Online Marketing Blog

With all the buzz about social media optimization the past week, I thought it would be timely for us to present two updated tools for encouraging the sharing of and linking to content as well as distribution. These are concepts that are fundamental to the notion of social media optimization or SMO.

The first tool is one we’ve received excellent comments on and it’s called the Social Bookmark Creator. In order to make it easy for readers to save a blog post or a web page for reading later or to aggregate resources using a social bookmark service, we’ve created a tool that allows you to add a social bookmark menu after each post or on a static web page.

After threatening many, many times to get a new face on Online Marketing Blog, we’ve finally done it. Thanks to Thomas aka TwisterMC for putting up with my many revisions and for developing the cool subscription and bookmarking tools.

Also thank you to those people that I kept bugging for feedback and provided it!  We may not have implemented many of the suggestions received, but all of them were appreciated.

New plug-ins and “social media optimization” features include:

• Smart Search – suggest search results as you type
• Slick foldout RSS subscription options in the right column
• The social bookmark dropdown option after each post

There are a number of finishing touches that are still being worked on, such as adding more static pages of resources, vidoe and tools, but for now this is it.

There is an exceptionally interesting meme developing around the idea of social media optimization. It started with Rohit Bhargava of Ogilvy Public Relations and his 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO) and this insight:

“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.”

With contributions by Jeremiah Owyang, “Rules of Social Media Optimization and Cameron Olthuis, “Introduction to Social Media Optimization” who offers this take on SMO: