Getting Down and Dirty with Social Media Optimisation

Social Media Optimisation SMO is something you can expect to hear a lot more about over the coming year as social networks increasingly come to dominate the web landscape. As part of an over arching Search Marketing Campaign for many it is no longer going to be good enough just to be on the front page of Google and have a professional adwords campaign. There is a new player in town and whilst you can ignore SMO today if you wish, tomorrow it may be crucial to your online success.

It’s important to remember that the web is still relatively young as an industry. Whilst I think we’re beyond the automobiles industry benchmark of the the Ford Model T, we’re nowhere near the deterioration of Detroit! The longevity of Search Engine Optimisation is less clear, but you can be guaranteed that as the web moves out of pubescence / young adulthood its evolution will have an effect on the way Search Marketing operates. Social Media Optimisation could be only the first of many examples.

So what is Social Media Optimisation?

The term Social Media Optimisation has been credited to Rohit Bhargava of Ogilvy Public Relations, he defines SMO as the following.

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.

When looking at SMO for his own clients Rohit breaks SMO down into 5 rules to help his thinking,

• Increase your linkability
• Make tagging and bookmarking easy
• Reward inbound links
• Help your content travel
• Encourage the mashup

To get a strategic overview of these points check out Rohits original post 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO). Rohits post is most definitely worth a look, but based upon my own experience and others I intend to delve into these points a little deeper and hopefully explain how they translate into real world (well, web world) actions.

1. Increase your linkability

For the uninitiated linkability is the measure by which your website is worth linking to. For most business sites out there this is usually pretty low; they offer generic shop fronts or dry corporate sites that are not regularly updated, both remain ’static’.

You need to give people a reason to link to your content, a standard pretty brochure based site simply isn’t enough. You need to offer something unique, interesting, original, useful, innovative, comprehensive, controversial, argumentative, informative, witty, -insert your own adjective here -. What’s your differentiator?

The most common and easiest way to achieve this for most organisations large and small is to introduce a corporate blog. This gives them a platform via which they can offer regularly updated insightful information about their organisation in an informal way, and it might just turn out to be something worth linking to or voting for.

The options here though are almost endless, from academic white papers, through to a themed Flash Game, back to a Firefox extension. An extremely old school example of this would be an office web cam, nowadays on its own this won’t be enough, but point it at your custom built office water cooler piranha aquarium and you’ve got a guaranteed hit.

The best example I can give is a site I recently created, Google Adwords – The Ultimate Guide, by PPC agency expert Steve Baker. This site is a comprehensive guide to using Google Adwords and contains a level of depth and insight not previously available on the web; its a unique and comprehensive guide on a topic that plenty of people blog about, and importantly a topic we as a business can easily generate content (or a resource or a tool) around. Making something that has linkability isn’t as hard as it may sound, just think about what you already know and how you can put that across in a unique and interesting fashion to others.

2. Make tagging and bookmarking easy

In the early days of Digg those ever so enthusiastic early adopters would happily manually submit your amazing content for you, just for the kudos of being first to do so; plenty of users would then follow on and Digg you up. Sure that still happens, but in order to maximise your potential number of votes and ‘make the front page’ of social media sites you need make it easy for users of these social sites to vote for your content.

Think about it, how many sites do Digg users visit in one session? Unless your content is the best of the best they’re not going to go out of their way to submit your site when there’s a funny video of Britney Spears exposing herself in the next tab waiting for their attention. Users of these sites want to reward content they enjoy (on whatever level), its part of the experience for them, you’ve just got to make it easy for them to do so.

Social Share Buttons

I like to call the answer to this, Social Share Buttons (SSBs), those little icons and text links you increasingly see on the bottom of every web page. Please feel free to propagate usage of this phrase via your own weblog :).

Technically SSBs are easy enough to implement, it’s just a matter a adding a few images, correctly linking them through to the social site and perhaps throwing in a few database controlled elements in, such as titles, descriptions and relevant tags. Most of the Social Media sites offer guidance on how to properly link to their service for user submissions and there are plenty of Wordpress plug-ins available to automate the installation of SSBs to help along the unsure.

