An optimized content distribution network tightly integrates the hub and spokes so that users can connect with a brand in the communities they choose.  For example, if brand X’s hub is a blog, they should make it very easy for users/readers to connect with them in other communities.  This is usually achieved either through editorial content or simple links w/icons somewhere visible on the web page.

Social Search

The rise of social search is an important element to consider and what makes the network so important.  YouTube surpassed Yahoo as the world’s #2 search engine a few years ago and it’s safe to assume that Facebook, Twitter and Flickr yield substantial search queries as well. It’s imperative for brands to have optimized content within these communities so they can be found in the search results. Optimization of these spokes should also include links back to the “base of operations” in case users want more information or want to connect with a brand more personally.   Tight integration is the key to a successful content distribution network.

Real-time Search

Real-time search has brought social media to search engines. With Twitter and Facebook updates now appearing in the  Google search results, it’s important for brands to create content on a consistent basis in order to capture search engine real estate for relevant queries.  This means that brands must be more strategic when posting messages and work closely with SEO teams to understand what keywords people are searching for relevant to the brand.

Social Omnipresence

The end result of a well optimized content distribution network is social omnipresence; where brands have some level of presence in external communities.  Rohit Bhargava talked about this four years ago when he wrote about the “5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO)“, specifically “helping your content travel”.  It’s still very relevant today.  When a brand either creates content in a “digital embassy” or makes it VERY easy for content on their hub to travel, the end result is the same – social omnipresence, which is the first step in creating community and advocacy.

This by no means is a plea for brands to spam the community.  The content created should be strategic, relevant and human (i.e. feeds are okay sometimes, but a real life human being — usually a community manager — should be the face and creating the content).

Graphic courtesy of Aaron Lewis

Being transparent (or real) in a conversation and disclosing who you are is really the first step in building trust with people online. It’s the same dynamic when building relationships in the real world, not that online isn’t the real world of course but you catch my drift. If I wasn’t transparent with my wife when we were first dating, and then issues began to arise after the fact, there is a good chance that we wouldn’t be married today. Same goes for big companies.

Back in June, I attended a Blog Council event in Chicago and met some really awesome people from companies like Dell, P&G, Nokia and Allstate Insurance to name a few.  It was great opportunity for us to talk about the issues that we face daily within our organizations as it relates to social media, one being disclosure. And, to make a long story short, we began to work on a collaborative disclosure statement (just released today) for companies that are engaging in and with social media.  Here are some key points that explain the statement in detail:

• The disclosure policy is intended to be used as a guideline to help companies create their own policy
• The document is open source; and will change and evolve over time
• The policy covers more than just corporate blogging. It encompasses “all things” social media

The Blog Council is a group of corporate marketers/managers/lawyers (volunteers); and it’s not our intention to set or enforce “blogging rules”.  The disclosure statement is meant to make it easier to share the best practices with each other and the community.

And, here is something really cool. It’s not his staff that is blogging, it’s actually Fred. And, it seems that his transparency (a characteristic of social media) on issues is helping him shoot up in national polls in the Republican presidential field. Good luck Fred!

Technorati Tags: social media optimization, smo, socialmediaoptimization, social media, fred thompson

In the news this week it is reported that hgtv.com is launching a social networking site for their target consumer group.  Users of the site will have the capability of writing ratings and reviews, post to various forums, and upload photos of their living rooms, bathrooms, or other rooms that have either been recently designed or need remodeling.

According to Adweek, Sony and video-sharing site Grouper, in an effort to increase customer engagement and excitement are holding a contest to look for two people to be the “Face of the Fan” and report on movie news. 

Chairman and CEO of Marriott International Bill Marriott is already yielding positive results from a blog he launched last month. In fact, one of the first posts, “Uncharted Territory,” has already received over 80 comments. According to Three Minds, the blog summarizes what blogging is all about – and what it can ultimately do for a brand by telling stories, listening and learning from customers, and putting a face to the brand.

And lastly, our lovely Democratic Party is finally catching on to Social Media.  Mr. Obama’s website allows users to create profiles, find nearby supporters, plan and attend events, network with friends, become a fundraiser and set up a blog.  On the Clinton’s side, the Team Hillary Action Center wants users to help build the supporter list, host and attend Hillary events, set goals for “Hillraisers” or registered users and become a guest blogger.

