Th term Social Marketing has it’s roots in health communications, however, has more recently been “adopted” by the Internet Marketing industry to describe activities associated with marketing and promotion on the many Social Media sites currently mushrooming on the internet under the banner of Web 2.0.
In terms of Online Marketing, Social Marketing is probably more accurately called Social Media Optimisation or SMO.
According to Wikipedia, Social Media Optimisation (SMO) is process of “optimising websites so they are more easily connected or interlaced with online communities and community websites”.
The concept behind SMO is relatively simple: implement changes to a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Digg and Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.
The 5 basic rules of Social Media Optimisation are considered to be :
- Increase your linkability
- Make tagging and bookmarking easy
- Reward inbound links
- Help your content travel
- Encourage the mashup