Please excuse the rant but I am amazed at the people that I talk too who think that that social media optimization = blogging. It isn’t. Go back and look at Rohit’s original thoughts about social media optimization. Rohit said:
“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.”
Yes blogging is a component of an overall social media strategy, but it is one part, just like link baiting, podcasting, mini-sites on MySpace, etc. Just because your company has a blog that does not mean that you have a social media optimization strategy in place.
Whew. Feel better now
THANK YOU! I’ve seen people simply lump many things under the umbrella of SMO simply because they need a new way to say the same old things. As I’ve said before, the original post by Rohit was great… but it seems to be spiraling into simply a bastard buzzword as opposed to a new way to explore how we help our content connect to people and travel.
Like anything new, the uneducated pick up on the sizzle with no regard for the steak. When SEO hit the mainstream, agencies crowed about their META tag expertise. Going further back, when web marketing first emerged there were many firms bragging about how well/easily they could port your print and video directly to the web.
David, you are right, SMO is much more than blogging.
The development of blogs, wikis and other websites, demonstrates that there is still a lot of innovation in the world of webdesign. Can you think of any problems that exist currently with interent users that are not satisfied with the current designs of websites? If you can we can add that to the mix of SMO.