Below is my presentation, which attempts go beyond the usual “Social Media” is the new SEO “linkbait” and also talk a little about the DAO (digtial asset optimization) of social media assets for SEO. (Mouthful, I know!).

If you have any questions, don’t hestiate to contact me – email or a comment below.

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While there has been much discussion – including here – how “Social Media is a Conversation”, it is clear that marketers need more concrete and less theoretical lens to view Social Media. Basically, “how does this make me and my boss look good?”

This is Social Media. But which is PR? Or Marketing?

First, we need to cast off the idea of Social Media as some hippie “Joining the Conversation” thing. It’s more of like the behavior of users or a characteristic of a website. But to make it concrete let’s call Social Media a Platform, just like how the Internet is a general platforms from which you can conduct advertising. There are lots of channels/tactics within a platform.

Above is a fairly comprehensive chart of Social Media by Brian Solis, which defines all of the various components that make the Social Media Platform. Understanding the “Social Media Platform” is important, but we also need to start thinking about the next stage:

Social Media. I get it. But what does each Social Media channel do? And who should do it? What’s the goal and ROI?

Looking at the graph, there are only many channels but many ways it can correspond to different areas of advertising. For simplicity sake, let’s focus on Marketing, Public Relations, Customer Relations and Community Building – looks pretty limiting.

In the rest of the post, I’ve sketched out a basic model of how to approach 10 of the channels/tactics – document sharing, link baits to microblogging – but ultimately, you should do the following:

Print out a few copies of Brian Solis’s Social Media Prism chart, bring the PR, Customer Service, Marketing, and Evangelist folks. Go through each channel and brainstorm how it could apply to them and their goals.

To help you guys start, I’ve started jotting down a few thoughts below. There are plenty more Social Media channels to explore and more creativity ways to exploit opportunity in a way that gives you ROI and not just “joining the conversation.”

Social Media Channels: Which One? For What and Why?

1. Widgets on Facebook to iPhones to the Google Homepage
Marketing, Public Relations, Community Building

This is an easy one. Widgets are basically mini-applications so they’re capable of being anything. From sweepstakes, to viral marketing, to letting users get in touch with other users and providing instant reviews on services or products.

2. Blogging: Blog Outreach
Public Relations, Customer Relations, Marketing (SEO Focus)

Blog Outreach is connecting with bloggers to understand their feedback on a product or service, as well as, help spread news (usually via seeding viral content) and for my purposes – SEO. Blog Outreach is something I’ve done over at e-Storm for SEO purposes with some great results for the SEO campaign.

3. Document Sharing – Sharing Online Documents, Presentations
Thought Leadership, Branding

Document sharing communities like Slideshare.net (PowerPoint sharing website) is a perfect place to reach the B2B Audience – other business people who are looking for knowledge in specific areas, case studies, industry trends and presentations from conferences. One can find all sorts of material from Social Media/SEO/PPC presentation from yours truely to Morgan Stanley’s annual report on the Technology Industry.

There is also an SEO benefit as you can use leverage SlideShare.net’s authority to get your content ranked well. Your content will be under SlideShare.net, but it will still be your content in front of users in the top 10 search results.

3. Linkbait – Creating & Sharing Content to Encourage Viral Lift
Public Relations, Branding, Link Building for for SEO

Linkbait – creating content that will be virally picked up and discussed – is basically one step above “viral videos”. It is about creating viral content – videos, tools, content, photos etc – that will be talked about, Digged, Blogged about…and hopefully linked to. As you may know, the more links pointing to a website, the better the chances the website will rank well on Google. Heck even Google says Social Media is great for SEO.

4. Blog Community
Customer Relations (Developer Community/Brand Loyalty)

A few companies, such as Ugobe (former client), which creates a sophisticated dinosaur robot called the Pleo, has created a community for Pleo owners which allow them to exchange their Pleo dinosaur experience with each other through their own “Plogs” (basically, Pleo blogs).

A company that provides a product that customers will have a strong connection to (like Pleo owners treating their robot dinosaurs like real pets) would be an ideal environment for allow users to connect and share via an internal blogging community.

5. Blogging on Corporate Blogs
Customer Relations, Public Relations

The United States Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to Marriot CEO Bill Marriot now have blogs. Blog are officially the mainstream for interactive marketers and public relation folks. They perform as a non-traditional communication tool – SEC recently declared that you can make official financial statements on blogs – that goes beyond the stiffness of a press release. And more interestingly of all, people are generally allowed and encourages to leave comments, provide feedback, and link to them.

6. Microblogging
Customer Relations, Public Relations, Marketing

Microblogging services like Twitter are a fast paced version of a blog and chat room rolled up in one. As I’ve written on previously, Zappos, HR Block, and Downing Street (UK equivalent to the US White House) have effectively used Twitter as a way to not only “microblog” new happenings but interactive with the twitter community.