SSBs (Social Share Buttons) from The BBC

Social Share Buttons enter the Mainstream

Over the past 6-12 months the practice of including SSBs has become practically mainstream. It all started in the Blogosphere, but SSBs can now be found on almost all national UK newspaper websites, weblogs, and local rag sites alike. Even the lamest of websites now include them, in fact the point of saturation is so that SSBs have become almost uncool, practically passe for the ultra web hip. It is perhaps the ultimate endorsement of your content or creditability when you are successful on social media sites like Digg without using them, I’m so big I don’t need to advertise kinda thing.

Participation is compulsory to protect your interests

The most recent high profile example of adoption of SSBs is the BBC. Whilst the Beeb was quick to pick up on and promote RSS feeds it has been slow to jump on the SMO and SSB bandwagon having only introduced its icons in the past few months. I would suggest that in part, the decision by the BBC to adopt SSBs was based upon the fact that many bloggers were recycling BBC news stories into their own blog posts and garnering the social media attention for themselves. Since the BBC has introduced the buttons the original stories (i.e. the BBC) are now receiving the social media attention rather than the copycat bloggers. This doesn’t just apply to large well known sites like the BBC. Imagine you were an obesity surgery business that introduced an innovative new type of surgery that was newsworthy. Introducing SSBs to the official press release would mean you would stand a chance of being noticed amongst the numerous blogs that will attempt to make grass on the back of your story. A more targeted SMO campaign could ensure that it is your copy and message that gains the most social media attention rather than some amateur blogger looking for cheap gains at your expense. Protect your brand and gain potential new customers all in one go.

The Facebook Phenomeom

You’ll notice that the Beebs SSBs also include Facebook. Facebook truly hit the big time in the UK over the summer, regularly making the headlines in print and on TV alike. We are regular informed that time spent on Facebook during work hours is costing the UK economy millions (if not billions) in wasted man hours. The speed at which Facebook SSBs appeared was remarkable, it has taken years for the phenomenon that is Stumbleupon to appear on mainstream websites, the adoption of Facebook SSBs was practically overnight. This is perhaps even more remarkable when you consider the fact that Facebook is largely a closed garden. Web developers and web marketers alike, whether they realise it or not, are embracing SMO tactics wholeheartedly.

3. Reward inbound links

If you’ve got this far into the article your probably already aware that links to your site play a crucial role in your success in Google rankings. Quite simply, the more inbound links you have the better.

A lot of ‘amateur’ bloggers will link to your content just to have something to blog about (assuming you have the right type of link bait of course) but to maximise your incoming linking potential you need to offer linkers a reward. The only truly valued reward you can give here is a link back.

Most blogging software offers track backs, allowing people to ping your blog when they link to it and receive an excerpt and link back to their original post in your comments area. It’s a simple, effective and established method of encouraging people to link and discuss your weblog posts.

More recently a number of webpage widgets have emerged that show related weblog posts to the page you are reading, this relationship is usually established via incoming links. Personally I’m not a fan of these as I feel they add more of a hindrance to a users site experience than adding to it, but I can appreciate how perhaps they are more appropriate than ‘techie’ trackbacks on some sites.

The ultimate aim of any search marketer is to generate one-way incoming links, and this is still possible using the above methods as, at least in the eyes of Google, these links are discounted if they have rel=”nofollow” insert on the link back. Most modern blogging software does this automatically nowadays. Also, most of the widgets that are available render their links in Javascript, meaning they are invisible to Google and other engines.

You should also make it as easy as possible for people to link to your site, simply by having human friendly URLs, eg http://www.example.com/news rather than www.example.com/index.aspx?5847. For the less technically minded (Bebo, Myspace et al users) it might also be an idea to introduce code which they can copy and paste to embed a link and a banner to your website.

