Web 2.0 refers to the social media phenomenon that has swept the internet in the past few years. Any site which incorporates a community element, be it Wikipedia allowing people to post their own entries, MySpace inviting bands to get their own pages or Gawker Stalker encouraging people to post their own celebrity sightings in real-time on their Manhattan map. For the purposes of marketing, a lot of the activity is with regard to blogs – what better way to get an idea of who’s saying what about your company than to check out people’s daily musings?
The concept of Social Media Optimisation was coined by Rohit Bhargrava Ogilvy Public Relations recently, who said, “The concept 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.”.
This indicates that it’s an area which may soon see greater integration into companies existing Search Engine Marketing strategies. Digital Brand Expressions highlighted a key difference between the two however: “SMO places its emphasis on increasing your brand’s overall visibility in the social media instead focusing on improving your website’s rank in the search engines.”
Social bookmarking is ensuring that this is not only not going away, but increasingly becoming the way that a large proportion of people are consuming their media. Digg and del.ici.ous are both key players in this market. Both allow people to bookmark favourite sites, and then arranges them in their search engine according to the number of times it’s been tagged.
For more information, check out the interview with Digg founder Kevin Rose on ZDNet.