Payoffs can be measured as real ROI, as Dell made +$1 million in sales via Twitter, or in terms of branding and reputation where disgruntled customers can be readily and transparent addressed (See Comcast example on the New York Times).

7. Social Networks: Advertising
Marketing, Branding, Engagement

Putting display ads on Facebook is not a Social Media plan. And ditto for placing ads on blogs, that’s still just good old fashioned ads.

It is as innovative as putting a banner ad the iWon search engine in 1999 (You guys remember iWon, right?). While Social Networks are known for having horrible CTR, Facebook SocialAds and MySpace Hypertargeting at the best hope for marketers and those with shares in social networks.

However, Facebook’s Social Ads and other new forms of social network advertising do show signs of promise when well executed as part of an integrated campaign.

8. Social Networks: Engagement
Customer Relations, Public Relations, Marketing

This can be anything from having a Facebook Page that you actually make active or something like the Expedia campaign, which had the lovable Expedia Gnome leaving comments on MySpace users’ profiles.

9. Social Networks: Presence (Creating Profile, Fan Page)
Public Relations, Customer Relations

United States Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome have frequently updated Facebook profiles. The Gavin Newsome staff have used Gavin Newsome’s profile active with news on Mayor Newsome’s upcoming events, videos of recent talks and even updates on his status message (to reflect his position on relevant news stories).

10. Wiki Collaboration
Customer Relations (Developer Community)

Wiki can be an interesting way of “crowdsourcing” a company’s help and support page or at the very least augmenting. Central Desktop, a project management SaaS tool, is one company that allows its users to contribute guides on new ways to use Central Desktop.

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Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion caused a stir in the SEO community last week by declaring that “SEO Shenanigans Pose a Clear and Present Danger to Social Media“, writing:

“I have recently witnessed a disturbing trend. Some respected experts are advocating launching social media marketing programs solely for the purpose of influencing search engines, rather than with the intent of fostering collaboration and genuine communication.

Having started this blog because I saw the increasingly link between SEO and Social Media, Steve and I are definitely on the opposite sides of the fence here. But, I think we can unite behind three central arguments:

1. We Marketers, Advertisers and PR People don’t make Social Media…
   What makes something viral or social is how involved the people get with the media. There are no such things as “Viral Vidoes” or “Social Networks” unless people use them. What we make has have to be interesting, authentic and worthy of being passed on to friends.
2. …But we can help encourage Social Media to happen easier.
   As PR, Marketers and SEO folks: our role is to only encourage “word of mouth” and social media participation, we cannot create it; that’s what “Social Media Optimization” is about. But to not to inform clients on the benefits of “Add to Del.icio.us links” or “Start a Blog to start a buzz” would be a failure of the part of the Agency. Of course, we must align tactics (Social Media) with goals (Building Community, Links) and the appropriateness (building real content people want to talk about) of the overall strategy.
3. Social Media and ROI: What do you tell the COO & CEO?
   In the end of the day, many clients ask “What’s the ROI on this?”. To say we’re going to use “Social Media to be part of the Community” will not cut it for many C-Level executives. Tell them that going long term on Social Media mans better SEO, Word of Mouth, Brand Awareness and Customer Service will make them listen.

Like Google Says: “The best way to create good links is to have good content”

A Google Ad: From Danny Sullivan’s Flickr Stream

As long as the SEO drive for “linkbait” (creating content to attract people to link back to the site) serves to create relevant and authentic Social Media content people will be interested in, the Community will benefit. The Community will quickly discern what’s worthy of being talked about, and what’s not. That’s the power of Word of Mouth and Social Media.

Read more on other points where I take a differing view from Steve:

1. Social Media Spam: Just from SEO people?
2. The SEO Community has been in Social Media as long as PR has, even Google encourages linkbait and writes on being Diggable
3. Social Media as SEO: Social Media is the Ultimate Search Engine Algorithm

1. Social Media Spam: Just from SEO people?
Steve is worried about how every SEO person will join Del.icio.us, vote on StumbleUpon and start blogs and twitters in some vague hopes of getting more links and getting better SEO. SEO spam is a real danger, but Social Media already has it’s own problems.

Last year, TechCrunch featured an article entitled “The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral” Videos“, which basically walked through a process of how to game and spam YouTube for viral video marketing success:

“Every power user on YouTube has a number of different accounts. So do we. A great way to maximize the number of people who watch our videos is to create some sort of controversy in the comments section below the video.We get a few people in our office to log in throughout the day and post heated comments back and forth (you can definitely have a lot of fun with this)”

…Also, we aren’t afraid to delete comments – if someone is saying our video (or your startup) sucks, we just delete their comment.”

What this shows is that Social Media has always been targeted by shady Social Media Marketers and has always been under the fear of someone trying to “game” Social Media for publicity, branding, eyeballs on videos and links for SEO. Sony’s fake blog called “All I want for Xmas is a P2P” comes to mind.

I think it is unfair to point a figure directly at SEO alone. This is a Social Media problem.

