Two More Rules for SMO

Social Media Marketing has been doing the rounds amoung Internet marketers and Rohit Bhargava of Ogilvy Public Relations has given it a kick start with his 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO)

He has lucidly explained the concept as

“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.”

Further contributions to the list of 5 rules was done by

Jeremiah Owyang - Rules of Social Media Optimization
Cameron Olthuis - Introduction to Social Media Optimization
Loren Baker - Social Media Optimization : 13 Rules of SMO
Lee Odden - New Rules for Social Media Optimization

Here's a brief list of all the rules that we have got on Social Media Optimisation till now :

1. Increase your linkability
2. Make tagging and bookmarking easy
3. Reward inbound links
4. Help your content travel
5. Encourage the mashup
6. Be a User Resource, even if it doesn’t help you
7. Reward helpful and valuable users
8. Participate
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
15. Choose your SMO tactics wisely
16. Make SMO part of your process and best practices
    

After reading through all these 16 rules in details, it inspired me to add the following two :

17) Encourage new participants : "Social media optimization" as the name suggests is a social process and as with any social process, it would be most beneficial and effective with increasing number of participants. Lee Odden sited,

"According to Hans Peter Brondmo of Plum during the SES San Jose session “Marketing with Social Media“, 1% of those involved with social media are creating content, 10% will enrich that content and 90% will consume it."

Now the 10% enriching the content and the 90% consuming it are actually depending on the 1% who are creating the content.So if the existing participants in this process can encourage each other to take up the role of "content creator" or atleast secondary contributors ( who enrich the content) this will inturn increase the total numberof participants in the social media optimization process making it more effective for everyone involved with it.

18) SMO should be a continuous process : For any company to actually benefit from SMO, they should make it a continuous process. While we all understand that SMO is most effective in creating buzz, we need to understand that these buzz that is created has a particular life cycle and is bound to die out at a certain point of time.In order to sustain this buzz we need to continuously fuel it with more linkable contents, more participation and application of the priniciples explained in the previous rules.