It is becoming more common to hear SEO professionals describe the discipline as a Social Science. This has to do with the growth of web 2.0, user generated content and social media sites that developed the foundation for marketers to drive viral marketing campaigns.

So the practice of SEO moves away from algorithm reverse engineering and becomes an activity whose main focus is on influencing people.

Of course, half of the statement above is false. Algorithm reverse engineering is still a great component of good SEO, as well as competitive analysis, link analysis, link building, on page optimization, keyword density optimization, etc.

In fact, many if not all the aspects of SEO that do not have to with Viral Marketing are still as relevant as they ever were. They are still relevant, but they are becoming increasingly commoditized for a number of reasons that exceed the limits of this post.

Marketers are realizing the explosive power of linkbait and viral marketing which has to do basically with two variables:

• content creation, and
• networking

Both of which are easy to categorize as “Social Science” because they have to do with influencing people.

But what the heck is “Science”? Is Social Science best described as being opposed to Exact Science? What is the difference between them?

The term is often used without a clear understanding of what it actually means.

The Issue With Empiric Evidence

From a strictly logical point of view, even though empiric evidence shows us that something has been in such a way until now, there is no logical reason that tells us that it will remain the same in the future.

For example, let’s look at the following scientific hypothesis: “All men and women die some day”. This is supported by empiric evidence. So far, we haven’t known any human being that lived past the hundred and something years.

The cells in human bodies go through a process in which they develop themselves until they reach certain point where they start an ageing and deteriorating process.

This is a fact. Not a logical deduction. In fact, there is nothing logical or rational about it. It is just the way it is.

Empirism Vs. Deduction

1+1 = 2

Now that’s logical. Can it be verified by empirism? No it can’t. Deductive knowledge operates this way. It is not looking at reality and trying to find out how reality works (that is empirism’s job.)

The deductive scientific knowledge is governed by one set of rules contained within what most of us refer to as “logic”. Given certain premises and the set of rules dictated by the logic, we can deduct a logical outcome.

Why am I ranting about this? Besides the fact that I enjoy making your head hurt, I think we need to get over the dichotomy “Social Science Vs. Exact Science” in which the SEO discipline tends to be misinterpreted.

Traditional SEO Is An Empiric Science

SEO has an empiric component, which has to do with the reverse engineering practice in which professionals interpret the reality of the SERPS and then attempt to apply the conclusions on ranking new sites (they attempt to verify their hypothesis.)

If the results are as expected, the hypothesis is verified. If the results are not as expected the scientist goes back to analyze the reality of the SERPS looking for more empiric evidence, then applies the new knowledge on an iterative cycle that only ends when the results are as expected.

Viral Marketing SEO Is Also An Empiric Science

Bait artists such as myself approach Viral Marketing from an empiric point of view. We research our audience, identify those elements that are known to work, and we use all this corpus of knowledge to create our hypothesis.

For example: My post titled “Top Ten Boob Jobs Gone Wrong (Pic)” will make the homepage of Digg if I am able to give it an initial push of 21 votes.

That is the hypothesis I elaborated after researching Digg users behavior and previous case studies. Next step in my scientific approach will be to verify or falsify my hypothesis.

So I go and perform the test. If the hypothesis is verified, I will leave it as is and consider it a “scientifically verified truth”.

If it is falsified I will:

• go back to the empiric field to collect more information
• develop a new hypothesis
• perform a new test

As you can see, the process is iterative.

So What’s The Point Of This Lengthy And Obscure Post?

• I want you to think about your SEO campaigns from a scientific standpoint
• I want to eliminate the misconception that exists in the dichotomy between Social Sciences and Natural Sciences
• I want to eliminate the misconception that equates “empiric verification” to “rational”
• I want you to think about the two basic forms of scientific knowledge so you are self aware of how you are making decisions that affect your marketing campaigns.

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  We all know that SEO is not an exact science. It is a social science.

The ulterior objective of any SEO activity is to influence on other people’s behavior. More specifically, we want them to perform an action on their end that will benefit our search engine rankings. Just like a War General plans for his troops to move according to his plans, you need to influence your visitors to perform the actions you want.

The War General has the easy job. He says, they do. The tough job is on you: you need to influence and persuade.

You want your visitors to:

• Link to your website from their website
• Bookmark your pages
• Vote for your submissions on social media websites where the exposure an article gets is directly proportional to the amount of votes a submission achieves
• Subscribe to your updates

Do you agree so far?

Good - but it can get more complicated than that. In other words I hope you make it more complicated than that because if you don’t you are missing out big time.

The bullet points above show a very simplistic picture of how you should graph your People Influencing Strategy.

Let’s look at the following case study:

My last post had viral elements that made it a Stumbleupon success. I am receiving a steady stream of traffic from Stumbleupon.

I am a bit annoyed that even though I am receiving all this traffic, I am not getting anything out of it. They are not subscribing, they are not converting, they are not commenting on my blog. All they do (and I don’t complain) is thumb up my blog on SU and some of them review me.

I guess this could result in some links and there’s always added value that I won’t be able to measure right away, but I’d like to take better advantage of the situation.

This is what I would do in this situation - Part I (The General Outline):

Analyze your post and the stream of traffic carefully and try to find out what exactly made it viral.

