What is Social Media Optimisation/Management/Marketing?
What is Social Media Optimisation/Management/Marketing?
Social Media Optimisation (SMO) or Social Media Management/Marketing (SMM) are catch-all terms for any proactive activity that is designed to engage with consumers online and influence their perceptions of a brand and their interactions with it and its products and people.
More specifically it consists of those activities focused on improving a brand’s presence on the mediums that consumers can add things to. The best known examples are Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, social bookmarking sites like Digg and Reddit, as well as review sites and Q&A services.
Managing or optimising your brand in these channels typically requires a simple two-stage process of monitoring the conversations that people might be having about you, your brand, your sector, or your products, and then deciding whether to engage in those conversations and with what specific contribution. In some cases you may want to start your own conversation within those channels too.
Activities that would fall under the remit of Social Media Optimisation, management or marketing, can take place on your own site, via things like forums and wikis, and/or on third party external media, such as within Twitter or Facebook. Each channel of engagement has its own benefits and drawbacks, as well as offering different types of opportunity and risk. It is therefore important to understand the different channels and use them appropriately against your brand’s core aims and objectives.
Forums
Forums are amongst the oldest of all social media. They allow people to talk about whatever they want - within the forum rules - and they could also be seen as an alternative to customer feedback.
However, because they are not so rigidly aligned to any particular brand or product, the debate is likely to focus on other issues as well. A forum on the betting site Betfair allows any debate loosely related to what the website offers, namely online gaming. One customer, Jamienffc, complained about the BBC’s coverage of Euro 2008 in a thread entitled ‘Boring BBC’:
‘Ive been forced to put the tv on mute. Motson is bad enough but Motson and Lawrenson is absolute dross.
Motson has been saying after 8mins of extra time after Fabregas looked for a pen "the only penalties we'll be seeing are at the end of this extra time"
What the??? since when does he know it’s going to pen. they have made this quarter final absolutely boring. Stark contrast from ITV with Tydlesly and Beglin.’
Taken in this way, forums are more like concentrated social networks rather than discussions about a brand in its products. Their strength is that they keep discussion of relevant business issues within a business’ website, and they certainly drive returning traffic and boost brand recall.
Blogs
Blogging is the most regularly assumed medium for companies looking to move into the online community, yet very few companies get it right. They are perhaps the most commonly misused of all.
Social media tools, and their effect on steering community debate is fraught with difficulty for at least four reasons:
- Most blogs are by amateurs offering unbiased opinion whereas a company will often have a blog written by a professional who will struggle to say anything remotely negative about the company who employs them, which erodes trust in the content.
- Companies most commonly thrive by appealing to a very wide range of people, principally by giving something that everyone needs or wants. By contrast, most blogging successes are based on appealing to niches.
- Companies are often too sceptical to allow one person to be ‘the face of the brand’ even though most blogs are transparent personal diaries, not collective views expressed by a company.
- As a blog is most often started from scratch, it can take a very long time to see any results from it at all so the expectations of what a blog can achieve must be realistic.
Those points aside, it’s by no means impossible for a company blog to be successful, and there are many instances out there that illustrate that they can be a good medium to generate supplemental discussion around a brand, or create new content that wouldn’t be publishable on the main website.
Like a forum, blogs should generally not be geared towards a particular product set. Instead, sentiment around a brand needs to be considered. On its blog, the extreme sports clothing producer Etnies rarely mentions its clothing line at all. Rather it mentions extreme sports tournaments, pictures associated with this, details of road trips, and generally anything that the editors would think to be interesting to people who enjoy the Etnies brand. Offering some unique content that is aligned with brand sentiment can be easy to do and will enjoy success, so long as the company has a commercially interesting brand. If a brand has little alignment to any form of hobby pursuits, however, this can be difficult, but it’s actually quite hard to think of a consumer focused company that doesn’t.
The real advantages of blogging can be seen in the way it can give a company a human face. A couple of writers should have authorship of the blog, be instructed which way to take it, and then take it where they want to go within those guidelines. It’s not really good enough to have a faceless editor writing the posts. The blogging world is essentially voyeuristic, and it craves transparency perhaps more than any other form of social media.
Additionally, from a technical search point of view, blogs provide companies with a longer tail of content, meaning that they can target search terms that the main website wouldn’t be able to.
Etnies probably wouldn’t be able to mention ‘Crookers North American Tour’ on their clothing product centred website, but on their blog such terms are very easy to include. Having this content also helps with the amount of linkable content that is available, and it is easier to submit to websites such as Digg or Reddit, or even be socially bookmarked on a website like del.icio.us.
Wikis are generally associated with user content evolution. That means the community edits content as it feels fit, and the content evolves accordingly. This means that wikis have no end game – each generation of user will bring different facts to the table, whilst opting to exclude other facts if they choose to. The ultimate wiki project, Wikipedia also has a very serious network of moderators behind it to ensure that the most important articles are not abused, but it is very easy for anyone to go on the site and edit a page.
Wiki editorial around a business is rarely exciting enough if thought of in terms similar to the Wikipedia project. Copy editorial rarely brings out much excitement, unless a business is based around a collaborative creative project, such as a novel or user generated magazine. Instead, companies can consider other ways to get their customers being creative. For instance, Coca Cola offers consumers the chance to design their own coke bottle, entitled ‘Design the World a Coke’, establishing a worldwide community who are designing coke bottles.
Another effective campaign has been Sheraton.com, which invited customers to send in pictures of them enjoying their Sheraton hotel break, and then published on them on the front page of the website on a map of the USA with the words: ‘Your Story in Your Words.’ This form of community marketing is initially expensive to set up, because the companies themselves have to envision and create a particular campaign and the programming required, or at least get a creative agency to do it. Blogs and forums rarely need this, as they are very easy to implement. On the other hand, wikis need less creative maintenance.
External Media
Businesses using forums, blogs, wiki, and other methods can obviously affect your brand too if you’re the topic of discussion. Beyond these however there are also external social networking sites operating as platforms for rapid content generation too. These are external to a business because for a business to use them, they will have to create a profile under the constraints of each given social network, rather than having no constraints as they would on their own internal website. Furthermore, content created becomes their property not yours.
The most popular of these networks are Facebook, Myspace and Twitter, but there are also a number of comparatively smaller networks too, such as Friendster, Orkut, and Gaia, that are worthy of some attention too.
Within Facebook there is the opportunity to create a corporate identity and secure friends in the same way as a human being would. With the ability to sponsor groups, undertake paid search campaigns, utilise news feed ads, and an increasing number of other options, Facebook is becoming a great place to cultivate a significant audience.
Twitter allows a brand to secure followers, giving a brand direct access to a pool of consumers and influencers, as well as providing it with the artillery it might need to project ideas and news into the populace in a rapid, direct-to-reader way.
Other platforms, including vertical social networks such as Linkedin, offer other opportunities through advertising and organic methods, to achieve any number of brand objectives.
One of the key decisions that must be made, for both internally owned and externally owned social media, is whether to create the engagement channel at all. Many companies create Facebook pages, for instance, without a clear objective in mind and without the human resource allocated to maintaining it. In many instances a Facebook page simply becomes another outlet for disgruntled customers and staff to criticise and complain about a brand unchecked.
