Using social media as a marketing tool (for your blog)

Thursday

The Belgian Zdnet had an article today about improving your company's visibility by leveraging social media. I don't know of any Belgian Company using this concept except the press (here and there) and this principle hasn't find it's way into the mainstream. But the appearance of this article might indicate some new awareness.
There is even a term for it as coined in the article: Social Media Optimization. Especially a lot of smaller companies can use this technique as a low cost marketing tool. The article also mentioned two Belgian variants of Digg: Scoopeo (French) en Bligg (Dutch). Nice to know. Now let's have a look at SMO.

Social media optimization (SMO) is a set of methods for generating publicity through social media, online communities and community websites. Methods of SMO include adding RSS feeds, adding a "Digg This" button, blogging and incorporating third party community functionalities like Flickr photo slides and galleries or YouTube videos. Social media optimization is related to search engine marketing, but differs in several ways, primarily the focus on driving traffic from sources other than search engines, though improved search ranking is also a benefit of successful SMO.
Rohit Bhargava was credited with inventing the term SMO. His original five rules for conducting Social Media Optimization are:

Increase your linkability
Make tagging and bookmarking easy
Reward inbound links
Help your content travel
Encourage the mashup
(Source: Wikipedia)

ln the meanwhile, others have expanded on the original article and there are now 16 rules. Marko Derkson has even translated the 16 rules into Dutch. So these rules also apply even if you have just a personal blog and want to improve it's visibility.

I also want to have a look on how this relates to Black PR. But that's for another post.

Related articles: