While drafting some ideas from my book this weekend my mind drifted to a familiar theme of Organic Search Optimization and Social Media Optimization merging and the more prevalent opinion today that you can’t do one without the other, well.   A few months ago I wrote about Organic Search Optimization and Google’s Wonder Wheel (see Google’s Wonder Wheel & Improved Search Rankings) and around the same time John Battelle wrote about Demand Media’s IPO (which we haven’t heard much about since then) and I quote from his post below:

…. many of us are just as likely to tweet or post on Facebook something like the following “Help! I forgot how to tie a tie!” as we are to search for that on Google.

… To me, all of this turns not on whether Demand will continue to be a search and content success (it will, to my mind), but whether Demand’s content can in some way become essential in what is increasingly a social content ecosystem. Of course, that is a key question for Google as well – can it add a third dimension of socialto its flat content-based model of search?

Put another way, Google owns the web of directed intent – help me find WHAT I need, WHEN I need it. Content like Demand works beautifully in this world, and up till now, the web has been modeled on the search centered world of WHAT. But the web is moving to a web of indirect intent – modeled more on how people communicate with each other, as opposed to how people find answers. That’s a WHO-driven web, a social web – a Facebook web. And the WHAT web, led by Google, hasn’t cracked that nut. The reason? Well, in short, people are not predictable. That’s the charley horse of social. We love to share, but writing algorithms that predict sharing is a tricky business.

Criticisms of Demand’s content declare, rightfully, that “flat” articles about how best to tie a tie or potty train a pet are not the kind of articles that most people want to share. They serve a single purpose: they are consumed and folks move on. It’s a classic search model.

Branded content, however, is far more social, because branded content is written with a human voice and published by a branded entity. Search drives a lot of traffic to branded content, of course, but once there, people tend to share branded content a lot more than “how to tie a tie.” The former is socially shareable (“hey, check this out, it’s interesting”) and the latter is specific (“I need an answer, and I don’t think my friends have the same need right now”).

John Battelle made a connection that branded search content was also sharable, thereby connecting Organic Search and Social Media into a bigger ecosystem where both modes of activity are feeding each other.  And Bill Hunt dug even deeper and showed SEO Optimized Content (in this case a Press Release for Sony  3d-capable HD TV’s which got picked up over 24,100 times with the exact subject line they sent it out as landed in many blogs such as Engadget and the Consumer Reports blog.  Once the SEO Optimized content hits the blog subsystem, it becomes shareable in Social Networks such as Facebook and short links/tweets in Twitter along with being comment-able in blogs and perhaps, making it’s way back to Mainstream media outlets if the story turns out to be of interest to newspaper and magazine editors.   Bill Hunt coined this the “Digital Asset Optimization” strategy:

This is where us on the SEO side get to help the new kids in social media. Their goal is to generate as much “earned media” as possible. We fully support that and want to make sure as much of that newly minted content ends up in the search results and is indexed as possible. This is why all Marketers need to consider their “content enablement strategy”

Turns out Search and Social Media are really two brothers or two sisters that should work together, and perhaps, end up being much the same people, same team (even if that didn’t make as much sense a year or two ago, it now makes perfect sense according to Bill Hunt):

.. Marketers need to ensure their digital assets are effectively optimized and distributed to the widest points on the net possible. Search is the logical team to help ensure this happens. They already manage the XML site maps and feed content into the search engines making it relatively easy for them to also integrate video, image, news and mobile feeds into that process and monitoring their performance.

And once Social Media content surfaces, it needs to be made to fit into a longer term strategy where content lives beyond the lifetime of the campaigns it was meant to serve:

….we have (need) a key destination page within the site that will last beyond the any promotion or campaign. This page needs to be identified and shared with all stakeholders to ensure we get the widest distribution of the central page and the assets and messages contained therein. For many companies, this type of content mapping has already been done by the SEO team and just needs to be adapted for Social Media and PR uses.

The points that Bill Hunt and Lee Odden are trying to make (Lee wrote a post on Extending SEO With Digital Asset Optimization a while back) is you want Social Media content to be findable in Search Engines (should and when searchers wish to find it) but first you need to align your content with the right landing pages and keywords and that’s something that is too often left out or poorly conceived and executed.

Bill then goes into a concept that I’m familiar with, Search Shelf space, it’s a concept he and I used to talk a lot about when we worked together at IBM.com back in 2004-2007 (and I learned a lot about Organic and Paid Search from Bill, stuff I use all the time and I helped him with Analytics, which is more of my specialty, so we helped each other).

… as more of them get indexed they in aggregate, foster a significant opportunity to dominate the shelfspace of various search engines.

Back in 2005, you could harness multiple sites and sub-domains and dominate the first page of search results through a careful interlinking strategy that helped a brand dominate the first page of search results and Bill and his coworkers perfected this strategy – then the world changed (Google suppressed more than two urls for any domain in a search results) and Social Media became more and more mainstream and pervasive.  Suddenly it became possible to dominate Search Shelf Space strategically using Social Media, and I quote from Bill Hunt again on this:

… Today we can do this a lot easier by leveraging the multitudes of social media sites. It works brilliantly for domains and brands but is a bit harder for specific categories but it is not impossible. This is where the collaboration and cooperation is the most important to make sure we are feeding the most relevant information that will help us get into the news, natural listings and the ever changing “real time” search results.