4. Help your content travel

Making your content travel is about creating content that can be portable, content that can submitted and appear on other sites or elsewhere in the ‘real world’. We’re talking MP3s, videos and PDFs here. Ultimately, Rohit argues, this will result in more backlinks to your site, I assume as simply your URL and content is in-front of more eyeballs. Whether creating portable media like this generates a significant amount of backlinks is too hard to assertain but submitting your creative video to YouTube will certainly increase your exposure.

5. Encourage the Mashup

A mashup is the idea of taking data sources from several different websites and mashing them together to form a new web application. Most mashups are altruistic affairs due to the nature of content licensing; common examples include such things as taking traffic reports from the BBC website and placing them onto top of Google Maps interface in real time.

As Rohit points out the best example of commercial success in offering content for syndication is You Tube via their video embedding, the promotion of their brand and service on every site that featured their videos weighed heavily in quickly raising their profile early on.

The easiest way for most websites to fulfil this point of SMO is to offer an RSS feed of their latest news stories. Doing this allows your content to be syndicated out to the rest of the web; your headlines and news excerpts can appear on other peoples websites, creating one-way back links and driving traffic. There are hundreds of RSS aggregators and search engines (and geeky developers) waiting to devour your content and promote it to a new audience.

Many worry about issues of copyright and duplicate content in making there content available in such an accessible manner, but they shouldn’t. RSS feeds can be set to only include a snippet from the news story meaning duplicate content penalties from Google should be avoided and anyone wishing to read the entire story will have to visit your site.

The truth is though, the chances are unless your what your feed offers is particularly unique or press worthy you are unlikely to feature in anything more prestigious than an RSS aggregator or directory. Whilst not reliant on RSS perhaps the ultimate ‘mash up’ (more accurately aggregator) most sites can hope to feature in is Google News. This endeavour though is still worthwhile, just for the backlinks it can generate alone (and we haven’t even touched upon the user experience enhancements it makes possible).

My own personal favourite mash up related tip is geourl.org. Add some ibcm geographical co-ordinates into the head of your document, submit and your listed. This instantly generates over 100 potential backlinks from geourl. What really interests me here though is where this data may eventually end up being used…..

On a very low level many blogs already feature GeoURL links in their sidebar. As there are few automatic services for embedding this data available these blogs tend to be of fairly high value as they have been created by web professionals, a free geographical on-topic backlink from a decent blog.

Its Still About the Links, Baby

As Google seemingly continues to shout clamp down on paid links the importance of being able to attractive and generate real natural links will become increasingly important. They’re not quite there yet, but eventually Google will manage to get its act together and weed out many paid for links (though probably not all). This could be years away, but as part of a long, long term strategy every site should be looking to build as many natural and real links as possible.

For me, working day to day as an SEO analyst this is the real attraction of SMO, the potential incoming one-way links it can generate, be it from the social media sties themselves or the proceeding blog posts. Sure, huge traffic surges can be nice but the traffic is often of a low quality or off-topic and offers me little or no real value as a search marketer of commercial sites looking to sell specific products.

If an article or ’social media bait’ of yours makes the front page of Digg you can be guaranteed that you’ll pick up a whole host of links from others sites, as others look for interesting content to blog about, recommend or link to.

Beyond the Social Media Optimisation 5 step plan

SMO though doesn’t just stop there, though I’m going to. A number of marketing professionals have picked up on Rohits post and run with it, creating several more SMO check points of there own.

6. Be a User Resource, even if it doesn’t help you
7. Reward helpful and valuable users
From Jeremiah Owyang

8. Participate
9. Know how to target your audience
10. Create content
11. Be real
From Cameron Olthuis

12. Don’t forget your roots, be humble
13. Don’t be afraid to try new things, stay fresh
From Loren Baker

14. Develop a SMO strategy
15. Choose your SMO tactics wisely
16. Make SMO part of your process and best practices
From Lee Odden

Social Media Optimisation is an emerging art and changing daily as new social media players emerge and the established sites update themselves. Your thoughts on this article, or on how this emerging industry will evolve are welcome.