2. The SEO Community has been in Social Media as long as PR has, even Google encourages linkbait and writes on being Diggable

Far from what Steve calls a “disturbing trend”, SEO’s love of Social Media has existed at least since 2005 (if not earlier). SEOMoz was one of the first companies talking about linkbait back in 2005: “Rand, How do I make Link-Worthy Content?“, “When Money Can’t Buy You Link Love”Even Google has gotten into the act with declaring in a UK ad that : “The more people you have linking to your site, the better. And the bet way to create good links is to have good content”

In the end of 2006, Stefanie at the Google Webmaster Blog, write in “Building Link Based Popularity“:

“Discounting non-earned links by search engines opened a new and wide field of tactics to build link-based popularity: Classically this involves optimizing your content so that thematically-related or trusted websites link to you by choice. A more recent method is link baiting, which typically takes advantage of Web 2.0 social content websites. One example of this new way of generating links is to submit a handcrafted article to a service such as http://digg.com.”

3. Social Media as SEO: Social Media is the Ultimate Search Engine Algorithm

As I’ve written about in the past, SEO is no longer SEO. It is Website Positioning Strategy. As noted in the Google Webmaster Blog and Google Guidelines, high rankings in Google comes from strong relevancy: building content people want to view and content people want to link to.

The more strategic goal of SEO is then the same as Social Media:

• Building an online presence (website to blog to ecommerce shop) with the Community in mind
• Building relevant content your audience wants
• Understanding how you can participate in that desired community
• Be present where ever your potential customers are: optimize for being on Yelp.com, Flickr.com – not just Google.com
• Making your website “optimized” for conversion: make it as easy as possible for visitors to buy, register etc
• Optimize your site to be portable, linkable, “mash-up able” with Social Media Optimization

Basically, the above asks “Can you build an online presence that is open, relevant and active in the community you want to be belong to”. If you can do the above, you will naturally be a strong leader in building an online brand, brand awareness, customer satisfaction and SEO.

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Move over SEO, Social Media Marketing has the Cash Now?

Talking with clients and those in the marketing industry, there appears to be an increasing interest in Social Media/Word-of-Mouth at the cost of SEO. Search Engine Optimization has been hot from 2004-2006, but we’re now seeing budgets being shifted to Social Media/Word of Mouth.

Is this true over your at agency or marketing/PR team? Leave a comment and let me know.

Some general observations…

Changes in the SEO Industry Landscape

• SEO and PPC resources are being shifted to in-house for corporations, with agencies working more as Search Marketing trainers and consultants
• SEO trends have become increasingly more reliant on Social Media; hence, terms like the “linkerati” coming out from the SEO world
• SES San Jose 2007 was an excellent example on the growing emphasis on WoM/Social Media/PR. SES had a whole track dedicated to Social Media.

Social Media Marketing & the Widget Economy

• Facebook and Widgets have hit the marketing mainstream with the O’Reilly report on Facebook making it officially the year of Facebook and widgets.
• San Francisco Bay Area hosted at least 4 conferences on Facebook and Widgets in the past 3 weeks alone: SNAP, Widget Summit, Graphing Social Patterns, CommunityNext Platform.

How will SEO adapt? Will it finally turn more into a philosophy of website design and positioning rather than a specific marketing discipline?

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Summary: Mayor Gavin Newsom & the Personal Brand

There has been a lot of talk on the need to develop the “Personal Brand” and to help build connections to the audiences, customers or even voters via Social Media.

While there is a lot of theory and experimentation, one great example of this has been the Facebook profile of Gavin Newsom, the Mayor of San Francisco. This posting will breakdown and identify what the folks behind Newsom’s profile have done so well.

Quick Background on Social Media and the Personal Brand

Todd Defren and his SHIFT team have developed some interesting approach to apply Social Media as “connection builder”, such us with their Social Media Press Rooom (plus a must see powerpoint).

On the Personal Brand side, there is are two thought leaders I’ve been following Rohit Bhargava, who has written extensively on it, and Brian Solis who recently wrote on how to approach Facbeook as a “Personal Brand” builder.

Gavin Newsom’s Facebook Profile: Social Media Press Room and Brand Builder

Mayor Gavin Newsom’s Facebook profile, or who we call “Mayor McDreamy” at our office, is the first live example I’ve seen of taking “Facebook as Brand Builder” in a well executed way. While the profile is of Mayor Gavin Newsom, it is positioned as a profile for “Act Locally SF”, which is the official campaign group for Gavin Newsom.
The profile makes it feel very transparent on what Gavin Newsom’s interests and passion are and what he is involved in through simple “Notes” postings, “Group” associations, video, photos – the whole shebang.
At the same time, it is also an active profile: As his friend on Facebook, I’ve seen his status message change at least once a week (e.g. “Gavin Newsom is Proud of San Diego’s Mayor”) and received invites to charity events that he is involved in.