These are just a few examples of how big brands/politicians are adopting social media in a way to engage with customers; a difficult yet rewarding task, if done right.

Technorati Tags: social media optimization, measuring social media, SMO, socialmediaoptimization, social media marketing

Over the last couple of months, there has been a allot of buzz around Social Media Optimization (the New Rules of SMO, the Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing and Treating Social Media Optimization as another Distribution Channel) and the list goes on. However, what I haven’t noticed is any discussion on how to measure social media optimization. We all know from Marketing 101, that the ability to measure the effectiveness of marketing initiatives and calculating a ROMI (return on marketing investment) is imperative to a company’s bottom line. In fact, just yesterday; Comscore announced a research and development initiative that is designed to provide comprehensive measurement of conversational media such as blogs and community-driven sites.

With that said, let’s jump right in on ways you can measure social media optimization today because we all know that Comscore studies can take anywhere from 6 months to 2 years before we can see any of the results.

Standard ‘Engagement’ Metrics

Whether or not you are leveraging social media, there are some general ‘engagement’ metrics that you should be monitoring as part of your marketing initiatives:

• Unique visitors
• Time spent on site
• Total time spent per user
• Frequency of visits
• Depth of visit
• Conversions

You can track most of these metrics from well known web analytics tools like Omniture or even Google Analytics which is free.

And then of course, if you are using paid search you will want to examine the standard search metrics such as clicks, impressions, click through rate, conversion rates, revenue and possible ROAS (return on ad spend). I would also recommend SEM Director as an additional enterprise solution, if you can afford it. It basically allows you to assign values to particular actions on the website once they arrive from search (i.e. filling out a form, clicking on a particular link, an internal search, etc.)

Social Media Optimization Metrics

There are several things you can look at when measuring the success (or not) of your SMO marketing efforts; and of course it depends on what your overall marketing goals are. In addition to the above ‘engagement’ metrics; here are some others to consider:

Reading content – if you have a blog, a good way to measure engagement is to monitor who is reading your blog and where they are coming from. You can run web analytic reports that will show you what is the most popular content on your site (blog); how long they were on that page, where they came from, and also the bounce rate (percent of visitors who left your site after visiting a particular page).

Contributing content – assuming you have a blog and allow for comments; a quick and easy metric would be to monitor the number of visitors who are actually interacting (posting comments) on your blog.

Who is bookmarking your site/blog posts – there are a couple of ways you can look at this metric. You can use your web analytic tool and run a click map report and see how many web visitors are clicking on the social bookmarking icons. Or, you can simply create profiles in each of the bookmarking sites and search for your urls. This can be very time consuming and would only recommend spending time searching in digg, del.icio.us, stumbleupon and netscape.

Subscribing to a RSS feed – you can also measure how many web visitors are subscribing to your RSS feeds.

Emailing posts – assuming you allow for your blog postings to be emailed to others (see below); you can use your blog platform tool like wordpress to see how many emails are actually being sent through your web form.

Who is talking about you – another metric you can use is to see who is actually linking to your blog and talking about your blog postings. You can do this a couple of different ways; through technorati or searching in Google and Yahoo for the following: link:http://www.yourwebsite.com. Or, if you have budget, you can hire companies like Radian6 or Collective Intellect, that offer real-time social media monitoring and analysis.

Technorati Tags: social media optimization, measuring social media, socialmediaoptimization, social media marketing, social media metrics

I have been blogging about social media for a little over 3 months now and I have noticed that there aren’t many bloggers talking about the need for politicians to use social media as a channel to communicate their marketing messages.  David Wilson, author of the popular Social Media Optimization blog titles one of his postings “Politicians Interested in Social Media” but cites that many politicians talk about social media but never seem to execute a social media marketing strategy.  In another post, David also states “Just as corporations need to create and execute a social medial marketing plan, so do politicians running for office.” I completely agree with David. As social media is almost mainstream, it’s imperative for politicians to penetrate this exponentially growing channel.  In today’s politics, social media probably won’t have too much of an impact on the results of an election; but I anticipate that it will be a tremendous opportunity for future incumbents to tap into a new demographic.

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