Social Media Q&A With Rohit Bhargava

We are really excited that Rohit Bhargava, Vice President, Interactive Marketing Ogilvy Public Relations and the person who coined the term social media optimization has agreed to be the interviewed in our social media optimization series.

Rohit leads the interactive marketing team at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide in Washington DC and is a founding member of the 360 Digital Influence team at Ogilvy. He is a frequent speaker at industry events and is a specialist in combining “traditional” interactive marketing efforts with innovative social media marketing strategy to help clients succeed in the new media landscape. His current list of clients includes Intel, Johnson & Johnson, Lenovo, and Unilever. Prior to joining Ogilvy PR, he was Executive Producer of the interactive team at Leo Burnett in Sydney, Australia and has worked internationally in several countries. He authors the popular marketing blog Influential Marketing and recently signed a deal to publish his first marketing book with McGraw-Hill.

1. It was a little less than a year ago Rohit when you wrote the 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO). Can you tell me about your decision to write a blog post about social media?

Well, social media was always a topic that I covered on my blog since I first started writing, but the idea for SMO came from a call I was having with a client. I was discussing the services we were already doing for a campaign and realized that it was about more than optimizing for search engines. Optimizing for social media allows people to share content, save it, and discuss it. These may relate to search rankings, but it’s not all about optimizing for search. As I saw it, SMO was about optimizing for discussion and “shareability.” Of course, the fact that this has an effect on search rankings was a side benefit.

2. In the last year we have seen a cottage industry of blogs about, and companies offering, social media optimization services that have sprung up as a result of your post. What has surprised you the most about the reaction to your post?

Two things really surprised me about it – the first was how much the idea really resonated with people as something simple and obvious that they either should do or had already been doing. The framework was just a way about thinking about a set of activities that were fairly intuitive. The other thing that surprised me is how threatened some search engine professionals felt by the idea of SMO. In my mind, they are two different activities and to believe that one can take over the other is naive. When you use the techniques of each hand in hand, you’ll find they actually compliment one another very nicely.

3. In a later post, you wrote about the challenges of measuring the success of a social media campaign. How do you measure the success of a social media campaign?

The challenge really comes from the fact that online marketers are used to measuring things in the same way – and those old models aren’t as valid today. With the recent news that Nielson is getting rid of the page view in their metrics, there is more proof of this than ever. So how are we measuring now? Engagement is the hot new word. How can we measure the level of engagement that consumers have with marketing messages and build a model of measurement around that? It’s not easy, but as advertisers focus more on data points like clickstreams, forensic click analysis, time spent on sites, eyetracking and other sophisticated forms of measurement, the picture is getting clearer. I don’t believe in empty impressions, only irrelevant impressions. If an impressions is targeted and reaches the right person at the right time, the click is not necessarily the thing that matters most.

4. Video has been one area that has really increased in popularity over the last twelve months. Do you believe that video actually generates qualified business inquiries? Or is it just for watching copies of the Daily Show?

Video can absolutely have an impact on brand marketing. The fact is, people are visual by nature and explaining concepts through video will very often be the best way to describe a product feature or benefit. The problem comes from broadcasting video as interruptions to consumers, and in helping consumers to find the right video messages at the right times. But the fact that I can get the Daily Show is pretty cool too.

Part 2: How Rohit’s clients are using social media tactics

1. Rohit, you head up the interactive marketing team at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide. Are your clients asking you for an SMO strategy? What social media tools or tactics are you seeing them use? What works?

Most are not asking us for it by name, but they are asking us to do many of the things that SMO is great for. The savvy clients are the ones who are focused on engagement, and SMO can be a great way to deliver that. Ultimately, what every client wants is for their messages to reach the right people and for those people to pass them on to others. That’s viral. When it comes to tactics, the secret to success is really compelling content. That’s probably not a surprise for most people, but trying to use SMO to “put lipstick on a pig” as the expression goes is a waste of time (to answer your later question). What works is having compelling content, getting it in front of the influencers that are likely to appreciate it and pass it on. That’s what everyone is trying to do – the skill comes from correctly identifying the influencers, creating the right content and then letting the consumers take over.

2. What are some of the opportunities in social media that you see that marketers are not taking advantage of?

Image search and video search and big open playgrounds right now. This is mainly because there is a gap in the rising quality of search versus the content that is tagged and indexed properly by brands and marketers. Do a quick image search on google and you will see what I mean. If any brand focused on this, they could own their own image searches with relative ease and optimize their videos for search through transcripts and tagging properly (among other things). I truly don’t understand why more brands have not made this a priority.

3. Social retailing is one of the hot buzzwords in 2007. How are your clients using it?

The most common way is in paying attention to how consumers are shopping and sharing insights. As an information and trend gathering tool, social retailing is brilliant. The clients that are on the insides of this trend are the ones who are using a credibility they have with their customers to build communities around their products and brand. Social retailing is a natural follow on effect from this effort.

4. Which SMO techniques do you think are wastes of time?

As I mentioned before, I think that trying to make something “viral” when it doesn’t have any of the right qualities is the biggest consistent blunder or mistake that marketers or SMO professionals make. The other is trying to game the system and build a business on that. Today, there are plenty of businesses that can survive on hiring low cost “link monkeys” to build profiles on popular social networks that can be exploited for client work. In time, we will start to see these dodgy tricks disappear as technology gets better are weeding them out.

5. Tell me about the biggest blunder you’ve seen in SMO?

See above.