I think advertising is going crazy at the moment over SMO using guerrilla tactics, fancy viral videos, flash games, and a multitude of other fickle engagement strategies to get people talking or thinking about their brand online. There is a false perception, I believe, that if you can get a lot of people to view something, that automatically translates to success. But how is it successful? It’s not that difficult to get people interested in something - I watch funny youtube videos all the time.

However I think that frequently, advertisers do not understand the difference between interest and action. You can release a viral video and get 100,000 people to be interested in it, but few may act on it - or even know that it is associated with a particular brand. Shifted Pixels raised some important questions in a recent blog post on what brands should consider before employing a social media agency.

What is the point of advertising? TO SELL. Pure and simple - at the end of the day, it is to sell, and getting the attention of consumers momentarily in the social media space is of low commercial value to a brand. Social media optimisation should not be viewed as a short term strategy that is campaign based. Doing this often just creates a shark fin on a graph - Momentary interest which can grow exponentially, but then you suffer a huge drop in interest (which is also exponential) which makes you a blip in the highly contested world of the internet.

Andrew Chen wrote a great article using Metcalf’s Law to understand how applications grow exponentially on social networks and the danger of the corollary: Eflactem’s law. Andrew argues that growth and retention relies on perceived value by users, and as you lose users, the value of your network decreases exponentially.

Creating value takes time. If you are using Twitter, build a following of hundreds by posting great content every day. Answer people’s questions and engage with your ‘friends’. SMO is about bringing your brand down to the personal level. Brands should no longer be anonymous - it’s an incredibly powerful marketing tool to have a representative of your company having conversations with consumers - like Matt Cutts from Google. Even though Google is enormous, Matt’s blog brings it down to the personal level.

Google is my friend!

Get your staff blogging and spreading the brand essence! Don’t be an advertiser, be a friend. If someone says something negative about your brand online, approach them and appologise - offer them a discount, or give them something free.

If you are using facebook - have a group which offers users discounts, promotions, and content which is updated frequently. Invite key members to try new products and make them feel like they are connected to the brand in a meaningful way. Update your blog’s content daily and network with bloggers relevant to the space you are in - Create a 2 way dialogue that is actually meaningful.

Nielson suggests we are now bombarded with around 3000 messages per day which has resulted in lower cut through and responsiveness from consumers due to an information overload. Worse still, only 7% of television advertisements can be differentiated from the rest, meaning advertising is becoming less relevant, more generic and is yielding lower returns on investment.

The human brain does not have the capacity to interpret this much information which results in what Georg Simmel called the ‘blasé attitude’. The basic premise is that the human brain interprets the world via a process of differentiation and modern society is now so complex that we are seeing ‘an intensification of nervous stimulation’. The blasé attitude is a response to this – the reason we don’t talk to the people sitting next to us on the bus. It’s not that we stop perceiving the things around us, it’s merely blunting the discrimination because we don’t have the capacity to comprehend it all.

Don’t do some stupid gimmicky campaign which no one will remember in one weeks time - sure, you may get 50,000 views and the client will be happy, but this won’t translate to any revenue for the company.

SMO is about building your brand into conversations over time and we need to move away from viewing it as a quick win. Listen to your customers - Using buzz metrics, Nike realised one of the keywords that kept coming up was ’sweat shops’ so they focused on campaigns to respond to this. SMO is very broad, but ultimately it comes down to creating high value for consumers. You’ve just got to work out what constitutes ‘value’ to you target audience.

My interest in social media from an advertising perspective begun about 3 years ago when I was working in cafe’s as a barista. The success of a cafe relies heavily on positive word of mouth, and the way to create positive WOM is to ensure great service, good food, and top notch coffee.

It seems strange, but I have learned more about social media optimisation from working in a cafe and engaging with cafe culture than I have reading articles, books and talking with advertising people. The key is to differentiate yourself by being the best - to be remarkable as Seth Godin might say. Then, there is a natural talkability. People will argue online and offline whether you are better than another cafe, and they will champion you to all their friends.

The reason cafe’s are a great example from an SMO perspective is that everyone has their favourite one. Where to get the best coffee is often debated and everyone loves to find a new great place to try out. It is a topic many Australian’s like to talk about and this can be seen with the explosion of PR articles in traditional print. Suddenly everyone is talking about the importance of freshly roasted coffee, and what goes in to making the perfect espresso.

If you own a cafe, be an active participant in the coffee world – an active member in coffee forums, coffee related blogs, CRM programs etc. Get involved in coffee competitions, write articles for print, post ‘how to’ videos on youtube for making the perfect coffee, and network as much as you can. Doing this influences the opinion leaders - the coffee nerds - the people who drink double ristretto’s - the people whose friends all ask them where they should be getting their coffee.

I have seen cafe’s invite coffee geeks to their cafe ‘after hours’ for coffee tasting sessions, to talk about their espresso machines, and check out new beans from around the world. These people then talk about you online, to their friends, and their friends talk to their friends.

If you own a wine celler, get the wine enthusiasts in for wine tasting sessions and make them feel special. Give them special member cards and watch as your sales jump. Perhaps give away free bottles of wine to these members and ask them to write a review on your blog. Because the same is true for wine enthusiasts - their friends all ask them where to buy a great cheap wine, and they will recommend you – in fact they will care about you which is a difficult thing to achieve – to make people care.

Strategies like these connect the opinion leaders deeply with your brand who then champion it to others. Over time this builds your reputation and equates to sales which are sustainable and consistent.

