What is SMO (Social Media Optimization) you may ask? Ahhhh, yes . . . the cousin to SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

(You can thank sites like YouTube and MySpace for this latest innovation in Internet Marketing.)

Social Media Optimization is another avenue of search engine optimization that involves making your content – whether written, audio or visual – more readily available in social arenas on the web. The SEO community is all a-buzz with this latest development – and in his article “5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO),” Rohit Bhargava offers some things to keep in mind before starting with SMO.
SEO and SMO both have the same end goal (getting enough attention [links] from the Web community to gain merit points with search engines,) they appear, at least at this stage, to merely be two different roads to the same destination.

The explosive success of both YouTube and MySpace are a testament to the web’s potential to circulate content at lightning speed. Look at how quickly Saddam Hussein’s hanging was circulated around the web – a dismal example, sure, but evidence that if you make content easily transferable, which is one of the five rules Bhargava gives for SMO, and you deliver content of interest to people, you can have success reaching a vast audience.

But one of the key strategies, just like any other marketing done these days – is going to be starting circulation of that information with a targeted audience, more than likely. And then, through web-networking – one person gets your content, and sends it to five of their friends, and each of those five friends send it to five of their friends, etc., – you can watch your information circulate like wildfire.

So what does this mean for copywriters? Well, social media optimization is yet another opportunity for us to be ambassadors of content – offering up conversational copy with a message, right?

What’s different about SMO compared with SEO or any other type of marketing copywriting? Well, the concept has only recently become a serious topic of discussion, so I will re-visit the topic when there’s more info to share. For now, I’ll leave it to Bhargava:

5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO)

For years now, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for websites has been honed into a fine art with entire companies devoting considerable effort to defining best practices and touting the value of SEO for raising a site’s performance on organic search listings. 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. Here are 5 rules we use to help guide our thinking with conducting an SMO for a client’s website:

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