Let’s further break down the components that make the profile work:

Using Groups and “Causes” Application:

• Shows what Gavin Newsom is compassionate about, give a glimpse beyond what he cares about beyond local issues, such as “Doctors without Borders” and “Free the Jena 6″

Using the “Kyte” Application for Video Distribution:

• Use the “Kyte” application, to show videos of Gavin Newsom that also link back to his own video channel on kyte

Using “News” and “Post Items” to Inform the Community

• “Notes” and “Posted Items” acts as fliers on everything from what events Gavin Newsom is attending to job openings/volunteer opportunities

Flickr Photos on what Gavin Newsome has been up to

• This one is pretty self-explanatory

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Last Saturday, I attended the CommunityNext Viral Marketing conference in Silicon Valley. The Conference, by Noah Kagan and Adam Kalamchi, brought together an interesting array of speakers to talk about Viral Marketing – from tactics, strategy, philosophy to viral marketing as Facebook widgets to community building.

Most of the speakers ranged from the experienced serial entrepreneurs (Dave McClure: PayPal, SimplyHired) to founders of accidental start-ups (Eric Nakagawa of icanhascheezurger). The atmosphere was very much on the casual side, with some point reaching nearly 1990s dot-com humor with of Adam Rifkin of Booze Mail making a cocktail during a talk to clearly very sharp and serious with Keith Rabois of Slide.

Below are my notes on:

1. Widgets – Metrics, Key Points on Facebook Widgets
2. Notes from Keith Rabois, one of the most impressive speaker at CommunityNext (Definitely Read This)
3. Flickr Photos: Including PowerPoint Slides given by Speakers. Plus: All Photos of the event
4. Feedback for the next CommunityNext Conference

** General Notes by Theme **
The Power of Leveraging Existing Networks: iLike v. last.fm

• The long established music discovery service from 2002, Last.FM, has been quickly overtaken by iLike which grew quickly once it launched the iLike widget for Facebook. (Tom Conrad of Pandora)
• Leveraging Existing Off-site Networks: It is a simple feature for your product to ask if the user if wants to import her Gmail Address book (or Yahoo, etc) and see who else is on the site and to “friend” existing contacts.

The Appeal of Widgets on User Profiles – Unique, Media, not Technology (From Jia of RockYou)

• “It’s like the first day of highschool” and you want to show-off how you’re different.
• Think of Widgets as a Media tool and a product, not a technological gadget
• It is not about “being technologically cool” but “being cool to use”

Facebook v. MySpace Widget Marketing Channels (Flickr Slide)

• There are 14 channels (opportunities) for spreading widgets, such as from the mini-feed, refer a friend (shown when adding a widget) and the profile page. (From Jia from Rock You).
• MySpace channels were mainly focused on In-Profile, Profile Comments, Bulletin Messages (e.g. “Your Friend Daniel has added Widget X”), and Forums (not often talked about, but highly effective).

MySpace v. Facebook Differences, Openness (From Jia of Rock You)

• FaceBook: Users do not necessarily browse around by visiting profiles, they have more reliance on using the FaceBook Mini-Feed on keeping touch on their friends
• In FaceBook, you need to rely on the Mini-Feed to place your call to action, e.g. “Daniel Riveong has just added the widget ZYZ, you should too”
• In Facebook, a user can only invite 10 friends a day to add a widget, making the friends feel more special

UGC Challenges

• With Yelp.com: Debate the use of paid-reviews to seed reviews. How authentic is it?
• Use MyBlogLog, Friendster and Others: Spam. Black-Hat marketers will always look for cheap tricks to hijack a platform for spam marketing tactics.
• From Friendster: The need to constant “prune” bad content to help develop the culture of the community and thus the brand

Miscellaneous Viral and Widgets Metrics

• Booze Mail on Facebook was able to grow its userbase at 30% per day
• RocketYou achived 9 million users in Facebook in 1.5 months
• Friendster: For every 1 (Exhibitionist) profile, there is 5,000-10,000 (Voyeurs) viewers
• Development of Widgets: ranged from 2 days to 4 weeks, using 1-2 programmers.

** Keith Rabois of Slide **

Lesson 1: “Viral Growth is Really Hard”
A very, very good reminder that Viral marketing and growth (user adoption) is just not magic and not just putting a YouTube video of a “funny video” and expecting traffic. It’s a mix of luck and strategy.

Examples:
Only 1 really great viral video every 6 months
Facebook Widgets: LinkedIn and Yelp.com have 2 widgets each, all have so far failed to reach beyond 4000 users each.

Lesson 2: Knowing the Value of a User: Viral Marketing v. E-Commerce Projection
E-commerce (Online Retailers) have data on the “tangible of users”, and so there is no real need for viral marketing. They know how much they are willing to spend for each user.

In a space where the value of each new user value is unknown viral marketing becomes very attractive; it has potentially the “lowest marginal cost for user acquition”. It is the safe choice to go far, when you don’t know how much you should spend, so you spend as little as possible.

