Ok, so I’m sitting in my local Starbucks, sipping a delicious Venti Verona, on a sunny Sunday afternoon in Austin, Texas. It being too hot here to do anything outside, I thought I’d catch up on email, and then just surf around a little while, enjoying my lazy day.

Was I surprised when I tried to login to my Digg account and got the message: Sorry - bad IP address. What?! Bad IP address?! WTF, I wondered. So, off to Google I go (did I mention I love Google?) to find out.

It turns out that a few other folks have experienced the bad IP address problem before . . . whew, at least it isn’t just me. Apparently, to prevent undesirables from posting in Digg, they have chosen blocking IP addresses as their method of choice. That’s all well and good, and it’s certainly their prerogative to block whomever they wish, but is it an effective method of spam prevention?

While I’m sure this confounds many of the people using T-mobile’s Starbucks hotspots, I imagine blocking the Starbucks IP confounds spammers for all of about 15 seconds. Indeed, even I was savvy enough to Google proxy sites and login to Digg in less than a minute.

So, I ask, why bother with blocking IP addresses? To me, this is sort of like passing laws making it illegal to have guns. If you’re going to use a gun to break the law, why do you care that it’s illegal to have it? The only people this will effect is the law, or in this case, the Digg TOS abiding citizens. The spammers will continue on unabated while good, money generating, adwords clicking traffic is driven away in droves.

IMHO, blocking the Starbucks IP from Digg is not just an ineffective policy, it’s a bad idea.

“Oh, great”, you might think, “another catchphrase created by internet marketers”. “Social Networking Optimization”, what the heck is that?

Well, the good thing is that Social Networking Optimization, or SNO, is really not just some made up markerter lingo. It is real, it’s relatively easy to implement an SNO program, and most importantly, SNO WORKS!

What is Social Networking Optimization?

Social Networking Optimization is simply the process of utilizing the various social networks spawned by the Web 2.0 Generation to generate direct traffic to your website while simultaneously using them to bolster your search engine page rank. Social Networks range from huge online communities like MySpace, to photo and video sharing websites Flikr and YouTube, to simple web based applications such as the “social bookmarking” websites Digg, Furl and del.icio.us.

How Does Social Networking Optimization Work?

Social Networking Optimization, or SNO, works in two ways. First, huge online communities have sprung up all over the web. These communities are often based on creating a more effective way to share information. By joining these communities and becoming an active member, you promote your site to thousands of people who would have never heard about it otherwise. Secondly, these communities allow you to link directly to search engine optimized content on your website, and since the online communities carry very high page rank, quite often some of that rank carries over to your site. Because of this, traffic increases to your site, some coming directly from the social networks, others finding you from your increased search engine results pages (SERPs) exposure due to your increased page rank. Simple, huh?

Social Networking Optimization Strategy

The most important things to consider when planning a Social Networking Optimization Strategy are the rules and accepted practices of the various online communities. These social networks have become popular because they provide people with valuable information. If they were suddenly filled with spam, no one would go there any more. Therefore, as you could imagine, the communities react pretty harshly to people, even well intentioned ones, who come across as spammers. Join a social network, lurk for awhile, learn the ropes then dive in and become an active part of the community. The more active you become, the more effective your Social Networking Optimization Strategy will ultimately be.

Social Networking Optimization Through Social Bookmarking

Another piece of your Social Networking Optimization puzzle is implementing a “social bookmarking” policy in your workplace. This would be implementing a plan so that each of your employees adds any new important link from your website to their bookmarks hosted on social networking sites. I promise, it’s not as hard as it sounds, but you will have to overcome some reluctance on the part of your employees. Maybe you could explain it will help keep them employeed if they take, literally, 10 seconds to bookmark any new pages on your site. Also, you can make it easy for them by sending out a company-wide email with instructions when you would like them to add a bookmark.

What is Social Bookmarking?

Stepping back real quickly, social bookmarking is the practice of using a small web application such as digg.com, furl.net and del.icio.us to save your bookmarks, and tag them with topical keywords so you can find them easily, instead of using the bookmark feature of your browser. Ostensibly, these services serve two purposes. First, they consolidate your bookmarks to one easy to use location, so if you find yourself at, say, a computer at the gym, you can still get to your bookmarks. Secondly, and this is the part we care about, these bookmark services allow users to share their bookmarks. This will generate some traffic, but what is really important here is that your keyphrase tagged bookmarks are also being shared with search engines.

Why is Social Bookmarking Important?

Think of each bookmark, or link, from a social networking site as a vote towards your importance for a certain topic. The more users who bookmark, the more votes you get and the more “important” the search engines think you are.

Implementing a Social Networking Optimization Strategy

The first, most important thing to do is for you, and your employees, to spend some time getting familiar with the various social networking websites. Start small, go to MySpace, Flikr, YouTube, Digg, Furl and del.icio.us and figure out what’s going on at each. Subscribe to each, and slowly become an active member of the community. From there, the opportunities are almost limitless because there’s a never-ending supply of Web 2.0 companies, and social networking is the hot topic of today.

Outsource Your Social Networking Optimization

Possibly the best solution would be to hire an experienced Internet Marketing Company such as Get Page One, LLC. We have been doing Search Engine Optimization since there were search engines, and we’ve been doing Social Networking Optimization since it was way too big a secret to discuss on our blog. So, if you’d rather spend your time building and running your company than hanging out on MySpace or Digg, we’d love to help you out. Our SNO specialists would probably just be hanging out there anyway, so together at least we could give them a purpose.

Contact us at our Austin, TX offices, or simply give us a call at 512-535-6633. We’d love to hear from you.

If you were sent here from Digg, I apologize for the confusion. Apparrently someone liked our article on social networking optimization and Dugg it, however that post is located at http://getpageone.com/blog/2006/10/31/social-networking-optimization. Sorry. Actually, I have often heard it referenced as social media optimization lately, and while I personally think that conjours up a slightly different meaning, I’m leaning towards using it because, well, it just sounds better. Any thoughts?