Whenever we are called by prospecting clients to explore what we can do for them in social media, they ask us what we do in SMO. We are never one for jargon and acronyms so we did some digging around and realized SMO stands for social media optimization. Wow, that sound like a mouthful! However, once the effect of the wonderful jargon starts to wear off one is left with the question what the hell does social media optimization really mean?
So here’s our view, and you are more than welcome to disagree or share your counter point. As we look around the social media landscape in India it transpires that the initial companies that started offering social media services were either digital media companies or PR firms. Now media companies were used to SEO (search engine optimization) so intuitively SMO (social media optimization) was the logical jargon that came to mind. PR firms have also been in the space where they have been managing the editorial communication for brands. Some double up and provide "Clipping Services" that seek to monitor the brand coverage in media. Naturally for them social media presented a business opportunity to manage digital PR and report on the coverage the brand was receiving.
In our interactions with clients and some of their social media agencies we heard the concept of "optimizing" the social media presence of brands. In plain English it probably means they will write out "optimized" profiles and "bio" of the brands across Facebook, Twitter, Orkut, YouTube and maybe a few others. The task was then to present excel sheets of all the brand mentions and how positive and negative they are, who are the top influencers online etc etc.
Our view on Social Media is pretty simple and maybe there are "experts" out there who don’t agree, but this has worked out pretty well for us.
- Treat social media as a communication and marketing platform as much if not more than a tracking platform. It is of course important to know who is saying what about your brand, but engaging in meaningful two way conversation with your community is equally if not more important. So we’d like to call this social media marketing (SMM if you like 3 letter words)
- Social media success is often based on a starting engagement strategy backed by creative thinkers, a touch of technology and a lot of hard work. You need to listen, converse, help and engage your community. This day to day interaction is based on real people who think of themselves as the extension of the brand they manage once they turn on their PC’s
- You need to be thinking on your feet, remain contextually relevant and innovate continuously. We never have a one month fixed schedule of activities for any of our clients. It is important to spot opportunities and respond to challenges as they are spotted. The more responsive you get the stronger the brand connect.
- Entrust the brand in the hands of smart young people who themselves live their lives at least in part on Facebook or Twitter (ideally both). If the social media team does not update their own status messages or have not got a strong Twitter network going how will they do anything meaningful for the brand they handle. We don’t look at the age or years of experience when we hire front line social media professionals just the fit. By the way we call them Social Media Marketers.
- Where do the numbers add up? A question we ask all the time when we work on any strategy for our clients. Its a fad to jump onto social media today. Its fashionable to do an augmented reality viral and the client purse strings are loose at this moment. One can see this in the number of brands that are joining in the fray with little to no strategy and practically no idea what these spends will deliver for them going forward. We know this wild west will not continue so work on getting at least a partial revenue linkage in place and it does not mean having to sell cars through a Facebook Application
So whatever it is you are doing, SMO, SMM or just building your brand in your community, we’d like you to pause, think and make the best use of a media so new and so exciting that we can see many brands literally running to jump in.
