Social Media Optimization

About 5 seconds after I thought I had completed the setup of SMOmashup a few things occurred to me:

1. It is impossible to ever be finished getting ready for anything.
2. For a site that’s dedicated to the Web 2.0 world, it feels very 0.9
3. None of the SMO-esque sites I’d seen actually used any social bookmarks
4. Neither did mine

Well, regardless of my inherit unrest I totally didn’t feel like working on a new theme and the only thing I could think of was trying to hook up #4, which would then fix #3 and make a little bit of headway towards the first two concerns.

In no time at all I had come across not one but two different approaches to adding Social Bookmarks to a blog.

The first one is the one that I decided upon and is the wonderful Social Bookmark Links WordPress Plugin from TwisterMC. Currently in version 0.5.1 it has options where you can pick and choose your favorite Social Sites to display with your post in text form or toss them all in a dropdown menu.

It’s super easy to install and looking at the PHP file it also appears very hackable so that given 15 minutes or so you should be able to add anything you feel the author might have overlooked. Though I would think from the 45+ choices he gives you, that’s probably not likely in the near future.

I would give this a 4.5/5 stars. For future versions I would like to see the ability to order the results in the text format instead of only being able to display them alphabetically. That plus a bit more control over the individual dividers. Other than those wishes for down the road, I highly recommend this for anyone looking to add the easy plugin functionality of Digg, Del.icio.us, Furl, etc to their WordPress setup.

The 2nd option that I found was an online Social Bookmarking creator by iFeedreaders that lets you choose from essentially the same options as the plugin and when you are done it spits out a clean bit of HTML code that you can drop right into your blog or static page to achieve a similar effect as an actual plugin.

This worked well and fast and would serve the purpose if nothing better was available for your particular setup (*cough* Postnuke *cough* Static Page *cough*). But since just about everyone who would be interested in this sort of feature probably isn’t using something dated I can’t think of what purpose this would serve on a regular basis. Still handy to have around I suppose so we’ll give 4/5 stars for doing what it’s supposed to do.

greg :: Jan.02.2007 :: SMO Tools, Social Media Optimization :: No Comments »

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 »