Social media marketing; what's in a name?

I really need to get quicker on the blog draw. I was working on a landing page for my Business Life article and I started to write about social media optimisation when I realised the inherent restrictions of the term.

SMO presupposes there is something there already to optimise. It fails to cover the actual creation of sites and viral campaigns which give clients new ways to connect with their markets. When I set up a school of blogs (sorry, I have no idea what the correct collective name might be) for a tour operator, the actual optimisation came only after a lot of creative input and technical coaching.

I ended up typing social media marketing instead as that seemed to cover more bases.

Cameron Olthuis had the same idea yesterday and posted his thoughts at Pronet Advertising. Ten minutes ago I was on the point of posting my agreement with Cameron, when I checked my feeds and discovered that Rohit Bhargava who started the SMO ball rolling also prefers social media marketing – and has done for some time (though he considers SMM is a less appealling acronym).

So there we are, all singing from the same hymn sheet. SMO is still a valid discipline but it likely exists as part of a wider SMM effort.

Bonus thought: Happily, we all spell social media marketing the same way. Those of us on this side of the Atlantic can worry less about whether to add an “optimization” tag with a “z” just so we can participate in conversations with the colonies.