The importance of Social Media Optimization (SMO)

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is an important component to any successful website. Put simply, well implemented SEO techniques are what help end-users easily find your site on search engines. However, with the staggering growth of social networks and smartphone applications, users are increasingly getting their daily content on multiple devices and platforms from streams of content originating from their social graphs. This has had the impact of transitioning search engines from being destination sites (i.e. where you start your internet session) to services (i.e. where you go to find things). To be clear, we’re not predicting the demise of the search engine. On the contrary, search engines are critical to indexing and cataloging the vast amount of information available online. As long as there is a world wide web, we will need search engines to help us find things. What we are saying, though, is how you craft, publish, and promote your message online is much different in the social media space.

We are now in an app-driven world and apps are powered by APIs (application programming interfaces). And since APIs deal in computer to computer exchanges of structured information and not the web’s traditional document-centric model, it’s critical that a winery’s brand and product information (i.e. data) be consumable by these APIs. The same goes for a winery’s creative content. Since social networks grew up in the era of the API, it’s no surprise that social networks and blogs (the predecessors to social networks), are also heavily API driven.

Enter Social Media Optimization, or SMO. Although there are many definitions of SMO, we are focusing on how a winery can effectively deliver their message and engage in this new, and ever-dominant, paradigm. In the following presentation we share our thoughts on SMO and why we think it is so important to the success of wine online.

What are your thoughts?