Moderator August 26th, 2009
In keeping with the trend toward SEO becoming a general term having to do with web promotion of all types, the phrase “social media SEO” was bound to creep in. What does it mean?
Much of classical marketing seeks to create a competitive advantage for the focus of the practitioner’s efforts. So we can generally assume that the phrase refers to achieving marketing objectives in some part through use of social media.
Social media is rife with buzzwords and ambiguity. Wikipedia portrays the following hierarchy and organizational scheme for social media:
Communication
Blogs: Blogger, LiveJournal, Open Diary, TypePad, WordPress, Vox, ExpressionEngine, Xanga
Micro-blogging / Presence applications: Twitter, Plurk, Jaiku, fmylife
Social networking: Bebo, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Orkut, Skyrock, Hi5, Ning, Elgg
Social network aggregation: NutshellMail, FriendFeed
Events: Upcoming, Eventful, Meetup.com
Collaboration
Wikis: Wikipedia, PBwiki, wetpaint
Social bookmarking (or social tagging)[2]: Delicious, StumbleUpon, Google Reader, CiteULike
Social news: Digg, Mixx, Reddit, NowPublic
Opinion sites: epinions, Yelp
Multimedia
Photo sharing: Flickr, Zooomr, Photobucket, SmugMug
Video sharing: YouTube, Vimeo, sevenload
Livecasting: Ustream.tv, Justin.tv, Stickam
Audio and Music Sharing: imeem, The Hype Machine, Last.fm, ccMixter
Reviews and Opinions
Product Reviews: epinions.com, MouthShut.com
Q&A: Yahoo! Answers, WikiAnswers
Entertainment
Media & Entertainment Platforms: Cisco Eos
Virtual worlds: Second Life, The Sims Online,Forterra
Game sharing: Miniclip, Kongregate
Got that? When considering any form of internet marketing our suggestion remains to first get clear on the objectives. After that a determination can be made as to which tactical channels might best serve the purpose. And those just might include some form of social media. The meaning of the phrase social media SEO may stick around and evolve, and eventually as with most things, segment into further to-be-defined categories.