Then Bill picked out “Old Spice” as the example – the Social Media Strategy which was cooked up by a PR firm turned into the Search Strategy that drove tons more qualified traffic to the Old Spice Brand, via Search Engine listings for Social Media Content (as shown below) and he then said one more thing that should make every PR firm smile – Search and Social Media could also solve Reputation Problems and provide a way for brands to sweep away negative content about them in Search Engines by using Social Media listings to wash away the negativity (though many of us would argue this approach is somewhat unfair to the searcher that might need or want to see that negative comment(s) as information they need to know before purchasing a product or service from this company).

In fact, the social media strategy for reputation management of Delta Airlines was a very successful in that it wiped clean (off the first page of Google’s Search Results) a very embarrassing.

… “Delta Airlines” and the infamous “Delta Sucks” site. That site and the other blog-based detractors are now gone (from Google’s first page search results), replaced by Delta’s Twitter account, mobile site, and their news site in addition to Wikipedia and a large block of “new” most of which was generated by Delta and ….

…. To make this work you have to participate in Social Media and leverage (the) optimization tactics to ensure the right use of names, keywords, tagging and of course, brand and keyword rich content.

… Many companies struggle with “sucks sites” and those pesky negative blog posts which seem to make their way to the top of the search results for brand or product searches.

…. By using the key social media outlets you have a great opportunity to push all or most of the negative listings off the first page for your brand or product name.

And, as Bill points out again, if you look at Search content (WHAT people are looking for) together with Social Media mentions (WHAT people are talking about) you can develop additional content, based on what people said, for Search Optimization.

Imagine if the content team could prioritize content best on not only this historical demand from search query volume but also real time input from social media monitoring.

If fact, instead of using tools to find Social Media Influencers, as is often the case in PR firms, Bill Hunt suggests a far more brilliant and practical strategy of using Google and other Search Engines to find Bloggers who are influential because they come up in the top 10 results for a relevant search query.  Let’s take a few examples to work out how one might go about this kind of influencer search while admitting the one caveat that Bill Hunt left out, that top 10 Search results for an important keyword phrase that includes one or more bloggers (who could become one of your influencers via Social Media) could change at anytime due to Google’s tweaking their algorithms regularly, and personalization more and more suggests two people may often not see the same search results for the same exact query.

Still, Google, in this case, ends up supplying blogger influencers to add to lists that are ultimately as good as anything else out there  that was specialty built to provide lists of influencers which PR firms are more and more supplying to their clients.

Example 1: Migraine Headaches

Uncovered Influencer 1:  James at http://headacheandmigrainenews.com/

Example 2: Best Amusement Parks

Uncovered Influencer 2:  The Theme Park Critic (since this a user contributed review site, you still need to do another step and find out who are the most influential posters at this site).  This would be done by going to the forum site and manually (unless you could automate it) hunting for the the members that have posted often and been members the longest).

For example, coasterwom has posted 1080 times since 2001 and is ranked a Platinum Critic on this forum site.  Or you can be more “sneaky” (I am) and use Google to find the influencers (say for Roller Coasters) for you.  In fact, Google picked out this page containing coaster05, Swimace and BobFunland right off the bat.

Finally, to round out this post we need to cite Randfish over at SeoMoz (syndicated at JatiN’s blog) who points out that editorial communities that provide rich sources of citations (needed for great search rankings in many cases) are contained in Social Media:

the social web rises with the popularity of sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn. These communities often contain a much higher percentage of editorial citations, particularly those that contain smaller communities inside them (LinkedIn groups, pockets of Twitter users and Facebook friends).

…. it became clear that nearly everyone is aware of this ecosystem and thinking more about how to leverage it to make search better.

But the problem is the use of back linking has so “corrupted” the web that Search Engines are now questioning if the links on websites should be counted at all even though the Search Engine Algorithms are almost always link dependent.

… problem for the engines is that links on websites have a high probability (probably not 50%, but maybe as high as 20%) of existing specifically to influence their rankings. While some of those influence-targeted links certainly do point to great content that’s relevant and high quality, the engines would prefer to return to a web of “pure” recommendations.

The social web might offer more of that type of web environment.

While our own tweets and Facebook posts don’t count for  much in anything in Search Engines – what your friends say about you, does.

The “external” endorsements, however, are often much more genuine than what exists on the open web’s link graph.

So ….

… If you’re in the field of SEO, I think this means social media marketing is a no brainer. And  t.if people aren’t recommending and endorsing your site editorially in their Twitter feeds, Facebook updates, LinkedIn groups, answers on Q+A sites, and when socially bookmarking, tagging and voting, I’d be thinking hard about how to change that,

And so I think I made my point.  If your going to do SEO you probably also need to to SMO (Social Media Optimization) and the two disciplines are actually converging.  Within a year or two, they will become one, for the most part and you will not be able to do SEO without Social Media and today most SEO’s do use social media as part of the their strategy.    Because, as Bill Hunt pointed out earlier,

… The desire for lot of high quality and relevant links is the main reason us SEO folks follow around the Social Media teams like lost puppies. Links have a pretty significant influence your rankings for specific search terms and the Social Media team can be on of our biggest allies in getting them but we need to ensure they have the knowledge and data integrated into their social media workflow.

And to end this long post, I want to remind my readers I’ll be speaking at Monitoring Social Media 10 in New York this week along with Monitoring Bootcamp and I hope to see some of you there.  Let me know if your coming and I’ll try to get discounts for anyone who wants to show up (leave a comment on this post).