The 5 NEW Rules Of Social Media Optimization (SMO) 20100815 18:13

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The social web today is focused on SHARING, which was not the case only four years ago.

So Rohit Bhargava, author of the post, is revisiting rules posted four years ago, refreshing them :

Create shareable content

Four years ago I focused on linkability because the main currency that could drive up your traffic was how many people were linking to your content. Today content can be liked or tweeted and it is about more than links - it is about creating content that is shareable. The better your content is, the more people will want to share it with their entire social networks whether they link it, like it, dig it or share it.

What is a shareable content?

a piece of content you can access directly (in your browser on any mobile device)

Make sharing easy

Following from the previous point, tagging and bookmarking only scratch the surface of the many ways that people can share content with others. They can post a short link to their profile, embed a video, send out a tweet or create a hashtag for a conversation.

Limiting the ways of sharing to just tagging or bookmarking doesn't make sense anymore.

The core of this rule, however, was the point about making it easy and that is still at the heart of this new rule. Once you have shareable content, it has to be one-button-easy so people will do it with minimal effort or thinking.

Reward engagement

In 2006, the main thing most marketers were concerned about were inbound links. It was a time when Technorati was the standard by which we all measured the performance of our content and many bloggers focused more on their number of inbound links than their readership or traffic numbers.

Today the real currency is around conversation or engagement.

While there are a million definitions for "engagement" ranging from comments and discussion to posting or sharing content - this is the behaviour that matters most in the social web and the one that we should all focus on rewarding when it happens.

Proactively share content

This was the weakest of the original 5 rules, as the original rule simply talked about publishing your content in other formats such as PDFs or videos and submitting them to other sites. Instead, the essence of the new version of this rule is all about proactively sharing content in a different way. This encompasses everything from creating slides to post on Slideshare or documents to share on Scribd - as well as tweeting about your content or offering embeddable versions of it, or using RSS feeds to syndicate it. Proactively sharing even includes posting your content to social networking profiles or creating profiles on video sharing sites.

Encourage the mashup

The last original rule of SMO is the one that I would leave intact. The concept of the "mashup" where people take and remix your content by adding their own input and voice has only grown over the past four years. The mashup will be around to stay, whether the term continues to be used or not.