Social Media Optimization

Last week the world was taken by storm by quite a few pieces of tech news. As none of them were, at the time, related to Social Media Optimization or Social Media Marketing, I really didn’t feel that it was appropriate to talk about them here. Besides, with 64 million sites already talking about the biggest piece of geek, what would I have to say on the matter that hadn’t already been covered?

Well my friends, the line has been crossed into the world of SMO and it will be interesting to watch the outcome, even if it does signify an un-official beginning of another hundred-year war. Continue Reading »

greg :: Jan.16.2007 :: Social Media Optimization, Social Media Optimization News :: 6 Comments »

It’s not so surprising, that places that are looking for a piece of the social media pie are usually moderately successful. For all my railing against the mindless masses that are drawn to these sites and communities I have to say that while I myself am not lured by the siren’s song, I can completely understand why some are. As I nodded to in one of last week’s articles, people drawn to places like MySpace are automatically freed from holding up the baseline as far as having a dedicated web presence goes. Sure, they are greeted by slow sites, multiple page load errors and unexplained/unaccountable downtime but still they persist and show up day after day, inconveniences be damned. Part of this draw is the freedom that is waved in front them. To each their own soapbox. A nice platform for which to share their ideas and thoughts and herald it to the masses.

On paper it sounds great. However there’s always the fine print. Who owns the soapbox? Who pays the bills? Are there restrictions to your freedom? What the fuck is a EULA? Continue Reading »

greg :: Jan.12.2007 :: Social Media Optimization :: No Comments »

So as someone who is a n00b with WordPress I keep looking at all the different things that are available as plugins and options within the publishing system. I’ve already done the basics of trying to make it more SEF, but for me and the purposes of this column I’m thinking more and more about different ways to optimize for social media and what that means.

Essentially I have to say that social media optimization for a blog is pretty tricky the same way that SEO can be. Sure you can make a perfectly SEO’d site that will be all text and linked in/out to oblivion but most of the time that site will be ugly as sin and the inner designer in me won’t let that happen. Same goes with SMO. There are, it turns out, about a bazillion different plugins, widgets, icons, and options to enable you to easily get your site socially optimized. However with each thing taking up a certain amount of space, sites can quickly become cluttered with social litter. This is no more asthetically pleasing than a site with no layout and has just about nothing to do with social media optimization. It reminds me of people who go nutty with Adwords and have them mixed in their menus and headers and footers and inbetween articles and paragraphs and fuck! If you need spare change that bad, leave the blog behind and get a job. Consider panhandling. No one wants to look at that shit and the ads aren’t helping anyone. It’s visual vomit two-point-oh.

Just like ads, the song remains the same for those trying to socially optimize as well. Due to so many people trying to get a piece of the social bookmarking landscape, the number of little buttons you could have on your site is staggeringly offensive to your optical nerves. Add all those del.icio.us and furl buttons to the connundrum of different RSS reading services, a few technorati and feedburner banners, some mybloglog rolls, and thumbs from your flickr gallery and you have a site that’s full on going to be unsafe for people with the slightest bit of taste. Everyday I thank god that the majority of these social widgets aren’t animated gifs, lest even tasteless epiliptics be harmed.

There currently isn’t a good solution for visual vomit as far as social media optimization goes other than to choose your battles and your delivery well. I’m not saying that this site has the best solution out there. In fact I’m just getting my feet wet with them and working on breaking them in slowly, to see which are beneficial to this site and which to the communities at large.

Part of this means trying new things and always being willing to know when something isn’t working,is a waste of time, or just plain looks bad. It’s a delicate balance and it’s something that takes time and adjustment. Just like good web design. Heh.

Unfortunately for you readers out there it’s the job of this site to know what’s what and some of that is going to mean testing the waters with new ideas and new trends. Some of these will be successful and some of these will be completely a waste of all our time. It also means that while this site is pretty scaled back design wise, some of these tests might not be the prettiest and I ask for your forgiveness in advance.

Know that the ugliness which is sure to follow pains me as much as it does you, if not moreso. Keep that in mind as we proceed and feel free to ask questions or offer up suggestions as we go.

For those of you coming into this article down the road looking for advice on how to implement social media optimization techniques into your design, let me layout a few basic ground rules:

1. Be mindful of the end user’s experience.
2. Don’t overthink things. Society never does.
3. Pick your targets and know the reasoning behind your decisions.
4. Be true to your design. Good design will always match form for function.

And that’s it. Remember this site is far from the pinnacle of these rules, more of a testing grounds so don’t get pissed if I toss them to the wolves

greg :: Jan.10.2007 :: Social Media Optimization :: 2 Comments »