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If you're a web-based marketer or publisher, odds are you're comfortable with the power of social media marketing optimization (SMO). In case you are a new comer to the world of Website marketing, you will end up interested to understand that this breakthrough method is a really inexpensive (practically free) way to create buzz concerning your products, increase traffic to your site, build trust about your company, and improve your sales.

Today, I will explain to you a simple method of getting entered social internet marketing - and a simple three-step process you can use to measure how good it's working.

In summary, social networking is definitely an interactive platform where people can correspond - via forums, forums, bulletin boards, networks (such as MySpace, Facebook, Classmates, LinkedIn, Bebo), user-generated content sharing (such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit), wikis (interactive online encyclopedias), and blogs - with well matched individuals who share similar interests, whatever those interests might be.

Cutting-edge businesses and marketing-centric companies have jumped around the social media marketing bandwagon to leverage the improved rise in popularity of this phenomenon. Companies small and large got their marketers to make MySpace, FaceBook, or LinkedIn profiles so that you can have their fingers about the pulse from the market, correspond with consumers, and create buzz about their products.

My opportunity has been on the net for a while now, dabbling in all sorts of social networking activities with content syndication, viral marketing, an internet-based PR efforts.

Measurement Wiki - Recently, we started leveraging the existence of our individual team members on LinkedIn. If you aren't familiar with this web site, it's really a network community for professionals. Users can set up profiles highlighting their corporate experience and special areas of practice.

Our search engine marketing tactics specialists answers select questions about LinkedIn which can be associated with his specialty. He also uploads blog articles with regards to a selection of search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing techniques (SEM), pay-per-click (PPC), and social media practices. This can help create buzz about our organization (through this person's profile and position at our company). Plus, he sometimes supplements his posts with links back to relevant articles on our website - which will help drive traffic towards our website site.

This can be a practice it is possible to emulate easily. Simply register as a part of among the social networking groups. Then begin to have fun with the discussions. For example, if your LinkedIn member posts a specific question about SEO, our SEO specialist will endeavour to discover articles on our website that addresses that issue. Then answers the issue in his own words, but recommends how the member also browse the article, which has worth more information. By answering questions posed by your fellow members (ensuring you set relevant links back to content on your own website), you will quickly generate "free" traffic.

Another site that work well for us is StumbleUpon.com. This website directs Internet surfers to Website pages depending on the surfer's pre-selected categories if he or she click on the "Stumble" icon on their toolbar.

You can install the StumbleUpon toolbar by yourself computer and recommend articles on your own site. This allows you to give any page a "Thumbs Up" or "Thumbs Down" rating. Additionally, it enables you to add a description and category for your submission. In the event you rate your article, it will come in the StumbleUpon rotation - which, again, means 'free' traffic to your site.

Starting is super-easy. But the key to making social media meet your needs is similar with any marketing medium: You need to have a way to determine whether it's working.

Although some marketers have been going full-scale with their social networking efforts, most haven't an idea as to the way to actually look at the campaign's failure or success.

Measurements of Length - Suppose my company just published articles on setting goals for 2009. This article is then a connected product ad inside our daily eletter, as well as by a separate e-mail promotion for a related goal setting techniques product, like our Total Success Achievement program. Income are produced by the e-mail and from your ad. Meanwhile, the social media marketing aspect gets control.

The content submissions are syndicated via RSS feeds, along with top article directories (like EzineArticles, GoArticles, ArticleBase, Buzzle, yet others) and user-generated content networks (such as Digg and Reddit). Readers may also discuss the article on goal setting and self-improvement blogs, forums, and bulletin boards.

So how might you appraise the social media aspect of this kind of effort?

It is not difficult. By using the same metrics which are utilized to measure a pr effort: Outputs, outcomes, and objectives - what I like to call the "3 O's."

1. Outputs (measures effectiveness and efficiency)

For the example, I'd look at Google Analytics for spikes in visitors to our homepage mothers and fathers pursuing the article's publication. I'd look specifically at traffic sources, visits, unique visits, and visit percentages. I'd also look at referring sites and check engines to determine whether the traffic is coming from social media platforms. And I'd try to find a boost in new subscriber sign-ups (leads) in that same time frame.

2. Outcomes (measures behavioral changes)

With this metric, I'd take a look at feedback from your customers... e-mails, telephone calls, comments posted on our member forum. I'd also carry out some reputation monitoring by searching the internet for keywords like my company's name, the article title, as well as the product name to see if others were referring to it in forums, external forums, and bulletin boards.

3. Objectives (measures business objectives/sales)

Measurement Wiki - The most apparent and related metric is direct sales of the product which are tied to the editorial. Orders generated from an e-mail link or ad link are coded for tracking, so attributing sales to those sources is definitive. If the sales come from something page on our website in which the true "source" can not be tracked, I'd go through the sales during the corresponding dates with the campaign for correlations.

Finally, for each of the aforementioned, I would compare the present campaign data versus the year-to-date (YTD) average and year-over-year data to clearly illustrate pre- and post- campaign performance. Put simply, I'd take a look at website traffic, unique visits, specific revenue, etc. - all for a similar periods of time. Like that, I'd have an established benchmark by which to measure our current social media marketing efforts.