Acronyms can be tricky. I remember taking my first business class and hearing the professor talk about OB. I knew he wasn’t talking about his obstetrician, but it took me several minutes to realize he was referring to operational behavior. So don’t be embarrassed if you see SMO and think System Management Office or Santa Monica Municipal Airport, before you think of social media optimization.
Here are some common acronyms in the online marketing field for the letter S.
SEO
Search engine optimization
This is not about stuffing a lot of keywords into your meta tags. This is a process of researching what keywords are appropriate for your site and improving the volume of traffic to your site for those keywords. It’s also about capturing the audience you want with those targeted keywords. It’s a way of making it easier for search engines to learn about, index, categorize and rank your online content, thereby making it easier for your costumers to also learn about you. It’s a very effective digital marketing tool.
It’s best to begin the SEO work during the site design process since effective SEO is influenced by coding, navigation, accessibility, redirects, site architecture and other elements of Web design.
Search engine optimizers
These are the humans who work on search engine optimization. Some might be referred to as “white hats” or “black hats.” This has nothing to do with cowboys, Tibetan Buddhism, or Free Masonry. The good people are, of course, “white hats” and the people who are likely to get your site banned from search engines employ “black hat” SEO tactics. I like to keep my hat shiny white.
SEM
Search engine marketing
Most frequently this means SEO you pay for. It’s a way of promoting your site’s visibility on search engine results pages by paying for placement, by contextual advertising, through pay per click (PPC) campaigns. Sometimes this term is used to mean almost all of online marketing.
SERM
Search engine reputation management
Basically this is a way to check your online reputation. If someone searches for you by name, is it legitimate information about you that comes up? Has someone purchased or registered your name as a site or account holder on a site? Is this confusing your audience when they search? This only a very small part of online reputation management (ORM).
SERP
Search engine results page
This is the list of sites returned by a search engine for the keyword(s) entered into the search box. When you launch a new site you initially just want engines to crawl your site so you’ll appear in search results. Then you work on improving where you appear on various SERPs for your identified keywords.
SMO
Social media optimization
SMO is similar to SEO, but broader. It’s about getting traffic from more than just the search engines. It’s making sure your images and videos show up on community sites devoted to those media, for example. SMO makes it easier for your costumers to share your content with their own online communities through RSS feeds, social bookmarking buttons, “follow me” buttons, etc. It’s like viral marketing except that the focus is on electronic word-of-mouth. It’s also been called the media “you earn” since you can rarely benefit by paying for it. Your content simply has to be engaging, relevant, information, encouraging, disturbing, weird, or funny enough to be worthy of being shared via a Tweet or blog post or other online media.
It can be about much more than just building your brand or marketing your product. It can also be used to build a community our of your various audiences, to gain market knowledge (what are people saying about you and your product?), ensuring customer satisfaction, customer relations, recruiting, engaging your employees, etc. This can be as time consuming as you want to take it, but its’ also a way to interact with your audiences much more cheaply than by going to trade shows, or holding individual meetings, and probably more enlightening.
SMM
Social media marketing
Engaging your audience and building their trust within social media spaces is what defines SMM. These could be Twitter, Facebook, Ning, various forums, LinkedIn groups, blogs, social/shared bookmarking sites, Gather, or many other possible locations online. (When you use the term, just be careful to carefully enunciate that first “m”.)
SMPR
Social media press release
The SMPR is not something to replace the traditional press release, it’s just some techniques to improve upon it. Think of a traditional press release that formatted in a way that makes it easier for new media professionals to use. Blogs, Twitter and other social media sites are now important news channels.
I haven’t seen the acronym used for social media public relations, but I’m sure someone out there is using it this way.
