Rules of Social Media Optimization

Rohit the Vice President for Interactive Marketing with Ogilvy Public Relations has written an excellent piece called 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO). For those involved with the web, we know this is quickly becoming a very important area (as social sites are dominating the web landscape).

Rohit’s Five Suggestions for Social Media Optimzation (SMO)
Read his post to see all details

• 1) Increase your linkability
• 2) Make tagging and bookmarking easy
• 3) Reward inbound links
• 4) Help your content travel
• 5) Encourage the mashup

6) Be a User Resource, even if it doesn’t help you
Add value to users, including outbound links to areas that could help them with their goals and purposes. Deployed corrected, even if you link to competitiors you stand to gain as the communities first source of information finding. How will this help SMO? Folks will link to your social site and tag is as helpful or the ‘ultimate’ guide in that space. As this adds up, it will become more and more relevent in search engine results.

7) Reward helpful and valuable users
Often helpful or popular users will be influencers and champions within your social site, devise ways to elevate them buy promoting their works on the homepage, or develope a rating system. Sometimes a quick email or note in private telling them you appreciate them can go a long way. Some folks have done that to me, and for communities I run, I do that as well. Only do if sincere. Perhaps this is not truly SMO, but it will help to keep the most valuable members of a community closer to your site.

I’m linking to Brian Oberkirch here, as I think he could add to this list, Brian, any thoughts?

Edit: Pronet has jumped in with rules 8,9,10,and 11

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 13th, 2006 at 4:53 am and is filed under Search Strategy, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.