Four SMO Tactics
Todd Malicoat aka Stuntdbl has an interesting posting titled 7 Opportunities for “New School” SEO. Todd’s suggestions might say SEO, but four of them are very applicable to anyone interested in SMO.
1. Social media marketing
SMM is NOT social media manipulation - it is learning what social communities online are looking for and giving it to them… (…so hard that they BLEED)
To often SEO’s think that SMO is simply manipulation of social sites like Digg and MySpace. It is not that simple. The social netwoeking sites are all different, and to be successful with social media marketing you need to know the difference between MySapce and Bebo.
2. Video promotion
There’s this little site called youtube that 90% of corporate drones waste 50% of their 40 hours per week on. There not ALL watching drunken litesaber fight videos - okay, well maybe they ARE - but if that’s what they want - GIVE IT TO THEM - just put your URL in as a watermark.
The number of businesses that are successfully using sites like YouTube and Google Video to not only market their products, but to recruit employees also is growing each day. Still it amazes me when I see a corporate video that shows a logo but no URL. Let people find you. Give them your web site URL.
3. Community participation
Everybody is looking for answers on the web. Find where you’re the expert, and become more so. Credibility is not a commodity, and there is a LOT of value to it.
A common SMO mistake that companies make is that they jump right into a community without paying any attention to the ongoing conversation. Listen before you respond. Provide answers to questions and links to your competitors (if appropriate). You will become viewed as much more of an authority than if ever answer was simply about how great your company is.
4. Reputation management
The new public relations - Google is the new http://, and everyone’s got MINIMUM 5 spots to defend. Those that are proactive will not be sorry. Knuckleheads that buck the trend probably will be.
The first stop for anyone conducting research on a company, product, brand, or person is Google. Your goal should be to control the top five positions (basically what is above the fold) in Google for these terms. The best companies have a reputation management plan in place and they are always ready to react to bad news. If you are waiting for the bad news to hit before rolling out a reputation management plan, it will be too late by the time you finally react.
Filed under Brand Marketing, Reputation Management, SEO, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (0) : Feb 25th, 2007