The coffee world is fantastic at this and this is where I have seen the best strategy. For cafe’s, advertising isn’t about fancy tv commercials or radio. It’s about making sure that everyday, the regulars get an amazing coffee, the cafe remembers their name, and they get a bit of love and feel special. It’s consistent dedication to quality and this is far more effective than any short term campaign. Doing this is also a retention initiative, and we all know that retention is easier than acquisition.

Below is an article I recently had published in Digital Media Magazine. It was restricted to 1000 words so it is quite superficial. Comments are welcome!

A new process of harnessing the power of social networks and online communities is delivering strong results to some, yet the true potential of Social Media Optimisation is yet to be realised.

SMO is the current buzz word that advertisers are trying to work into their marketing mix. It is the art of utilising the connectivity of social networks and online communities and leveraging user generated content to spread your message in a viral way.

There are two vital criteria for successful SMO: your target market must be engaged with social media in some way (remembering, however that over half of the Australian population now has a presence on a social network),and secondly, your target market must use the online environment in the information search phase of their decision making process.

SMO is still largely ignored by big brands who continue to invest heavily in conventional media and find it difficult to keep up with the rapidly changing digital landscape. The fact is, methodologies and approach to SMO need to change every week as we discover new ways to engage segmented demographics, snowball information virally, discover what people will find ‘interesting’ and produce relevant content that people will pass around. Oh, and realising new technologies which assist this.

SMO and viral go hand in hand and both rely on content being of interest. However, the big question is: what is interesting? How do you differentiate your content from the millions of other people all trying to muscle in? How do you remain relevant in a space with a whole new set of politics, decision makers and opinion leaders?

A great example of interesting content going viral was a recent blog called ‘90 day Jane’. The blog detailed the activities of a girl who claimed she would kill herself in 90 days documenting the process via her blog. Amazingly, the blog received 157,530 hits within a week. It was quickly taken down shortly after.. But is this the only blog out there talking about killing yourself? No, so why did this one go viral so quickly?

I think what made 90 Day Jane go viral (beyond the gimmicky name) was the way the content was positioned which ‘pulled’ people in. It aroused feelings of contempt, intrigue, excitement, shame and ambivalence.

It challenged people’s very notion of self preservation. Such acts of transgression challenge the status quo and engage people to react and debate with others. It also raises a number of questions around censorship, responsibility, governance and morality which go beyond the scope of this article.

The example of 90 Day Jane shows just how fast the transmission of information can become global. Businesses need to be able to tap into this if they are going to remain competitive. With this transmission of information comes the requirement for businesses to be able to respond to change if they are to remain relevant to consumers.

I believe we’re seeing an evolution in advertising through both the democratization and de-politicization of information and its transmission through communities. Users increasingly control the ebb and flow of what is distributed across the net. We are seeing a de-politicized method of communicating that is not censored by large publishers with vested interests. Everyone still has their bias, but it is more democratic because content is ranked based on popularity and relevance (albeit Google’s notion of this).

However it is still important to understand the mechanics of power and influence online. In fact Business week recently named owner of Techcrunch, Michael Arrington as one of the 25 most influential people on the web.

Advertisers can no longer push their message onto people in the online space. They need to work out how to build their brand into user’s communications and leverage opinion leaders. This is a major objective for SMO.

Building a brand into online communications can present problems for companies if they are the victim to negative comments. An example of this was last year’s Whirlpool forum attack on 2Clix who’s software was criticized in a large thread. 2Clix estimated they lost $150,000 per month over 7 months equating to over one million dollars in lost revenue. There were 195,000 users on whirlpool at the time and this does not include the multitude of anonymous visitors viewing the posts (http://whirlpool.net.au/article.cfm/1753).

In the modern world, people and technology are inextricably linked. As our ways of communicating online shift, new technology is developed to facilitate that interaction. Conversely, new technologies create demand and alter current ways of communication and notions of community.

From an SMO perspective, advertisers need to understand there is a bilateral relationship between social change and technological evolution and as an advertiser; how do the two of these work cohesively to produce new modes of communication, meaning, connections, categories and ontology?

Does a new technology create demand for itself, or does our need for something demand the development of a technology?

For example, Google’s Open Social is a combination of both a technical development and a social need to make technology simpler.

There are currently thousands of niche social networks out there in the web. These networks are closed systems and require users to signup to each one individually, re-create their friend network and comments etc.

Google’s Open Social is an emerging technology which provides a standard for a way these social networks can interact with each other. Each separate social network can now connect to a super social network. This will undoubtedly add another dimension to SMO which digital agencies will need to quickly embrace.

Nielson has just released a research report which looked at box office performance of 400 recent films, and found that the films that grossed at least $100 million in sales were more likely to have been blogged about (not exactly profound!). (http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/news/recent_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003723083).

Did the popularity of the films encourage bloggers to write about the films, or did the bloggers help make the films popular?

Can you quantify to what degree the former influences the latter? And how can you implement an SMO methodology which is fluid enough to understand such a complex process, yet scientific enough to prove results to clients?

For advertisers, effective SMO is not about trying to infiltrate forums and blogs to promote your brand. What we want to do is create interesting content with a strong ‘hook’ and bait other people to comment on it – to build our brand into communications by providing information that is remarkable, high value and relevant to specific groups of people.

The question is, what are you doing to understand and harness the power of SMO?