After writing my “The Impact of Social Media on Businesses” post on Friday, I kept thinking about the concept of Social Media Optimization (SMO) mentioned by David Berkowitz. I believe there’s something very strong there, almost a new meme. By reading Rohit Bhargava‘s post on it, I discovered that there were now 16 rules around Social Media Optimization. Here they are:

1. Increase your linkability (usually through fresh content)
2. Make tagging and bookmarking easy
3. Reward inbound links (permalink, listing recent linking blogs)
4. Help your content travel (if your content is portable, submit it to other relevant sites)
5. Encourage the mashup (let others use your content)
6. Be a User Resource, even if it doesn’t help you (include outbound links to areas that could help your users, even to your competitors)
7. Reward helpful and valuable users (promote their work, develop a ranking system)
8. Participate (join the conversation)
9. Know how to target your audience
10. Create content
11. Be real
12. Don’t forget your roots, be humble
13. Don’t be afraid to try new things, stay fresh
14. Develop a SMO strategy (define your objectives and set goals)
15. Choose your SMO tactics wisely
16. Make SMO part of your process and best practices

Rohit Bhargava created the first five rules, Jeremiah Owyang added Rules 6 and 7, Cameron Olthuis added Rules 8, 9, 10, and 11, Loren Baker added Rules 12 and 13 and Lee Odden added Rules 14, 15 and 16

What it means: the new social media world has its own code of conduct that marketers need to understand if they want to leverage it. This list is a great introduction and gives you the basic notions needed to be successful. Again, I really think that this notion of SMO will be very important in the future as new generations use the Web in a much more interactive way.

Harry says: The irony of it, be social (join the conversation/ listen/ be humble) in what is technically an asocial medium (sitting alone in front of a computer).