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No! We're not trying to develop another RavenNuke™ CMS addon - at least not yet.  But it's difficult to ignore the impact of social media, especially Facebook and Twitter - not to mention the hundreds of other recent startups trying to grab a piece of this worldwide market.  Hopefully, that title got your attention.

Community-based content management systems like RavenNuke™ CMS are the original Internet social media sites.  Designed in part to build online communities, content management systems frequently combine membership management functions and a host of user-submitted content, including news, journals (now referred to as blogs), forums (which have evolved into statuses, walls, groups and "pages"), galleries (a la flickr, facebook photos, etc.) and weblinks (now served by Del.icio.us, Digg, Stumbleupon, and others).  Just as the mechanisms for social interaction have evolved, community-based content management systems can adapt to take advantage of these new methods of interaction.

This is a first in a series of articles that are intended to help webmasters using RavenNuke™ and other community-based content management systems learn more about social media and how it can be used to interact with and promote your sites.

What is Social Media Optimization (SMO)?

According to Wikipedia,

Social media optimization (SMO) is a set of methods for generating publicity through social media, online communities and community websites. Methods of SMO include adding RSS feeds, social news buttons, blogging, and incorporating third-party community functionalities like images and videos. Social media optimization is related to search engine marketing, but differs in several ways, primarily the focus on driving traffic from sources other than search engines, though improved search ranking is also a benefit of successful SMO.

Social media optimization requires social media, also referred to as online social networking sites.

Is online social networking really new?

Of course not!  People have been using computers to communicate long before web 2.0 or even the Internet itself.  Email, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Usenet newsgroups, chat rooms, and even instant messaging (can you say "ICQ?") have been around for years.  Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) were widely used by computer hobbyists for communication before AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy and other pre-Internet systems replaced them.

What's next?

Now that we've travelled back in Internet time to relive the online social networking glories of the past, we'll next focus on the current trends in social networking before discussing the impact on community websites running RavenNuke - and opportunities to enhance these sites by interacting with social networking sites.