Five by Five

written by Steve Sponder, Managing Director, Five by Five

The online media landscape is constantly changing; we have seen search grow from nothing to a one billion pound market almost within the blink of an eye. For many search is media and it’s therefore critical to have a search strategy that covers PPC and SEO.

But now there’s a new kid on the block; social media. Straight from the Web 2.0 stable, social media is a catch-all term for sites that allow consumers to participate by creating and sharing their content, posting comments and encouraging visitors to rate and tag content.This search media challenger is attracting the attention of your target audience and is threatening to dominate the online media landscape. In September 2006, the market share of visits to the top 20 social networking websites accounted for 4.9% of all Internet visits. This was an increase of 94% compared to September 2005. (Source Hitwise 2006)

So how do you get a slice of the action? You can obviously get placement via display advertising or Google AdWords if they allow such activities but to gain long term, cost effective credibility you need to get involved in the ‘conversion’. This can be done through a Social Media Optimisation (SMO) strategy.

On a tactical level SMO is about using techniques to ensure your message is optimised for consumption within the social media. This can be achieved by ensuring your web site content is easily linkable and therefore signposts to your content are widely available across the social media landscape. Although it’s far better to ensure the message itself is transportable and therefore easily spread far and wide.

On a strategic level SMO is about realising the shift in power from marketer to audience. It’s about understanding that it is no longer possible for marketers to control the conversation, it’s becoming increasing more difficult to shepherd people to your web site. This means the brand must have something interesting or relevant to say or else it’s going to be ignored.

To conclude, there’s no doubt that social media optimisation is going to be important, just how important is difficult to say at this point. Some advocates insist that, in the not-too-distant future, web site ‘containers’ will become unvisited ghost sites as the messages and content get unlocked to exist within and entwined throughout the social media landscape. This is definitely a trend that’s not to be ignored.

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taken from the Launch Edition of the Five by Five Review, January 2007