SMO

SMO (Social Media Optimization) is somehow the acme of an eMarketing strategy. Not only SMO can help you generate a qualified traffic of visitors from social media but eventually it can really improve your image and help shape the debate online in your favour.

What is SMO (Social Media Optimization)?

SMO (Social Media Optimization) is a subset of Social Media Marketing (SMM), which is the online promotion a brand, product or service through the creative use of social media. By social media we mean media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. The landscape of social media can be divided into three main categories: content-sharing platforms, social-networking platforms and social-bookmarking platforms. This landscape tends to unite in a general mashup bringing all the features previously mentionned.

Content-sharing platforms

Content-sharing platforms are web platforms allowing Internet users to share text, audio and video type of content. Typical examples are YouTube in which Internet users can share videos or FlickR in which they can share pictures.

Social-networking platforms

Social-networking platforms are web platforms focusing on building online communities of people who share interests and/or activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Typical examples are Facebook to connect with friends or LinkedIn to make professional contacts.

Social-bookmarking platforms

Social-bookmarking platforms are web platforms allowing Internet users to share, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web resources. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren’t shared, merely bookmarks that reference them. Examples range from digg-like services to more elaborate web application like Stumble Upon which allows its users to discover and rate web pages, photos, and videos. It is a personalized recommendation engine which uses peer and social-networking principles.

Mashups

The global tendency is a global combination of all these services into integrated ones – meaning that social media platforms are converging to propose integrated services to Internet users. One of the consequence of such integration is the acceleration of the diffusion of the information in a horizontal way.

Why use SMO (Social Media Optimization)?

SMO is particularly fitted for ORM (Online Reputation Management) purposes which can be defined as the continuous improvement of one’s personal or professional, business or industry reputation as represented by the content across social media. In other terms, SMO allows to protect your reputation and improve your image. Because social media are particularly fitted to engage with Internet users, SMO can also be used to collect feedback and shape the debate online.