Lesson 3: Is PR helpful in Viral Marketing? Not Really.
Keith felt that the best PR is done in-house, based on his experience and from talking to others. He cites the story that out of 5-6 start-ups in a room, only 1 company raised their hand when asked if they were happy with their PR firm. Other speakers repeated a similar theme.

Lesson 4: Viral/Social Network Structures & Business Model Changes
Yelp was originally an “Ask a friend where to eat tonight” referral service. YouTube was more focused as a dating service, but changed after utterly failure in the Los Angeles market. Slides was originally desktop-based before going into the Widget space with Facebook.

** For Next Time: Suggestions for Improvements **

Noah, Adam and the rest of the CommunityNext gang pulled off a heck of a conference. So I’m providing suggestions here, but in no way are they intended to criticize either the CommunityNext team or their invited speakers. This is stuff both CommunityNext and the speakers will hopefully (I hope that is) find constructive and useful.

Overall, I think a quick 30 minute session on refreshing one’s presentation skill will go a long way in making many of the speaker’s performance. We all need reminders! Also, maybe invite folks from the Marketing Agency world too to talk about their experience, especially working with a client to understand the viral/social-media space…of course, I’m not suggesting merely me. :)

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If SEO is Multi-Disciplinary: Is In-House Better?

If SEO requires a holistic approach that integrates content development, PR, blog outreach, blog marketing, usability and so on – there is always the looming question of which is better: a well-turned in-house SEO team or the top SEO consultant with a willing client?

With the level of coordination and integration required, I’m leaning towards the in-house team. Although, I think there are currently more creative/top SEO consultants then there are top notch in-house SEO team. However, going in-house has been the trend for the past 1-2 years.

What Do Agencies Need to Do?

For those of us working on the Agency side, we need to ask ourselves: If our client’s competitors are a top-notch in-house SEO team, how can we act like our client’s in-house team rather than as outside consultants? What training is required? What cross-discipinary (PR to conten producing) stakeholder buy-ins is need? What Long Term planning must be done?

See the various Case Studies of a successful in-house Social Media Marketing campaign below:

Docshop (by David Willson)

“Sujan James Sujan Patel is responsible for driving organic and social media traffic to Docshop, a health information portal.

Getting web sites to link to anything health related can be an extremely difficult task, but Sujan has managed to add over 38,000 links this year!”

“Digg, and Stumble Upon are very good sites and can drive a lot of traffic but smaller niche sites can drive good traffic that is more likely to come back to your site. This is something I haven’t seen many marketers take advantage of.”

SEOMoz
SEOMoz built over 1,000,000 links in 33 months through the quality of its content, participation in the SEM community and timeliness. See Rand’s article here.

Link Building success through content:

Web 2.0 Awards – 72K + 30K = 100K+ links
Beginner’s Guide to SEO – 6.5K + 5.6K = 12K+ links
Page Strength – 4K + 3.5K = 7.5K+ links
Search Ranking Factors – 14K + 9K = 23K+ links
SEO Blog – 19K + 34K = 53K+ links

SplashCast (Via Jeremiah Oywang)
Splashcast hired to Social Media folks to active conduct community outreach via: blogging, sending trackbacks, commenting on other blogs, using Twitter, reaching out to bloggers for product launch and other methods.

“As a result of implementing this strategy before, during and after our initial launch, we had more than 1,000 publishers register for an account at launch, we doubled that in our first month to 2,000 and doubled it again in our second month to more than 4,000. SplashCast player loads are now aproaching 5.5 million.”

Of Blog Outreach: “That strategy lead to more than 250 blog mentions within 48 hours of our launch, for example.”

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Stowe Boy gives a rough (and somewhat cynical) description of SMR and asks one of the common question critics ask about SMR:

For those who have missed the idea, a social media press release is supposed to be a webbish/bloggish version of old timey press releases. These will incorporate elements of the now commonplance blog motif: links, tags, comments, and trackbacks, for example.

This all begs the question (which I raised early on in the evening): Why not just use blogs? Why do we need these so-called “social” press releases?

Brian Solis, a SMR supporter, goes further and reminds us of the qualitative goals of SMR:

The IDEA is to strip out all of the bullshit and hype from traditional mechanical, and useless press releases and rebuild it as a focused compilation of relevant facts, links, media and a subscription feed to help readers write, tell, and share a story their way (without having to sort through a sea of crap to find out what’s real, what’s canned, and what’s important.) This is what a good release should be anyway, regardless of trends and titles. Basically it’s the press release redux. It takes out what’s wrong with press releases and modernizes them into a usable format for journalists, bloggers, and individuals.

See an example of an Edelman Social Media Release in action here.

Todd Defren, principal at SHIFT Communications, was an early proponent (early/mid 2006) of the Social Media Release, followed quickly by Edelman in late 2006 with the release of StoryCrafter (a CMS for making SMRs). Chris Heuer, Brian Solis and others have been promoting a more open approach to Social Media Releases, including the use of the microformat hRelease.

