Ask any child over the age of 10 what MySpace is, and you’ll get a pretty good description. During the conversation, you’ll also probably hear about other places like Flickr, FaceBook, ShoutLife, YouTube, Twitter, and Jaiku. These are all examples of the different social networks that have become an Internet phenomenon over the past few years. Social networks are groups of people who are linked by some type of connection. MySpace is a social network where friends — people who know each other — connect. New friends come into the mix. Friends’ friends come into the mix, and eventually you have a network of people (shown in Figure 18-1) who may not know each other in the real world but are connected on the Internet.
When you understand what social media are, it’s not a far step from there to social-media optimization. It’s about using social media to spread the news about your web site. And instead of tweaking the elements of your web site, when you’re practicing social-media optimization you’re participating in social networks and tweaking the content that you share within those networks. It’s through that participation and optimization that your site is distributed, and that’s what brings traffic to your web site. There are also a couple of added benefits to social-media optimization. First, it’s free in terms of monetary investment. There is no cost to participate in these networks except your time. But make no mistake about it, you will have to invest a chunk of front-end time into this type of optimization. You must become familiar with the communities and participate to establish a name for yourself before anyone will take serious notice of you.
