by B.J. Tolentino

Created on: September 13, 2010

It is so easy to believe that creating landing pages in social networking sites, article marketing, growing a number of fans, friends and followers in these social sites makes one a social marketer. While you don't have to be Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga or a Barack Obama to have great influence (haters as well), being a social marketer is certain much, much more than just continually posting links. It is analogous to why healthy SEO is certainly not about keyword stuffing, link farming and search engine spamming!

Social marketing is a very old and proven marketing concept. It takes advantage of popular social and psychological tendencies like bandwagon mentality, herd mentality and the power of suggestion. What wanna-be social marketers forget is that they have to have a certain level of influence and credibility to be able to sway people, to persuade them to ideas and products they intend to market. It is the same way in Google (and in the new and improved Bing-Yahoo) SEO, visibility and importance takes time. Search engines too, know how to value trust and confidence as important elements in page ranking.

 
SEO is in reality a "marketing concept" derived from social marketing. When you hear a social term such as breaking or trending topics merge with an SEO terminology such as popular keywords (now of real-time relevance), this is "social marketing meets SEO" in action. Who influences who? Is it social media influencing SEO, or the other way around? The line is certainly blurry.

A Google Adwords SEO keyword tool for example, makes use of real-time search trends and results. Search advertising is geared towards keywords (popular or niche). SEO writers create web content based on mixing and matching keywords. This is in fact considered standard SEO procedure. However It makes one wonder, are writers the influencers or are search engines influencing us?

The concept of social marketing is also the moving force behind the popularity of social networking (which in turn is an important part of SEO). With Google announcing that it will integrate Facebook page updates in its real time search results (other social sites such as MySpace and Twitter are already included), social networking is now an even more influential part of SEO. It means that if one is an influential social marketer operating in these social media sites, he/she could get into SERPs much faster!

Google Caffeine is in reality an affirmation of the influence of social media marketing in SEO. It is also a validation of the power of social marketing in shaping Google's future. Google also knows that its search advertising model (although making billions for them in ad revenue), has to improve even more, in order to sustainably compete with Facebook's increasingly popular display advertising model. It has to continue to gain the confidence of advertisers. Google needs the growth of quality web content (it knows its importance). It has given more incentives with the latest changes in its algorithm. 

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