Social media networking is something of an umbrella description which covers the effective use of a new breed of interactive sites such as MySpace, Twitter and Facebook, together with media streaming sites such as Flickr and YouTube, all of which allow users to share media such as videos and photos with their friends. These are some of the better known social media sites but there are countless other blogs and forums, all of which broadly fall into the category and many of which may have audiences that precisely match the demographic target for your business. The effective use of Social Media Optimisation (SMO) is a complex discipline; here we will focus on blogging which forms a key [art of many SMO activities.

Blogs, short for web logs, originated as online diaries and journals for individuals but the commercial world soon recognised their potential for interacting with a highly focused, targeted audience. There are numerous collective blogging sites such as blogspot.com which allow you to sign up, create a profile and start blogging. Many of the mainstream, social media sites will also have some degree of blogging capability and there are blog aggregators which, as the name suggests, gather and provide a unified search across, in some cases, literally thousands of blogs which some term the 'blogosphere'. Twitter is an interesting variation on the blog, centred around so-called micro-blogging wherein each entry is limited to 140 characters. This changes the game somewhat in that instead of the stream of consciousness and length entries found in so many other blogs, a somewhat terse, keyword focused style is needed to make effective use of Twitter.

Blogs will also allow you to embed relevant media and links although it is essentially the simplicity of a blog that is one of the main attractions. By now, you will no doubt be realising that blogging for commercial purposes is likely to consist of far more than simply creating your own blog. You will also be participating in threads on the blogs of other people. You may decide that adding a blog to your main site is appropriate in which case you will be relieved to know that the technical implementation is generally simple. There are a number of mature, established and, importantly, free of charge technologies including WordPress and Joomla that allow you to rapidly add a blog or indeed create your own stand-alone blog under a domain name of your choosing. Each of these technologies has a vibrant community of developers with the result that there are literally thousands of plug-ins and customisations available, many of which are also free of charge although some are commercially developed.

Identifying where to blog is the key. Search for relevant questions and blog posts using both the search engines and dedicated blog search engines such as blogsearchengine.com. It is worth keeping an inventory of relevant blogs and subscribing to any keyword-driven updates via email (in a similar fashion to Google news alerts). Similarly, you should submit your blog to the major blog aggregators to allow them to index and add it into their universal search capabilities. Don`t, however, submit it to any of the search engines as your rankings are better achieved through natural discovery and links than through the submission process and your long term rankings in the natural (unpaid) search results should be better.

The subjects around which you blog will of course be determined by your business, products and services. You will need a thorough understanding of the keywords that your target audience are likely to use in both the search engines and blogs and you should drive all blogging activity by those keywords. There are a number of tools and techniques that you can use in identifying the most appropriate keywords, including Wordtracker and the Google AdWords keyword suggestion tool.

Your posts should include the keywords and most importantly must be of value to the reader. Opinions are fine and some degree of controversy can spark a lively and useful debate provided that it doesn't result in you being perceived as bigoted or unreasonable. Most importantly, your dialogue with your readership and indeed with fellow participants on other peoples' blogs must always remain courteous and helpful in tone, regardless as to the level of provocation. We all know that there is an unreasonable element in almost all walks of life, blogging being no exception and indeed seemingly encouraging those who hide behind the anonymity of a computer. Always count to 10 before committing a response: even the best laptops cannot recall something once you have posted it!

In responding to others, demonstrate an understanding of their position and indeed some sympathy with it if at all reasonable, before gently and subtly demolishing it with beautifully crafted prose and unshakable reasoning. Avoid sarcasm and any level of personal comments. After all, your objective has to be the building of a reputation for fairness, balance and a depth of understanding of the subject matter in question. For the same reason, avoid any temptation to add LOL or 'me too' responses to threads simply to elevate your 'number of posts' count: this is irritating and adds no value whatsoever.

There are many other techniques that can prove highly effective in building reputation and ultimately driving traffic. Not least of these is to create in-depth responses to relevant questions and to post a useful summary with a link to the relevant page on your site with the detail. Adding this to relevant threads will benefit the thread watchers, the blog owner..and you.

Blogging has become an integral part of our society, just remember that if you are serious about it, you will need to understand your target audience, the relevant keywords. And you will need to spend a considerable amount of time handling the interactions.

Popularity: 2% [?]