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In case you are an online marketer or publisher, chances are you're comfortable with the power of social media marketing optimization (SMO). In case you are a new comer to the concept of Website marketing, you will be interested to understand that breakthrough technique is a totally inexpensive (practically free) method to create buzz about your products, get more traffic to your web page, build trust regarding your company, and supercharge your sales.

Today, I will show you an easy method of getting entered social media marketing - and a simple three-step process will measure how well it's working.

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

Cutting-edge businesses and marketing-centric companies have jumped about the social media bandwagon to leverage the elevated popularity of this phenomenon. Companies small and large got their marketers to produce MySpace, FaceBook, or LinkedIn profiles in order to have their own fingers around the pulse from the market, correspond with consumers, and make buzz regarding products.

My business may be on the Web for some time now, dabbling in every sorts of social media activities with content syndication, viral marketing, and internet based PR efforts.

Measurements of Length - Recently, we started leveraging the existence of our individual downline on LinkedIn. If you aren't familiar with this web site, it is a network community for business people. Users can setup profiles highlighting their corporate experience and special areas of practice.

One of our search engine marketing specialists answers select queries about LinkedIn which can be related to his specialization. Also, he uploads blogs about a selection of seo (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), pay-per-click (PPC), and social media marketing practices. This can help create buzz about our company (through this person's profile and position at our organization). Plus, he sometimes supplements his posts with links back to relevant articles on our website - which helps push traffic towards our website site.

This is a practice you can emulate easily. Simply register being a part of among the social media groups. Then commence to have fun playing the discussions. For example, in case a LinkedIn member posts a particular question about SEO, our SEO specialist will endeavour to find an article on our website that addresses that issue. Then he answers the question as part of his own words, but recommends that the member also see the article, which includes worth more information. By answering questions resulting from other members (making certain you set relevant backlinks to content on your website), your site content will begin to generate "free" traffic.

Another site that works well for all of us is StumbleUpon.com. This website directs Web users to Website pages based on the surfer's pre-selected categories if he or she click the "Stumble" icon on their toolbar.

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

Starting out is super-easy. But the key to creating social media marketing meet your needs is the same with any marketing medium: You need to have a means to find out if it's working.

Although some marketers happen to be going all out with their social media marketing efforts, most haven't an idea regarding how to actually look at the campaign's failure or success.

Systems of Measurements - Let's say my opportunity just published articles on setting goals for 2009. This article is followed by an associated product ad inside our daily eletter, as well as with a separate e-mail promotion to get a related goal setting techniques product, like our Total Success Achievement program. Revenue are generated from the e-mail and from the ad. Meanwhile, the social networking aspect takes over.

The article submissions are syndicated via RSS feeds, as well as top article directory sites (like EzineArticles, GoArticles, ArticleBase, Buzzle, yet others) and user-generated content networks (for example Digg and Reddit). Readers might also discuss the article on goal setting techniques and self-improvement blogs, forums, and bulltinboards.

So how might you measure the social media marketing part of such an effort?

It's easy. Utilizing the same metrics which can be used to measure a pr effort: Outputs, outcomes, and objectives - a few things i prefer to call the "3 O's."

1. Outputs (measures effectiveness and efficiency)

For your example, I'd examine Google Analytics for spikes in visitors to our homepage mothers and fathers following the article's publication. I'd look specifically at traffic sources, visits, unique visits, and visit percentages. I'd also examine referring sites and appearance engines to see whether the readers are coming straight from social networking platforms. And I'd search for a boost in new subscriber sign-ups (leads) in that same time frame.

2. Outcomes (measures behavioral changes)

For this metric, I'd examine feedback from my 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, and also the product name to find out if others were talking about it in chat rooms, external forums, and bulltinboards.

3. Objectives (measures business objectives/sales)

Measurements of Length - The most obvious and proportional metric is network marketing from the product that are linked with the editorial. Orders generated from an e-mail link or ad link are coded for tracking, so attributing sales to the people sources is definitive. When the sales originate from a product page on our website in which the true "source" cannot be tracked, I'd look at the sales throughout the corresponding dates from the campaign for correlations.

Finally, for each of the above, I'd compare the existing campaign data in comparison to 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 site traffic, unique visits, specific product sales, etc. - all for the similar time periods. Like that, I'd have an established benchmark by which to determine our current social networking efforts.