You need to know what is it about your post that made it a SU hit. Was it the use of an image? The headline? The humor? The quality of the research included in your post?

Decide what you want to do with them.

Get them to subscribe? Vote you on Digg? Fave you on Technorati? Join your group on Facebook? Befriend you on Mybloglog? This step is crucial and it will be a direct consequence of your conclusions in step 1 above.

Once you know why they liked you and you know what you want from them, get them to do what you want.

Craft a little message specifically for them. Give them more of what they like. Ask them to do something for you.

They are reading you because they think you have something worth their time, so some of them will do what you ask.

This is what I would do in this situation - Part II (The Example):

Analyze your post and the stream of traffic carefully and try to find out what exactly made it viral.

Let’s say my post had a wonderful eye pleasing image of a beach sunset. I took this picture with my camera when I went surfing to Brazil with my school mates. The picture captured the essence of the moment, the sunset, the surfers still going at it, you can almost listen to the swaying sound of the sea if you close your eyes for a sec.

I think it’s pretty obvious what drew the attention of SU surfers to my post. So what does this tell me about my audience?

They like beautiful inspiring pictures, especially those that have to do with the beach and with surfing.

They may also be keen on surf and possibly have an affection for outdoors in general.

Decide what you want to do with them.

Given what I know about them, I will figure out what can I get these people to do for me. Let’s see, here are some ideas:

• I could recommend them my Flickr group where I added more pictures like this one.
• I could tell them about Sojjo and get them to sign up and befriend me.
• I could just tell them that I will keep making posts like this one so they better subscribe or bookmark my blog before it gets lost in their temp folders (right - I wouldn’t phrase it that way)
• I could ask them to link to my site if they have a blog. If they do I have some goodie for them that they will like.

Once you know why they liked you and you know what you want from them, get them to do what you want.

This is up to you and how you decide it’s better to execute the ideas above. Usability rules apply. Write a little message where you know they’ll see it and won’t spoil their experience. Or make it a graphic. Or make a Youtube video and embed it on your sidebar.

It’s up to you how you deliver your message. Just make sure it fits your audience.

In case you missed that last bit: Make sure it fits your audience

So next you check your stats and you find out that you are receiving a new stream of traffic from a unique source ask yourself if you are taking full advantage of this. Understand what they want and why they are looking at your blog. Crack that code and move your troops in the direction you want. Get this right and you’ll be able to make people do what you want (Vote your stories on Digg, join your groups on social network sites, the possibilities are endless.)

Now if you consider this post was worth reading, I need to ask you for a favor. It’s not money, don’t worry. Do you see that blue button a few centimeters down, to your right? That’s a Sphinn button. I want you to click on it. If you don’t have an account on Sphinn you can sign up for one in less than one minute. It doesn’t hurt one bit. Once you are logged you’ll be able to click on that button and vote for my story.

Alternatively you can use your Stumble Upon toolbar and review and thumb up this page. Once you did this I want you to look at the top right corner of this blog (you may have to scroll up) and click where it says Full RSS Feed

Sigh… it feels good to act like a War General

By the way, do you need a linkbait writer?

With everyone talking about SMX Social Media in New York City taking place October 16 and 17, I thought it was worth mentioning another event taking place in the Social Media space.

Chris Pearson described Facebook Applications as the key to unlocking the goldmines in micro networks. This is your chance to be there, where the goldmines are nurtured.

Graphing Social Patterns: The Business & Technology of Facebook is going to take place in San Jose, CA from October 7th-9th.

From The Graphing Social Patterns website:

a conference for developers and marketers on how to build and distribute apps for the Facebook Platform. This event is for both business executives & technical developers who want to learn more about the Facebook environment, and how to reach online communities using social networking platforms and applications

The list of speakers is pretty impressive. These are just some of them:

• Tim O’Reilly - O’Reilly Media

• Dave Morin - Facebook

• Danny Sullivan -Search Engine Land

• Reid Hoffman - Linkedin

• Seth Goldstein - Social Media

• Michael Arrington - Techcrunch

You can register here.

The Social Graph Project attempts to map all the relationships between individuals in current social networks.

Pretty ambitious project, don’t you think? The problem, as Brad Fitzpatrick explains, is the lack of of consistent framework that would allow for global mapping:

Unfortunately, there doesn’t exist a single social graph (or even multiple which interoperate) that’s comprehensive and decentralized. Rather, there exists hundreds of disperse social graphs, most of dubious quality and many of them walled gardens.

This has a great impact on usability. As he continues to explain:

People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site.

Faced with this scenario Brad argues that a non profit organization should exist to manage all of the user’s information (personal profile information, friends, email, address, etc.) Then when the user goes and register in a new site he is prompted with a message such as: “Hey, from sources available to us through public means we know that you have all these friends, blogs and personal info. Would you like us to fill your profile for you using all this information?”

If you are in the mood for some reading go ahead and read the full article about the social graph project.

Diggularity provides you with a Wordpress Plugin that displays the amount of times your site is linked to from Digg.com. Okay let me rephrase that. The amount of links from Digg.com that Google indexed. This is the query used by the plugin:

“site:digg.com your-blog.com”

If your blog made it to Digg’s frontpage a couple of times you should have a decent Diggularity and you may want to show off. If that’s the case head over to Diggularity and install the plugin in your blog.