as Rand calls it. The increasingly social and sharing nature of the web creates a significant opportunity for content producers to "socialize" their content, whether it's a blog, a web site or media. Tools like the AddThis service are great for this sort of thing. I prefer to have more control though, as the AddThis service sends visitors to their web site. We have tools for creating chicklets as well as bookmarks that work directly with your blog software and they keep the visitor on your site (until you click the bookmark links). They are also as space saving by providing drop down menu options. RSS Button Maker Social Bookmark Tool SMO has increased our traffic and subscribers by nearly 50% in the past 3 months. I'd say it's pretty effective. It's also just one tactic in a smorgasboard of marketing tactics. As is SEO. Lee Odden TopRank Online Marketing http://www.toprankresults.com From: Nathan Holley Subject: SMO and Link Bait The democratization of the Web has definitely made content viral. Not just content, either, but the whole phenomenon of branding. Jack Yan (a fellow LEDer) writes about this in his, Online Branding: A Definitive Guide. Worthwhile reading, this. So yes, I use these tools too. They can be quite effective, but are (like everything else) becoming abused and used for capitalistic ends. This is not what they were initially designed for, but once again the SEO crowd is pissing in the pool and making everybody's cool water feel warm and stinky. Sorry for the rant. But is anyone else sick and tired of SEO black-hatters pulling down the Web? And it's not just black hats - it's everyone who's a) too lazy, b) too greedy, c) or too dumb to do things the ethical, mutually-beneficial way. That's right, old school white hat SEO with the end-user in mind. Link promotion, guerrila marketing, PR, yadda yadda yadda. And high quality content, dammit, real honest to goodness *quality* which is becoming so hard to find. Not to lump everyone who uses "SMO" (or "SMM" depending on who you read out there) into the same dirty pool as the abusers. That wouldn't be fair. Like I said, I too use these tools for Web promotion. But I'm conservative and ethical, and trying to honestly add something of value in addition to getting targeted traffic. Many others are not. (And you probably won't be reading any replies from *them* to this thread, either.) It's all linkbait crap out there now. Yeah, linkbaiting, something I haven't read much of on LED Digest but is the current fad. Linkbaiting + 150 user accounts at the major social sites = lots of eyeballs the cheap way. The problem is, it really is cheap because the content doesn't justify its traffic much of the time. The Web is thirsty for high quality right now. It's also drowning in the SEO black hat chaos. Okay, rant over. Nathan Holley From: Dirk Johnson Subject: Social Media Optimization (SMO) and Link Bait Link bait is just more SEO-speak. It's the latest flavor, and a lot of very experienced people in this industry are buying in, as if it's some kind of new phenomenon. It's not. Link bait is just creating content and site features that people want to use. It's a concept that goes to the formation of the WWW. In the old days, it was simply called "make your site worthwhile". Now it's called "link bait", and it's packaged as some kind of SEO revelation. We all have to realize that these new SEO terms are generated and promoted for a reason. They sell books, seminars, and services, under the guise of being new concepts. From what I have seen, most of the concepts that are presented as "link bait" cannot be applied effectively to most sites. Many of these "cool" concepts are out of reach for most site owners. Sure, they are good ideas, in specific circumstances, but very limited in practical terms. Often, there is a siren call to make your content so compelling that other people will just automatically link to it in some kind of mesmerized stupor. What is not explained is how a real estate agent in Peoria accomplishes that. Maybe it's not explained because it is not really practical to expect it to happen. Not that good content is a bad thing, but the effect of "good content" on the link back profile of most sites is minimal, at best, unless there is some other catalyst at play. First, people need to realize that the content is there, and second, they need to have a compelling reason to link to it, once they find it. Even if it is good. Those are high thresholds for success. Yes, a real estate agent in Peoria should post good information about their marketplace. That goes without saying. But even if it is exemplary information about Peoria, how many other sites will have a reason to gratuitously cite it? Probably not many. Good content needs to be promoted. Links don't just happen magically. As for social networking, I fail to see how the RE agent in Peoria uses their MySpace page for anything more than incidental traffic. Gaming it with fake accounts, as Nathan mentioned, seems like an incredible waste of time and money. And should that agent also post a blog on their site? How much of their available time should they spend posting to this blog? What should they say that is not already on their site? Who'll read it? What if they are not a good writer? Or should the agent in Peoria instead cover their SEO basics well, get some links, and then go out and list and sell some houses? Or should they sit in their office typing "link bait" to promote on MySpace? These are legitimate questions to ask, as they have real bottom-line implications. Once again, the SEO world conveniently ignores the return-on-investment (ROI) aspects of these other leading-edge concepts. They cite examples of phenomenal results, which do exist. But quite often, they put forth concepts that are too expensive or not practical for average site owners. Knowing how a Hollywood studio creates buzz for a movie is interesting, but can that be applied in Peoria? Maybe. Maybe not. Certainly, link baiting and social networking concepts have a legitimate place in the web marketing realm. There are instances where it works very well. It's just that those instances can be very specific in scope and structure, and they do not apply to the vast majority of sites in ways that are meaningful. I see many instances of business owners who are fascinated with the SEO concept of "link quality", to the point that they will spend hours analyzing the links to their sites, while declining link opportunities that are quite legitimate and relevant, simply because some arbitrary standard of "quality" had not been met that some SEO advisor told them to use. The time invested in this link review could probably be much better spent promoting their core business, as opposed to satisfying some misguided SEO guru's concept of a "quality link". A good SEO consultant does not propose fads to their clients. They should review the circumstances in front of them, and advise strategies that look first at the ROI aspects of each and every decision, and thus, maximize the client's bang for the buck every step of the way. Best regards, Dirk Johnson, Partner - Operations DomainDrivers LLC www.domaindrivers.com Comments (0)
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