Respected Social Media practitioner Brian Oberkirch (who I just wrote about last night) doesn’t like people gaming the system, he says “There Is No Such Thing As Social Media Optimization“. He doesn’t like it because:

• “You are link bait dressed as thought leadership”
• “You focus people on tools & rules instead of talk & understanding“
• “You attempt to homogenize & productize what will really be a series of handmade, one-off engagements“
• “You do ridiculous things like put yourself in Wikipedia to seem more legit“
• “You attempt to ‘black box’ and complicate what should be made transparent, open, abundant“
• “You drag that bullshit practice of SEO into the social media world”

As far as I see it, these are best practices based upon experience to use these tools to their maximum ability, I see nothing wrong with that. That of course, as long as they fall under the premise of being community and customer focused.

Heh, this should be interesting, as I was the first to add to the list of Social Media Optimization list started by Rohit. I suggested to 6) Be a User Resource, even if it doesn’t help you 7) Reward helpful and valuable users. There is anything wrong with trying to get your message out there as efficiently as possible and being customer focused. Sharing of knowledge around how to use these tools as best as possible should be available to the open community.

I had no idea that this term Social Media Optimization was put into Wikipedia, the line should be drawn if someone is trying to bottle up, label, and brand these community learnings for a quick profit, is someone doing that?