Social Media Marketing eBook

Why I’m Not Keen on the Term ‘Social Media Optimization’

I’ve already started a list of topics that version 2.0 of our ebook needs to cover. If you do a search of the current book, you won’t find a single mention of the phrase ‘social media optimization‘. This was, admittedly, a bit of an oversight, but it was a Freudian oversight, of sorts. I don’t like the phrase.

It’s a question of framing. Calling social media markeeting SMO puts it in a camp with a series of other dark marketing arts: SEO, SEM and so forth. Some of these have a dubious reputation. More importantly, they’re intimidating phrases, and difficult for the average person to understand. I used to be a technical writer, so I know. Whenever you want to make something sound hard and expensive, give it a long name.

Rohit Bhargava apparently coined the term back in August, 2006, and he does some good thinking about social media marketing in that post. And I’m sure his intention was to obfuscate what comprises the field.

I much prefer ’social media marketing’ or ’social media relations’. They’re friendlier, more understandable words, and the latter emphasizes the crucial relationship-building aspect of the work.

SMO sounds highly technical, and implies that all you need to do is a follow a bunch of rules and procedures. Of course, that’s not the case–Chip Griffin’s post on breaking the rules (thanks to Roderick for the pointer) is a good example of that.

Tags: chip griffin, robit bhargava, smo, social media optimization