Ok everyone, it’s my very first blog. I’m tossing all the rules aside and tackling a monumental beast that I hope I can bring you closer to. What’s that? Why it’s the world of Social Media Optimization!

I’d been struggling for a bit with this post as I didn’t know exactly what to cover.. Should I touch on why I’m doing it? Perhaps I should mention where it comes from or talk of my reasons behind starting this site? Should I stop procrastinating and just make an entrance? Yes!

I decided upon touching on what everyone in the industry credits as the origins of SMO:

Social Media Optimization (SMO) was a term coined by Rohit Bhargava in August of 2006 in this blog post.

Rohit states,

“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.”

He also gives his 5 rules for Social Media Optimization:

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

That’s his version and the origins of all of this in a nutshell. Over the next while I plan on bringing you my version, exploring the differences and perhaps through our shared experiences we could all learn a thing or two about the future of internet marketing.

greg :: Jan.01.2007 :: Social Media Optimization :: 2 Comments »