The social media has emerged with a boom during the past few years. The social media sites enables a website or a blog with good content to generate traffic as well as create awareness.

Lee Odden in his post on Social Media Marketing informs about the essential characteristics of a social media community. 

• Create profiles/accounts
• Grow a network of friends
• Submit content or collaborate
• Vote on content
• Tag content

Lee Odden rightly says that the above factors are what 'social' stands for. The 'media' is the platform and the content. Like wiki, forums, threads, blogs, audio-video sharing etc. social news sites are largely used today to generate traffic to a post. Many bloggers have gained popularity owed to the social media sites.

Back in August 2006 Rohit had a good post on Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO).