Here is an example of social media at it’s finest.
An African American woman in West Virgina gets brutally tortured and raped, forced to drink bodily waste and barely escapes with her life.
Where did the story go? This happened Sept 12 and I can’t remember hearing anything about it. Yet, the Jenna 6 story about 6 black guys beating up a white classmate is all over the news.
Help to join 36,000 Facebook members who are trying to get the story out:
This is an easy one - we want to extend the International Talk Like a Pirate Day for a whole week:
Tell whoever you want. You should be sending them to this link to find out about this important holiday, and to get some good pirate sayings:
Today’s movers and shakers, according to Yahoo Buzz, look for O.J. Simpson to be in the news.
Seth Godin had an interesting post on his blog. He was talking about this sign these activists had put up at his college campus:
Wear Blue Jeans
On Wednesday
If You are Gay
A simple sign, but effective. Not so much because it got a lot of people to wear jeans, but that it started a debate. It started a discussion. In fact, as you can see the discussion is still going on - many years later.
And therein is the key to advertising. The audience must be first listening, and the best way to know they are listening, is to have them talking about it with each other.
And this is what SMO is - rather than ‘yelling’ at consumers, we talk with them. In fact, we don’t even treat them as consumers, we simply make sure our product, service or content is valuable, and then make it easy for people to talk about it.
Rohit Bhargava has created 5 steps for effective SMO, as outlined in his blog. Rohit writes:
For years now, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for websites has been honed into a fine art with entire companies devoting considerable effort to defining best practices and touting the value of SEO for raising a site’s performance on organic search listings. While I believe in the power of SEO, there is a new offering we have started providing to clients which we call Social Media Optimization (SMO). 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. Here are 5 rules we use to help guide our thinking with conducting an SMO for a client’s website:
- Increase your linkability - This is the first and most important priority for websites. Many sites are “static” - meaning they are rarely updated and used simply for a storefront. To optimize a site for social media, we need to increase the linkability of the content. Adding a blog is a great step, however there are many other ways such as creating white papers and thought pieces, or even simply aggregating content that exists elsewhere into a useful format.
- Make tagging and bookmarking easy - Adding content features like quick buttons to “add to del.icio.us” are one way to make the process of tagging pages easier, but we go beyond this, making sure pages include a list of relevant tags, suggested notes for a link (which come up automatically when you go to tag a site), and making sure to tag our pages first on popular social bookmarking sites (including more than just the homepage).
- Reward inbound links - Often used as a barometer for success of a blog (as well as a website), inbound links are paramount to rising in search results and overall rankings. To encourage more of them, we need to make it easy and provide clear rewards. From using Permalinks to recreating Similarly, listing recent linking blogs on your site provides the reward of visibility for those who link to you
- Help your content travel - Unlike much of SEO, SMO is not just about making changes to a site. When you have content that can be portable (such as PDFs, video files and audio files), submitting them to relevant sites will help your content travel further, and ultimately drive links back to your site.
- Encourage the mashup - In a world of co-creation, it pays to be more open about letting others use your content (within reason). YouTube’s idea of providing code to cut and paste so you can imbed videos from their site has fueled their growth. Syndicating your content through RSS also makes it easy for others to create mashups that can drive traffic or augment your content.
There are many other “rules” and techniques that we are starting to uncover as this idea gets more sophisticated. In the meantime we are always on the lookout for new ideas in Social Media Optimization to encourage even better thinking. Perhaps we may even see the rise of entire groups or agencies devoted to SMO in the future …
To this, we would like to add:
6. The quality of the content drives the whole campaign. SPAM dies, as it should, but clever, funny, even controversial content travels quickly.
It’s official! We’re hiring. We’re looking for 1,000 ‘employees’. Old or young, big or small, we want your help to spread the word. You can apply here:
http://www.yovia.com/smobloggers.html
There is definitely a difference between a good comment or post, and a SPAM comment. You need to make good comments. Here would be an example:
Hey, I saw the funniest video of Britney Spears. This fat dude is dressed up like her and they dubbed over the VMA Award performance:
A bad comment, or one that is going to be removed or blocked would be:
Check out our great video site.
1. Check each day for what we need ‘blogged’ here: buzz.yahoo.com
2. Search the web for discussion boards, blogs, Myspace pages and post comments or start discussions about the company we are trying to ’spread the word’ for.
3. Talk about it anyway you want - post it to your Myspace page, just make sure it links back to the site (the URL will always be on this site)
4. Record that you made a comment or somehow linked the article or website in your Yovia Worksheet.
6. Save your Worksheet as YourName_blogger-worksheet.xls and email it to us.
Note: If you do not have the Yovia Worksheet - Apply Here.
