Social Media Optimization vs. Social Media Marketing

Jan 03, 2007

OK, the online world is becoming complex every passing month, week, day, and even hour. Getting decent exposure for your website or blog doesn’t just mean you search engine optimize your website and be happy when the traffic begins to pour in from the search engines. In fact, not basing your online campaign merely on search engines was the theme of my recent post where I wrote that you should focus on getting traffic from other websites and blogs too.

Cameron at PronetAdvertising has written a nice post on social media optimization vs. social media marketing where he tries to separate social media optimization (a term invented by Rohit Bhargava) from social media marketing. Social media optimization, as Cameron puts it, is

the process of refining a website (optimizing it) so that it’s awareness and content are easily spread through social mediums and online communities by users and visitors of the website. This can include anything done “on-page” such as improving the design and usability of the website so that it becomes more compelling to users, in an effort to help them spread it through social media sites.

Whereas social media marketing

plays more of an active role in relation to social media by referring to the creation and distribution of content and other messages through the social web by some form of viral marketing. This can be anything from creating compelling content that gets bookmarked and even hits digg’s homepage to spreading a viral video by putting it on YouTube and other social media websites. It’s about the things that are done off-site.

Technorati Tags: social media optimization, social media marketing, smo, smm, seo, seo marketing