Where’s the Metrics to Prove/Disprove SMR?
What I find curious about the whole debate over the merits of SMR is the lack of discussions regarding any data: Let’s Gather Some Engagement Metrics.

• How many people actually add a Social Media Release to Del.icio.us? Or Digg it?
• How many people clicked on the SMR Pictures or Media Section?
• How many people left comments on comment-enabled SMR?
• What does Technorati/Google tells us regarding track/backlinks for SMR? Are the numbers any different than the average “Old School” Press Release?

These are just the few metrics that should be readily available to any SMR ever released. Let’s see how much of the “social” aspects of SMR are being used by people.

As for qualitative aspect of SMR that Brian Solis has described, this is difficult to measure and indeed an aspect that can be applied to traditional Press Releases as well (as he has said himself). We can’t measure that, but if we find no one is using the new features of SMR (Del.icio.us, Media Links, Comments etc), this may cast some doubt over its effectiveness over traditional Press Releases.

Conclusion
Of course, the cynics will look at SMR as simply a Press Release with “Social Media Optimization” or simply “a bloggish Press Release”. But, I believe that SMR is a required evolution of the traditional Press Releases – for it to remain relevant and engaging to the public at large. And for that, Brian Solis, Chris Heuer, Todd Deffren and others are doing a great job in helping promote SMR and advance online PR.

I don’t believe in discounting SMR, but the question that Stowe Boyd asks “Why not just use blogs” is an important question to address. Maybe the answer depends on how the client wants to be positioned: fully open and cutting edge via blogs or partially open and more “traditional” via SMR?

But in any case, intelligent debate can only be done with evidence and data. Other wise, this debate is simply a mental/philosophical exercise. I’m a supporter of SMR, but if we want to debate SMR constructively let’s try to have some data to base our arguments.

So who is going to release the first report on the number of SMR Diggs, Del.icio.us and Trackbacks? Edelman? The SocialMediaRelease.org? Or maybe their critics like Strumpette?

Todd Defren has issued a “Quick Progress Report” on the early successes of SMR. Perhaps we need to follow-up with more data?

Links for Further Reading

• SHIFT Communications: “Social Media Press Release” Template
• Brian Solis: “Enough Already: Getting the Social Media Release All Wrong“
• PR Squared: “The Social Media News Release: A Quick Progress Report“
• Social Media Release
• Steve Edelman: “Edelman Debuts StoryCrafter Two-Way Press Release“
• Strumpette: “Mega PR Firm Releases “StoryMakerUpper 1.0“

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For some time the Washington Post (WaPo) has included two SMO-related features on the articles they post online:

• “Save & Share Article” – This is a new feature I just noticed; they are the the same buttons you see on most blogs, allowing you to easily bookmark webpages to social bookmark sites.
• “Who’s Blogging” – Essentially a trackback feature that shows bloggers who have mentioned the WaPo article.However, as this is a major newspaper, I am sure this feature is a motivator to blog first to get listed on the top of list. I’m not sure if WaPo planned it this way, but its a good way to encourage bloggers to link to the Washington Post for some free exposure.

I would expect that social bookmarking buttons, trackbacks, and comments will become an ever common feature in established media websites like the Washington Post. Where it gets interesting is in the realm of interactive media and social media, with portable content and higher level of interaction between the audience and the content provider.

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Bounds goes through the whole online marketing landscape in a relatively quick ~3,700 words, covering: Online PR; blogging for buzz: Google AdWords; “organic” seach marketing (oddly, never calls it SEO); doing podcasting; using flickr and del.icios.us; and, word-of-mouth marketing. This is a tall task given the need of explainations of the terms and use of real-life examples and other antedotes.

Covering the Power of Blog Marketing (with social media optimization):
What’s interesting, to me however, is that Bounds covers the power of online PR/blog marketing so very well. Here’s an excerpt regarding the Hollywould website:

Ms. Dunlap, in fact, was seeing results — just not so much from the PR firm. She had begun penning a diary on her Web site, www.ilovehollywould.com, chock-full of juicy details about her personal life, from late-night keg-party revelry in her downtown Manhattan boutique to boozy jet-setting jaunts through Europe….As Web-site traffic grew, so too did sales.
…
After five months, Ms. Dunlap cut loose her PR firm, betting the Web site could do more to build her company’s image. Today, she spends roughly $700 a month on Web maintenance and commands an average of 20,000 visitors a week, a figure that can triple when her site is mentioned on other Web-site trend leaders such as DailyCandy and Gawker. She sends weekly email blasts to “VIP” customers who registered online, profiles a customer each month and doles out fashion tips.

“Our best PR,” Ms. Dunlap says, “comes from people who are mentioned or featured on our site and forward the link to their friends.” Ms. Dunlap estimates sales of $6 million to $8 million for 2006 for Hollywould, and her wares are now sold in Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus and Harrods of London, among others. (Empahsis mine)

Miss Dunlap is conducting a very interesting form of “online PR” using her blog to empower those she blogs about (via an ego boost of being mentioned) to further her blog and her brand.

