This question came up in a discussion today. Imagine that Blue Horseshoe hires your SEO company to optimize their web site. Blue Horseshoe sign a twelve month contract and you do your thing. You fix the indexing problems, add new content and implement a link building campaign. As a result of your efforts, Blue Horseshoe online sales skyrocket from $10,000 a month to $150,000 a month.
Renewal time comes around and Blue Horseshoe decides that they don’t want to pay for SEO services any more. They do not renew your contract. However, Blue Horseshoe continues to enjoy good rankings, traffic and conversions as a result of your work. In fact, over the next twelve months they sell an average of $100,000 a month.
When you think of social marketing and web 2.0, the web sites that jump to mind are Wikipidia, MySpace, Digg, Delicious and Teconorati. Underneath these five leaders are a huge variety of 2.0 web sites, each vying to become the next big web success. One of those sites is Squidoo, the brainchild of Seth Godin launched late last year.
Now Squidoo does not technically fulfill all the requirements of a social medium like [insert a few requirements of a social medium]. Its goal is become a resource for others instead of a meeting place, and content is not user or group edited.
In a previous post I wrote about how to implement a social media optimization (SMO) marketing strategy. In phase one you added some terrific content to your web site, and traffic and links have increased. So now you are ready for phase two: venturing into the world of social media optimization.
Why Social Media Optimization?
The goal of SMO is to make your web site more visible in social media circles. The SMO strategy developed in phase one has similarities to a traditional search engine optimization strategy. Once you head into the social media space, there are significant differences.
I was really surprised that nobody picked up the huge decision that went against Target last week where a federal district court judge ruled that a retailer may be sued if its website is inaccessible to the blind. See PR on Yahoo
Part of the NFB’s charge was that target.com failed to include alt-text beneath graphic images so that screen readers could detect and vocalize a description of the image to a blind computer user.
Earlier I wrote about the challenges that old media were having developing a strategy to attract a younger, more social audience. John Battelle today highlighted a recent article by Tom Mohr in Editor & Publisher. Part of Tom’s comments were that:
It is instructive that after twelve years of the consumer web, not a single example of breakthrough online innovation has emerged out of a newspaper company. Not in recruitment. Not in auto. Not in classifieds. Not in shopping, directory, new ad models, or content aggregation.
One of the stated goals of social media optimization is “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)”. One of the best ways to do that is through the use of RSS feeds.
To many web site owners and marketing professionals, using RSS feeds is synonymous with having a blog. For a lot of companies, because of regulatory or personnel constraints, publishing a blog is just not an option that is open to them. So what options do they have if they want to utilize RSS feeds to distribute there content to a wider audience?
I am amazed at the number of brands who have abdicated their brand names in the social media space.
For example, Merck has has spent a lot of time and money building its brand both online and offline. It’s website is optimized for the search engines and I am sure that the PPC budget for Merck is considerable. So why would Merck’s Internet strategy not include social networks? On Myspace, http://www.myspace.com/merck is “owned” by an 18 year old from Massachusetts. Merck’s drug Vioxx has made a lot of headlines over the last year, but its MySpace account http://www.myspace.com/vioxx is owned by someone else.
There is a lot of chatter recently in the SEO (search engine optimization) world, that SEO and SMO (social media optimization) are basically the same. While both SEO and SMO both have similar desired outcomes (increase revenue, build brand awareness, etc) I believe that the two are fundamentally different.
At its most basic level, SEO is focused on driving traffic to your web site via the search engines. SEO specialists focus on finding the right keywords to optimize for, develop content for these keywords and then generate incoming links to the web site based on these keywords. From an SEO perspective, everything is focused on driving traffic to one URL (having multiple domains can cause indexing issues for the search engines).
One of the biggest challenges that website owners face is driving traffic to their web site. Traditionally this has been done via either search engine optimization (SEO) or Pay-per-Click marketing (PPC). The problem with SEO is that competition is usually very high for more main keyphrases and that your strategy can be turned on its head by the latest algorithm changes at Google, Yahoo or MSN. The problem with PPC is that the cost per click has been steadily rising, and it is becoming a lot more expensive to use PPC than it was a year or so ago. Social Media Optimization (SMO) allows you to drive traffic to your web site from a variety of different sources. There are many web sites that are getting huge amounts of traffic from web 2.0 enterprises like MySpace, Flickr, Squidoo, and Technorati. Look at the demographics of your customers and see where they spend their time online. You will be amazed at how many of them belong to at least one social network. Then develop a plan on how to market to that specific network. Done successfully, you will find a target market that is a lot less competitive than the one that the search engines target.
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