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Adirondack 2.0 via the SMO Trail

August 21st, 2006 · No Comments · Destination Marketing

That’s it, the professional blogger/web designer/SEO person can now aspire to a new title. Social Media Optimization Expert. Oh, if your thinking that some doofus from MySpace is going to launch your website into the new millenium, unfortunately for 90% of the world, that is what your going to get and it might actually do you some good. On second thought, if your thinking about MySpace, you might be wasting your time. Please stop reading now.

A fun little toy appeared recently. Socialmeter lets you check any website for “Social Media” presence. Try it out, you might be surprised. This service is still sort of new and the numerical score is somewhat misleading, but as a benchmark of activity may be useful. Awesome for checking the performance of linkbait or anchor posts. I’d like the ability to search among tags or some indication of tags being used too. This is where SMO comes into play.
Frankly, the fact that SEO is still being discovered is a mystery to me. What webdesigner, especially a professional designing a site for a client who desires traffic, would ignore basic SEO? Lot’s. Who would actually pay someone for a site without requiring basic SEO and adherance to webdesign standards? More than you think. If you using Firefox, Ctrl + Shift +”A”. SMO takes things another step. Reality is that the new social networks are quickly becoming the new aggregators of information and have the ability to drive huge amounts of traffic quickly and at a relatively low cost. These marketing channels (while not designed to be, looks, smells, and tastes like a distribution channel to me) are gaining ground and will likely overtake the traditional search engine as the “trusted” index of internet reality.
Rohit Bhargava is credited for coining this new term and he’s given an excellent introduction to the concept and it’s no surprise that several others have expanded on his idea. The fact is, SEO all by itself is useless and could even be considered obsolete as a new an innovative activity. Nobody should toy with presenting a website without already practicing sound SEO strategies. Oh, if your thinking “I already buy AdWords so I don’t need to do this”, please send me a check and go edit your MySpace. (Sorry Rupert, it’s just to easy and fun). What each business needs to do is identify their niche, create and participate within that niche, and use SMO techniques to aggregate, disseminate, and publicize their information vertical. The transition to managing “pull” marketing versus the vestigal analog activity of “push” marketing is what is happening now. So, anyone want to take a walk on the SMO Trail with me?

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