Category: blogging

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.

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Guy Kawasaki on what students should learn this year

Guy Kawasaki — writer, speaker, thinker, blogger, venture capitalist, etc. — offers his list of 10 (actually 12) things college students should learn this year “in order to prepare for the real world after graduation.” He offers some valuable tips on how to talk to your boss (“Your role is to provide answers, not questions”), survive a poorly run meeting (“First, assume that most of what you’ll hear is pure, petty, ass-covering bull shiitake, and it’s part of the game”), run a meeting of your own (rule No. 1: “Start on time even if everyone isn’t there because they will be next time”), create a decent PowerPoint (follow Guy’s 10/20/30 rule), and more. All are lessons I wish I’d learned in college. (True, PowerPoint hadn’t been invented yet. But still, I could’ve used some help on creating effective slides for the overhead projector.)

The best advice of all comes at the end:

One last thing: the purpose of going to school is not to prepare for working but to prepare for living. Working is a part of living, and it requires these kinds of skills no matter what career you pursue. However, there is much more to life than work, so study what you love.