As regular readers of this blog will know, Scott Gray is our local expert on all things strategy and online. I had a chat with him about Social Media Optimisation; what it is and how best to implement it. The highlights of our interview are transcribed below:

So Scott, what is Social Media Optimisation?

Traditionally it meant making sure that you have the most optimal links between your online spaces and your own media environment. The idea is that you take advantage of these links so that you can leverage them.

If you look at how old-school media planners would work this isn’t really that different. They may have decided to flight an advert during a specific time when they know people are watching TV. With Social Media it’s the same – it’s about making your brand accessible in the spaces where your customers operate online.

So does this mean that you should link absolutely everything?

No, not everything. It depends. At its most basic level you’ll want to link your website to your Facebook and Twitter accounts. In the early days, this meant just including the logos. Now the major social platforms have gone a step further with integration, such as the Facebook ‘like’ buttons that appear all over the Web. The basic point is that you want to make sure an individual’s experience is not interrupted. It’s more about bringing your brand into their user journey without interrupting it than it is about linking all your sites together.

In this way Social Media Optimisation has become very similar to integration – making sure you blur the lines between platforms and your brand’s presence.

But arguably different platforms and mediums call for different kinds of communication and content? On Facebook you can be more informal than you may be on a company website – how intertwined do you want them all to be?

It’s not about integrating content, it’s more about opening front doors into different environments. A space like Facebook is more consumer driven, so it’s just about letting the user bring a brand into their space where they can share it with their friends.

Can you think of any examples of brands doing this particularly well?

Well, Zappos do it very well. They use Twitter as a really great after-sales back up channel. BMW have put a Facebook box on their homepage, and I know they don’t make decisions like that lightly, so for me that was quite significant.

So everything starts with Social Media?

Not yet. The idea that everything starts on a Social Media platform has influenced my thinking, but I still think that if you are a brand, people would search for product info on you should start with Google.

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