Social Media Optimizer - SchMOe or Marketing Genius?

To my understanding a social media optimizer (SMO) was born from all the ruckus brought about by social media networks like Digg.com, del.icio.us, reddit, furl, stumbleupon (among others) and communities such as blogs, myspace, facebook and friendster (yet again, among others). The idea is that this person is responsible for tapping these resources and generating traffic from them.

I am currently trying to do this for my present company. It's quite exciting because you need to make appealing content particularly targeted to a specific audience. This specialization requires significant time investment to learn how the different media sites operate not only to generate the most traffic out of the sites but also to build a company image. To start off, I suggest small steps like getting into blogs, communities and forums - focusing primarily on improving the quality of content generation.

In order to do this properly, you will need to generate different online personalities that would naturally mesh with the communities you are trying to attract. Just like the basic premise of marketing, you get people to respond to you and become interested in what you tell them. For online marketing, this is most evident in the number of back links you get. The most effective articles are those that people comment on. More people link to them. And at the very least they are just plain popular. But of course the catch here is that, different communities host different kinds of people.

Another goal of course is to get to know the informal organization as well. Discover who's the unspoken leader, who is admired, who is followed. It is said that in some of these networks, being commented on by a more prominent member will enhance article rankings compared to receiving a comment from a virtual nobody. Bottom line though, in order to succeed in the social media scene, the network has to lead people to your site. The gauge of success being the same as all other marketing efforts and that is lead generation.

It is believed that social media marketing is the shift of marketing from traditional means where the company controls the information it sends out (brochures and stuff - making communication one-way) to being consumer controlled. The consumer can control not only the information received but also the information retained. Unlike typical marketing efforts where only one side is heard (by this I mean the advertising company), social media marketing allows the consumer to respond AND more importantly, this response is published... published for all the world to see, thereby affecting the response of other prospects. The social media optimizer then doesn't just write creative content (as would be the closest job description in a traditional marketing scenario) for the company but interacts with clients as well - I'd like to call this person an evolved copywriter.

If this isn't done right, it ends up being spam. A dummy article is written and artificial links are created without any real relevance. Forum and blog comments are posted with no clear connection to the topic or the website. This can be done through programs and scripts and sometimes just plain haphazard efforts to get the word out. And this is where caution should be exercised as this creates a negative image for the company. Spamming is a big no-no. I speak from experience here. Very difficult to rebuild a contorted company image especially online where almost everything gets archived.

So depending on how you get to social media optimization, it can go either way - SchMOe or Marketing Genius.

For more tips on how to achieve social media optimization, visit Rohit Bhargava who wrote 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO), Jeremiah Owyang who wrote Rules 6 and 7, Cameron Olthuis who added Rules 8 to 11, Loren Baker who contributed Rules 12 & 13 and finally Lee Odden who made Rules 14 to 16.