While this doesnt apply to many websites, having people spread your blog (and thus brand) by playing on their ego (e.g. “guess’s who got mentioned? me!”) is another form of “Social Media Optimization” that’s better than any “Add to Del.icio.us” link.

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Recently, Lee Odden posted a unique perspective towards Social Media Optimization (SMO) on “UnGoogle Your Marketing with Social Media“:

I think one of the ways you can sum up the idea of social media optimization and marketing is: “traffic alternatives to Google”. As great as Google is, marketers are increasingly looking for alternative and/or additional channels for content distribution and marketing and consumers for sources of information and interaction.

…

What’s interesting is that more and more of our clients are asking for what amounts to alternatives to Google traffic. They’re doing great on Google and the other major search engines, but want other sources of “free” traffic. SMO/SMM provides that augmentation. These include MySpace, Digg, YouTube and other viral tactics. For an excellent list of such opportunities, check out Rand’s list.

Organic Traffic Optimization – An Agnostic Approach to SEO?

Lee hits on a thought I had exactly this morning when waking up (yes, I think about search marketing in the mornings). I believe that eventually search engine optimization (SEO) will be succeeded by simply “Organic Traffic Optimization” – optimization that is agnostic to where the traffic comes from, but is limited to the organic (natural and unpaid) side of things.

This touches on what Gord Hotchkiss of Enquiro mentioned in “SEM Has No Future“:

Search engines, and the form of marketing we’re currently familiar with, will disappear in the next 5 to 10 years. But here’s the good part. The act of a user requesting information through a query, either implicit or explicit, will pervade everything online.

Here, Gord is hitting at the fact that SEM will evolve to focusing on marketing on query done online no matter if its in a search engine or its on any other online tool.

SEO may follow the same path. Optimization for increased organic traffic no matter if its from social networkings/media sites (SMO) or search engines (SEO).

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Quick Summary
Raking in +$15m opening weekend (#2 spot), “Snakes on Plane” – a movie soley carried and even re-shot because of the blogosphere – is defining the power of blogs as it pertains to the movie studios. But SoaP is also a unique product, so the organic support via the blogosphere cannot be easily replicated by just any movie.

But at the same time, SoaP shows “Social Media Optimization” and highlights the need to embrace it. Instead of sending crease-and-desist letters for people making their own trailers and ads for SoaP, New Line Cinema embraced them, engaged them, invited them to screenings and talked to them.

Introduction: 5 Lessons Learned from SoaP
Jackie Huba over at the Church of the Customer, puts out a great post listing the 5 Lessons of the Snakes on the Plane (SoaP) blogosphere phenomenon. Read the whole post, but here’s an excerpt:

1. Memes have never been more important.
2. When fans embrace your meme, embrace your fans.
3. The culture of participation is here.
4. Embracing citizen marketers reduces risk.
5. The experience is the difference between profit and failure.

The Results of SoaP and Blogs
Considering that Snakes on the Plane is a b-movie with a modest marketing budget, the opening weekend of SoaP is impressive, as reported by Viral Garden:

The production budget for SoaP has been set at anywhere from 30-36 million, depending on what source you go by. The marketing budget is another 2-10 million, again depending on what source you go by. That gets us to a cost of 32-46 million, with an opening gate of 15.3 million.

So that means that SoaP covered 33-48% of its cost on opening weekend.

In conrtast, a PG-13 rated movie called “Pacific Air Flight 121″ (the original rating and title) would probably have not faired so well. Without the blogosphere, there would be “No “Snakes on the Plane”, no gratuitous cartoony violence, no Samuel L. Jackson screaming “I’ve had it with these mother fucking snakes on this mother fucking plane!”. What kind of movie is that?

SoaP: A Unique Phenomenon
While the Church of the Customer is spot on on what lessons movie studios and marketers in general can learn, marketers should also remember that “Snakes on the Plane” is a unique product.

There are still ways of just throwing enough money at a bad movie to get a descent opening sales, but those days are waning. The blog-supported SoaP is not an alternative route to that. SoaP was embraced by the community because it was a wonderfully campy movie with a ridiculous plot. Indeed, the movie was concieved as a bet on purposely making a bad movie pitch.

Social Media Optimization Applied
Revisiting Rohit Bhargava’s “Social Media Optimization“, we see how SMO is in action for “Snakes on the Plane”. Here’s a some things I’ve noticed, but its not comprehensive:

• Rule:
  #4 Help your content travel
  …Applied in:
  “Get a Call from Samuel L. Jackson” Mobile Phone Viral
  “Snakes Kit” Downloadable Audio, Movie Clips, etc for distribution
• Rules:
  #7 Reward helpful and valuable users
  #3 Reward inbound links
  #5 Encourage the mashup:
  …Applied in:
  “Fan Site the Week” Feature (though could be improved)
  “Contest” – Vote for Biggest Fan
  Inviting bloggers in premiers with free Treos for live blogging
• Rules:
  #12 Don’t forget your roots, be humble
  …Applied in:
  Via MMM: “SoaP director Dave Ellis stopped by Snakes on a Blog to personally thank all the fans for making the movie a phenomenon.”

