Seven Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO) for Publishers

NOTE: I wrote this article for the June 2007 issue of Folio. Here is the complete, unedited version…

Just when you thought you had the hang of SEO and SEM to drive traffic to your publication’s web site, along comes another acronym for you to master: SMO. Social Media Optimization (SMO), was coined by Rohit Bhargava of Ogilvy Public Relations in 2006 and is a set of tactics to get more exposure for your site in social media (blogs, forums, social bookmarking sites, etc.). The goal of SMO is to make it as easy as possible for others to link to your content and thus get as many inbound links to your site as possible. This in turn leads to more traffic to your web site and more traffic equals more revenue opportunity.

This isn’t really a new concept. For years publishers have been encouraging people to bookmark their site and syndicating content to other sites with the goal of driving more traffic. And we all know that the more links to your site from other relevant web sites, the better your site ranks in the search engines and the more traffic you’ll get from them. But SMO makes us really think about the best way to do this.

Rohit created five rules for social media optimization (see links at end of this article), and several others have contributed more rules along the way. At last count there were 17 rules altogether, but they were written primarily for marketers. Here is my adaptation of the SMO rules to create the Seven Rules of Social Media Optimization for Publishers:

1. Increase Your Site’s Linkability – You’ve got to give people something to link to. As publishers, you’d think this would be the easy part, but make sure you have good content and frequently update it. Next, make your content URLs easy so people linking to you don’t have to work so hard. I can’t tell you how many horribly long and complicated URLs I see publishers use for their content. Finally, don’t move your content URLs. It takes a lot of work and time to get people to link to your content. The last thing you want to do is break all of those links when you do a redesign of your site.
2. Make Tagging and Bookmarking Easy – Somewhere on each content page where it’s easy to see, put links to major social bookmarking sites like Digg and Delicious, and to personal portal sites / RSS aggregators like Yahoo!, Google, and MSN. With a single click, visitors to your site can add your content to these sites giving you valuable inbound links to drive both direct traffic and improve your search engine rankings. Figure 1 shows an example from a B2B publisher who is doing it right. This toolbar is located at the bottom of every single article on their site.



3. Develop and Promote RSS Feeds and Widgets – Rohit calls this “encouraging the mashup” which is a trendy way of saying, “make it easy for other people to integrate your content and tools onto their own web site.” RSS feeds are the most common way to do this. There are hundreds of manufacturer, association, publication, and individual web sites who crave new, fresh, quality content. RSS lets them easily find and use your content (or at least just the headlines and decks) so that you get more exposure for your content and more inbound links. But RSS also requires that those other sites have the technical ability to read the feeds and re-publish them on their sites. Give people small “widgets” – a simple line of code that people can cut and paste directly into their web site without any further programming. Rohit points out YouTube as an excellent example of this. They provide a simple line of code that any site can simply cut and paste to embed a video clip in their site. This has driven much of YouTube’s growth. Likewise, publishers can create widgets that other sites can simply copy and paste to pull in your content or a handy tool that you’ve developed. And by all means, be sure to prominently promote your RSS feeds and widgets. They won’t do you any good if people don’t know you have them!
4. Reward Inbound Links – SMO is all about inbound links, and people who link to you like to be recognized and should be rewarded. Find ways to promote the blogs, forums, social networks, and other sites that link to you. Blogging software, for example, uses a concept called “permalinks.” When someone links their site to the permalink, the blogging software automatically puts a response on the blog containing a link back to the referring site. This is just one way to recognize and reward inbound link. Listing the most common referrers to your site is another.
5. Participate – Rules 1 through 4 focused on how you configure your web site. Rules 5 and 6, however, focus on what your audience development (or editorial team) should be doing. Someone on your team should be responsible to set up an account in the major social networking sites like Delicious, MySpace, Digg, etc., to put links on them to your own content. Your editors should actively participate in appropriate blogs and forums and post regularly. For example, I have one editor from a major media publication who regularly participates in my eMedia Strategist discussion forum. In his signature block, he has a link back to his publication and is getting a ton of great exposure and back links to his publication’s content. He also links to content in his publication that is relevant to the discussion. This is a fantastic example of SMO done right.
6. Be Real – When bookmarking your content or participating in a community, be sure that the content is appropriately tagged / categorized, and that you put thoughtful commentary with it that is relevant. If you do not, you will be instantly recognized as simply self-promoting rather than truly contributing to the community. On my eMedia Strategist blog, I had a marketer post a comment that was a long as an article and wasn’t relevant to the post he was commenting on. That same marketer posted the same comment verbatim on four other blog entries. I instantly knew that he was “spamming” my blog with a pre-canned article his marketing department had written. I called him on it and he admitted what he had done. He had the right idea – using social media to promote his product – but went about it all wrong. He didn’t actually take the time to engage in thoughtful dialog. Bottom line, I deleted all of his comments because they weren’t relevant to my community and he didn’t get any exposure. Be real about your participation in social media. It’s easy to spot a fake.
7. Monitor SMO on Your Own Site – All six rules to this point have been about how publishers can use social media to drive traffic to their own site. Rule 7, however, is what you as a publisher need to do when others use your blogs, forums, article comments, and other social networking aspects to promote their sites and agendas. Don’t be afraid to allow advertisers and even competitors to post comments on your site or participate in your community. Allow them to use their URL in their signature blocks. However, do be very vigilant and make sure they are not blatantly promoting their own products in an inappropriate way and do constantly ensure they are providing useful and relevant commentary when they do participate.

For more about SMO, you can read Rohit Bhargava’s original blog. Search engine guru, Danny Sullivan, also has an excellent post with links to several SMO resources.