I agree--I see SMM as a complement to SEM, personally.  Good article, with excellent points. 

Insightful article with thoughts shared by many in the industry. At the same time many others are lead to believe social media is the answer to all their marketing efforts. As Lee mentioned it is just one "tool" in a site's marketing efforts.  

I wonder what the next shiny toy will be that everyone will focus their attention on?

Loving this article as well. 

I’m starting to see SEO/organic traffic as two different things at this point.  SEO related traffic is really traffic that comes from the deliberate design and modification of a website to meet the requirements of the ranking algorithms of major search engines.  Organic traffic is people navigating directly to your site, through typing a URL into the address bar or by searching for your company's name in a search engine, because they know your company and they want to go to your site for information or for a service you provide.

Looking at it this way, all of this social media marketing should be looked at from the organic standpoint, which means branding and building awareness of your site/company.  I think this is really where social media comes in…a visit from Digg or StumbleUpon might not make you money right away, but it may help build the brand and lead to a sale down the line.

Sure, social media marketing can help with SEO, especially with linking, but like Jill says, it’s no substitute for good fundamentals.  That’s why it seems that we should pursue social media with organic traffic/branding/awareness in mind, not so much SEO (any link juice you get will just be a bonus).

Very nice post, Jill. you are very right, SEO and SEM are evolving, increasingly integrating Reputation Management in the mix, leveraging sentiment analysis and other emerging semantic technology applications. I used the term "Reputation Management" instead of "Sentiment Analysis" because I think SA is actually a broader computational linguistic discipline than its online marketing application, including pieces like semantic categorization and tone polarity scoring. This said, it's a powerful tool for online marketers, brand managers, PR agencies, advertising agencies, CPG advertisers, ...

Actually, online advertising is moving away from Search into branding vehicles in relative terms. There is a shift of brand advertising budgets from traditional media to the Web.

In parallel, consumer generated content is exploding and insights are extracted to debate reputation management strategies. I believe Jupiter reported that about 28% of top search engine results come from consumer generated content sites. Elixir says that 39% of the top 100 results are consumer generated. That's a lot of impressions when you consider the value of ranking above the SERP fold. With that, there is also the emergence of "Influence" segmentation. Spending on social media and “conversational marketing” will surpass traditional marketing spending by the end of 2012 (TWI). I guesss someone's going to have measure and justify, right? But how do you measure reputation or sentiment? With these brand dollars, "Engagement" seems to be emerging, the metrics that nobody knows how to define and measure :-)

-arnaud