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Search Marketing and Social Media
By Jim Hedger (c) 2006

The phrase Social Media Optimization, (SMO), has quickly become
an industry buzzword in search marketing circles. The term
refers to the practice of crafting, altering or augmenting
profiles, images, movies and other files to be easily found and
well shared in social media applications such as 43Things.com,
MySpace, Tribe.net or Flickr, and by interested parties
throughout the blogosphere.

The ultimate goal of any marketing campaign is to put products
or services in front of as many interested eyeballs as possible.
Where the public leads, marketers, by necessity, must follow and
if those eyeballs begin to congregate over there as well as over
here, many marketers feel the need to move. Tens of millions of
registered members populate dozens of social networks. People
appear to enjoy the ability to form communities and inform each
other. Online marketers looking for another winning venue are
therefore turning to social media spaces as social marketing
tools.

For the past five years, the number of high-traffic venues for
search marketers remained fairly constant, consisting primarily
of Google. More recently, the space has been supplemented by
Yahoo, Ask and MSN. For the most part, five years of consistency
has benefited the search engines, their users, online merchants
and the SEO/webmaster communities. Nothing stays static very
long on the Internet though. The online marketing metaverse has
expanded yet again.

People like applications that make life easier. That's why
search is somehow part of practically every application people
use online. One of the major appeals of social media networks is
that by nature, they are about sharing information, usually from
a highly personalized point of view. As the theory goes nobody
knows everything but everyone knows something. Collectively, we
must know a great deal. Where search tools are about users
pulling information and Web2.0 applications are about pushing
information to users, social media steps into the middle ground
by pushing information to subscribers and inviting others to
pull information via shared files.

In a social network, large groups of people who would otherwise
likely be strangers associate with each other based on
spider-web networks of contacts, friends, images, interests, and
occupations, creating ever expanding communities. These
communities, built around shared ideas and interests, draw users
by giving them the ability to educate, inform and share with
others.

Both Google and Yahoo have embraced social networking in their
membership based services for years, starting with Yahoo Groups
and Google's Orkut. More recent products include Flickr (Yahoo),
Picasa (Google), Yahoo Publisher Network, and Blogger (Google).
The major search engines have learned from the lesson suffered
by the music and movie industries over the past decade.

About eight years ago the true power distributive power of the
Internet was demonstrated by peer-to-peer file sharing networks.
When Napster appeared on the scene, the music files of millions
of people became illicitly traded public property, virtually
overnight. A similar thing happened to the movie industry two
years ago with broadband and bit-torrent. As soon as a large
enough number of Internet users catch on to a technology that
delivers access to the information or entertainment they want,
that technology becomes a trend. Sometimes, trends have a way of
becoming habit.

Social media applications have transited from trend to
mainstream usage. Thousands of new users sign up for Flickr,
MySpace, Facebook, Linked-In, Tribes and other community-active
networks every day. As a result, blogging, image sharing and
new-media content creation have moved well beyond creative
geekery and corporate PR departments to become a trans-global
pastime. Now that the various social network tools have acquired
mass-market popularity they represent a pirate's treasure to
corporate PR departments and the online marketers ready to serve
them.

As far as treasure troves go, the world of social media is
fairly easy to find; access and start working in. Creating a
MySpace membership or a Flickr account is as easy as filling in
a simple form. While building a MySpace profile is slightly more
difficult than outfitting a Flickr portfolio, both are easy
enough for new users to begin immediately. Partially because
social media is so easy to use and partially because sharing
information, recommendations and the latest outrageousness with
friends and strangers alike is so cool, tens of millions of
people have populated the social environments with hundreds of
millions of files, ranging from music, images, documents and
movies.

Social media is a cool, barely controlled environment in which
individual users can form instant communities, finding
friendships based on shared interest, passion and ideas. So how
long do such environments remain cool after the invasion of
barbarians cleverly disguised as marketing experts? That all
depends on how we (the barbarians), make use of the virtual
villages we're migrating into.

The problem with breaking in any new marketing medium is the
instant gold-rush mentality of the advertisers who are early
adopters. As recently as six or seven years ago, for instance,
the majority of SEOs chased placements without a great deal of
regard for the integrity of the search results. Claiming every
possible Top10 placement under any given keyword phrase for a
single site on AltaVista, InfoSeek and Lycos was entirely
possible, and it was done with mercenary zeal. Ask any long-term
SEO about the earliest days of the industry and most, if not all
will show a slow, sly, satisfied smile. Back then, everything
was blackhat. Before PPC paved the way to profitability, the
search engines naturally considered SEOs as dangerous enemies.

Similarly, social networkers are not terribly happy about
hitting the search marketing radar screen. By introducing
corporate clients to what is assumed to be an open and
non-commercial atmosphere, the online marketing sector is
blatantly degrading the experience shared amongst the people
making up the social network. As the months move on, more and
more marketers are finding their way into places like MySpace.
Communicating with custom created personalities shilling brand
name sneakers is not what most social network users signed up
for.

On the other side of the coin, the people populating social
networks are already being subjected to advertising. Banner ads
have been a part of MySpace for over a year and in a deal
recently signed between MySpace and Google, AdWords ads could
begin appearing alongside the personal profiles of MySpace
members who've registered with the AdSense program. Movie
studios, bands and other performers have also used social media,
primarily MySpace, as an effective marketing venue to reach
youthful consumers. Flickr sometimes displays paid ads from
Yahoo Search Marketing. Advertising is nothing new to web users
though its inclusion in areas or formats that would normally be
considered non-commercial content is often frowned upon.

The social media environment is increasingly going to be used as
a marketing tool regardless of how the various social networks
and their millions of members feel about it. For a good search
marketer, it is nearly impossible to avoid affecting whatever
file one is working on in order to get good placement. In the
realm of social media, adding tags, links and trackbacks is
easier than altering the title, meta-tags, content text and link
patterns. As Internet users gravitate towards the social media
and thus, towards each other, online advertising is likely to
take a community and interest based focus.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_website
Wikipedia list of social networking websites s)
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Search marketing expert Jim Hedger is one of the most prolific
writers in the search sector with articles appearing in numerous
search related websites and newsletters, including SiteProNews,
Search Engine Journal, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide.

He is currently Senior Editor for the Jayde Online news sources
SEO-News (http://www.seo-news.com) and SiteProNews
(http://www.sitepronews.com). You can also find additional tips
and news on webmaster and SEO topics by Jim at the SiteProNews
blog (http://blog.sitepronews.com/).
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