Would you like to generate over 1400% better ROI over PPC using SMO? Hrm.. let’s translate that. Want to generate a ton more traffic for less bucks by implementing a social media optimization strategy? It’s quite possible and very economical to do so according to this research report.

One of my favorite marketing research resources, Marketing Experiments, has released a report showing how they used Social Media optimization principles to generate a stack of targeted traffic to some sites they set up specifically for the purposes of their testing.

SMO is the practice of boosting your online visibility via online communities and community web sites through viral means such as videos and the use interactive content such as blogging to encourage conversation. The crux of the concept isn’t just to get a visitor, but to get that visitor telling others, which can reduce the reliance on such avenues such as organic search rankings, but at the same time can bolster your rankings through the buzz that’s generated.

SMO is all about providing value to a visitor, but taking it to a new level; an evolution of the “sticky” site concept.

It’s not so much a case of spending more, but how that ad money is spent - for instance, it may be more valuable to hire someone to blog for you rather than funneling most of your budget into PPC. In their tests, they found that a visitor garnered through Social Media Optimization cost 4c, whereas one acquired via PPC cost 61c.

As always, the Marketing Experiments brief is very detailed for a freebie and provides a lot of valuable information to take away and act on, plus some good links to further resources - I thoroughly recommend recommending reading Harnessing Social Media.

Related:

The social bookmark effect

Web 2.0, mashups, social networking - what’s it all about?