Author: andrewcareaga

Former higher ed PR and marketing guy at Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T) now focused on freelance writing and editing and creative writing, fiction and non-fiction.

Five, seven or 17 rules for social media optimization (SMO)

Just getting caught up on the rules for social media optimization discussion that’s been bouncing around the blogosphere the past few weeks. (Social media encompasses “the online tools and platforms that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other” via blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis, vlogs, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, etc.)

The SMO discussion began with Rohit Bhargava‘s August 10 post of the five rules of social media optimization (hat’s off to PR Squared for the find).

Here are Bhargava’s original five rules, and snippets of his explanations:

  1. Increase linkability. “Adding a blog is a great step, however there are many other ways such as creating white papers and thought pieces, or even simply aggregating content that exists elsewhere into a useful format.”
  2. Make tagging and bookmarking easy. “Adding content features like quick buttons to “add to del.icio.us” are one way to make the process of tagging pages easier, but we go beyond this, making sure pages include a list of relevant tags…”
  3. Reward inbound links. “[L]isting recent linking blogs on your site provides the reward of visibility for those who link to you.”
  4. Help your content travel. When you have content that can be portable (such as PDFs, video files and audio files), submitting them to relevant sites will help your content travel further…
  5. Encourage the mashup. In a world of co-creation, it pays to be more open about letting others use your content (within reason). YouTube’s idea of providing code to cut and paste so you can imbed videos from their site has fueled their growth.

Easy peasy, no? Then why aren’t more of us (including yours truly) making a conscious effort to optimize our sites for social media?

Anyway, over the past three weeks, the SMO list has grown to 16 (or maybe 17, I’m not certain), and now there are rules for adding a rule to the list. I haven’t scratched beyond the surface of these rules yet, but I’ll delve in shortly and will be looking for ways to make my site more social media optimizationally acceptable.

technorati tags:

del.ico.us tags:

icerocket tags:

College-bound teens: ambitious but unrealistic?

Today’s college-bound students may have unrealistic expectations about obtaining advanced degrees, according to the Florida State University study. Reuters reports that “the gap between school leavers’ career plans and their actual achievements is growing.” Citing several national surveys, the researchers point out that 50 percent of “school leavers” in 2000 planned to get an advanced degree, compared to 26 percent in 1976. “But the percentage of high school graduates between age 25 and 30 who actually earned advanced degrees remained roughly steady, meaning only the expectations have changed.”

This comes at a time, Reuters points out, when SAT test scores record their sharpest decline in 31 years. Which could mean even more unrealistic expectations, which could lead to “wasted time and resources, not to mention anxiety and distress,” say the researchers.