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Social Media Optimization: Emergence Media’s 5 Themes to SMO:
Or “How to Win Friends and Influence People” on the Internet

Sometimes, there’s an idea so simple you kick yourself for not thinking it first. Rohit Bhargava of Ogilvy Public Relations is doing that to me with his new term: “Social Media Optimization (SMO)”

“While I believe in the power of SEO, there is a new offering we have started providing to clients which we call Social Media Optimization (SMO). 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”

The Term “SMO”: Simple. Brilliant. Sexy. I’m Jealous. I’m not sure if SMO is the best term for what we are all experiencing in the area of Social Networks, Search, WoM, SEO etc, but it sure is a darn sexy one.
The Rules: From 5 to 16

Rohit initially posted 5 rules towards SMO, but others have contributed to the list and as of time of this writting, we have 16 Rules for a successful Social Media Optimization. Here they are in total (read the full post of each contributor):

1. Increase your linkability (Rohit’s Rules 1-5)
   
2. Make tagging and bookmarking easy
3. Reward inbound links
4. Help your content travel – Content Diverification Beyond Web Pages
5. Encourage the mashup – E.g. Portability of YouTube Videos on MySpace
6. Be a User Resource, even if it doesn’t help you (By Jeremiah Owyang)
7. Reward helpful and valuable users (By Jeremiah Owyang)
8. Participate (By Cameron Olthuis)
9. Know how to target your audience (By Cameron Olthuis)
10. Create content (By Cameron Olthuis)
11. Be real (By Cameron Olthuis)
12. Don’t forget your roots, be humble (By Loren Baker)
13. Don’t be afraid to try new things, stay fresh (By Loren Baker)
14. Develop a SMO strategy (By Lee Odden)
15. Choose your SMO tactics wisely (By Lee Odden)
16. Make SMO part of your process and best practices (By Lee Odden)

Emergence Media’s Thematic Approach to Social Media Optimization

Loren Baker, Lee Odden, and Cameron Olthuis have well contributed to Rohit’s original Top 5 list, but now at a total of 16 Rules, its getting a bit unruly. Taking in everyone’s contribution, I’m going to jump into the fray and give “5 Main Themes of SMO”, as opposed to specific rules.

I think my approach to SMO Success falls under two underlying assumptions:

1. The New Ruleset: If the Social Media is about “Engaging People” and “Conversation” why are we reading still reading just the Cluetrain Manifesto? We should be reading “How to Win Friends and Influence People” as well. Read up on it. Can you see how it applies online?
2. The Equation: “engagement + authenticity x audience reach”. Logic+Marketing has covered this and so has Scott Meyer at SES San Jose.

The 5 Themes of Search Media Optimization (SMO)

1. Understand, Cater, and Help Your Audience
   What is your audience like? Who are the influencers? How can you cater to them while still “keeping real” to both your audience and to what your website is about? And yes “keeping real” may even mean linking to your competitor in your resource guide.
2. The Internet is Alive, Make Your Web Site Alive Too
   Is your website static? Is is it fresh and engaging? Are you putting forward new content – be it published by you or UGC? How is it dynamic?
3. Treat the Audience Like People!
   Treat your audience as you would you would your acquaintances and friends. Be friendly, be real. For those that heckle at you, engage them in an honest conversation and find common ground. With those that love you, empower them – make them Evengelizers with “digg this” links to letting them borrow your stuff (”portable content” like YouTube).
4. Social Media is Not a Tool, It’s Today’s Internet Culture (and the Future’s?)
   Beyond SMO as a Strategic Plan, we see from blogs to MySpace to Digg that the Internet is become more social, interactive, and open than ever before. So “Social Media” is not just a term du jour, Social Media is becoming a part of the Internet Culture. If you’re on the Internet, it should be yours too.
5. The Internet is More than a Webpage on a Computer, What about You?
   Do you have useful and engaging content beyond the pages on your website? Video, Audio, Mobile-Accessibility, Widgets, downloadable PDF Whitepapers etc. Expand your network of influencers (bloggers, digg etc) and expand your network of content (PDFs, Video, allowing others to “port” your content elsewhere ala YouTube).

Thoughts? Let me know.

Related Links

1. 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO)
   By Rohit Hargava
2. Rules of Social Media Optimization
   By Jeremiah Owyang
3. Introduction to Social Media Optimization
   Cameron Olthuis
4. New Rules for Social Media Optimization
   Lee Odden
5. Social Media Optimization : 13 Rules of SMO
   Loren Baker

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