Although the latest buzzwords may sound exciting, do you really know what it means to “Digg,” “Stumble,” “Tweet,” or “Twackle?” Does the fact that you not only know these words, but are using them around the office seem a bit strange to you? As a site owner, you should be aware of Social Media Optimization (SMO), even if you are not a big fan.

Yes, that’s right − add another acronym to the long list. While SMO is not as advanced as SEO, it has proven to be influential for the success of a website. SMO is a form of online marketing that drives traffic from sources other than search engines, which can improve search engine ranking as well. It was originated when marketers realized there was a need to invest time and money into developing a strong social media strategy. Now several full-service agencies are offering SMO services to enhance brand reputation through social media.

Social media optimization (SMO) is an extension of SEO, Bian Solis explained, during his recent webinar, “Social Media Optimization Is the New SEO.” Brian Solis is Principal of FutureWorks, an award-winning new media marketing and branding agency in Silicon Valley. It allows companies to be a part of the decision-making process, which we can sometimes steer in our favor, he added.

The Impact of Social Media

Recently, McDonalds named Rick Wion Director of Social Media, according to Ad Age. As one of the founders of the McDonald’s Digital Task Force, Wion had been handling all of the social media projects for the fast-food chain since 2006. The news of the strategic move sparked conversations around the PR and marketing world. What does this mean for the future of marketing? Will other companies follow suit?

Google and Bing recently adjusted to the impact of social media by forming a relationship with social media sites like Facebook and Twitter so that real-time results could be integrated into the search engine results page (SERP), making the SERP more relevant to consumers. The scope of Google and Bing real-time results includes blogs, tweets, public Facebook pages and news sites. It has even been suspected that the future of SERPs will display breaking news faster than regular news outlets.

Google’s real-time search results, which launched four months ago, has been the most dramatic evolution in search since “Personalized Search,” which uses previous search history to generate relevant search results and “Universal Search,”, which blended news listings, images and video in the search results. Google plans to keep real-time search results relevant by judging “author quality,” “probability of relevance,” and “query hotness,” according to Google Fellow Amit Singhal.

The Presence of Social Objects

Companies should not only have a presence on active social media sites, but should also be optimizing the content that they are distributing.

“Everything begins with search,” Solis said. “SMO improves the ‘findability’ of social objects.” He later went on to explain that social objects can be anything that sparks a conversation. A social object could be a blog post, a tweet or simply an image or a YouTube video.  “It is anything that is introduced into a stream that causes a reaction,” Solis added.

The attention of desired audiences must be earned by companies publishing content. Before you can optimize your social media you must create content that is timely, relevant and shareable. The “discoverability” of your tweets, blogs, newsletters, etc. is directly related to – you’ve got it – keywords.

The keywords incorporated into your social media content should be strategic and findable. The abundance of content circulating social networks can be overwhelming at times. Search functionalities and page ranking are ways that Google and Twitter have adjusted to that and have improved the experience for the user. For example, hashtags are used on Twitter to add metadata to your tweets so they can be found when keywords are searched.

In order for companies to have their own influential voice on the web, they need to ensure that their social media content is optimized. In order to gain a competitive advantage using social media, marketers should really be getting a true ROI of their marketing efforts.

Measuring the ROI

Measuring the ROI is important in order to ensure that your social media efforts are working. You should carefully evaluate both the positive and negative effects it is having on your brand. A lot of companies find that measuring the social media ROI is challenging because many aspects are hard to track and the wide variety of tracking tools are overwhelming.

The benefits of new tools have allowed marketers to look beyond the “last click” and evaluate unexplored areas of opportunity. This gives them the advantage to gain a true ROI of their marketing initiatives. Putting some scale of attribution modeling into place will help companies understand which channels are generating the most traffic.

A new tool was recently released by PeopleBrowsr called Analytic.ly, which will help companies measure their Twitter conversations, according to Mashable. Users will have to pay a subscription fee of $20 per month in order to use a custom dashboard to analyze Twitter data.

Although the task of implementing an attribution model may sound daunting, it should be a key element of your social media strategy.

Social Media as a Social Strategy

In a recent Harvard Business Review blog, written by Umair Haque, he discusses the idea behind social media becoming a social strategy.

“Social strategies are about rewriting the logic of the industrial era entirely, shifting gears in how we think, envisioning a broader, more powerful, more challenging use of social tools,” Haque said. Consumers rely on these social tools for real-time feeds so they can determine what is worthwhile to read. If a coworker or friend promotes an article or newsletter, then that is a more reliable source than a salesman or company promoting the content.

Facebook’s recent announcement of the new “Open Graph” authenticates this point even more. The “open graph” will connect social media sites and partnering sites to Facebook, which currently has over 400 million users, according to Mashable.

"Yelp is mapping out the part of the graph that relates to small businesses. Pandora is mapping out the part of the graph that relates to music," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said. "If we can take these separate maps of the graph and pull them all together, then we can create a Web that's smarter, more social, more personalized, and more semantically aware."

It is a critical turn in the road for the internet. Social media is changing the Web, leaving the permanence of industrial media in the dust. Just as easily as social media can be altered; it can now reach a global audience of “friends” in less than a second. There is no excuse anymore to produce poor content and no way will it survive the social networks of online critics. Despite how humorous it may sound, it’s important that your distributed content receives enough “diggs,” “retweets” and is “stumbledupon.”