iSMOblog

Social Media Optimization, a relatively new term for the laymen of the internet, is now making waves and the ripples can be felt. The reverberations are not far away. When I launched iSMO, my endeavor was to launch a company that offers social media optimization services to companies who are looking to drive more traffic to their website. I could see a place for iSMO, especially in the lucrative Indian market. With considerable knowledge of SEO, I guessed SMO would be the next big thing. However, I have now realized that SMO has its own challenges and few takers.

Who should choose SMO?

It has been hardly a year that companies have started to understand Search Engine Optimization, and now we have SMO, another concept that has to be explained to the customers. It is strictly for those who have significant web presence, and need traffic for their web properties. The company can be an IT company, FMCG, Insurance, Healthcare, Real Estate, Consumer Goods, Hospitality, Retail – just about anyone who cares for his online reputation management and website traffic.

Mediums for SMO

Some of the basic mediums for SMO are:

Social Networking Sites: Social networking sites such as Xing.com, Ryze.com, -Facebook, MySpace and many other popular and not-so-popular ones are there to help you drive traffic from. Many big companies and SMEs lure traffic from participation in the communities and forums on such sites. I read an interesting phrase somewhere which said, “You have pants, Facebook has people.” That says it all!

Social Bookmarking: Getting traffic from social bookmarking sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon is better said than done. For every category and post there are thousands of competitors at any given time and they keep increasing. Social Bookmarking is a good idea for those websites that are highly-ranked and have already established them as credible source of information, like BBC, CNN. But why the hell do they need social bookmarking? It is a classical case of the rich getting richer. Anyhow, Social Bookmarking will always remain a safe bet, or should remain a safe bet.

Forum Participation: Very effective tool and if you participate in high-ranked forums and build links from there, nothing like it. The WWW is full of theme-based forums and they are not hard to locate. You can participate in an existing thread or create a new thread according to your own convenience.

More mediums will be disclosed in the posts to come!