As more companies embrace social media, the chatter about return on investment, or ROI, has amplified as executives attempt to determine whether the money they’re spending is worth it. In theory, it’s a good exercise but given it is still early days for social media, it is a challenge to accurately quantity its impact right now.

Rather than focus on ROI, companies should be looking long and hard at SMO – social media optimization.

So, what is SMO? One way to define is that SMO is a focus on making sure that a company’s social media activities are as efficient and effective as possible. It means creating content – be it blog posts, tweets, videos or Facebook updates – that can be easily used and leveraged across multiple social media platforms.

It means making sure a company’s social media person or team is highly productive so that their day-day-day activities are focused and productive as opposed to having a scattered shot-gun approach that consumes too many cycles.

Yes... and no.
I agree 100% that our work needs to be optimized. Social Media is no exception to anything else that is done in an organization and as such is not exempt of falling prey to waste and inefficient processes. There are multiple tools that can help improve this. But beyond the tools we must first look at how we are organized/structured. Does our organization's design aid or hamper our productivity?

We talk so much about relationships in social media that we forget about our internal structure and relationships.

Where do I disagree? There are still ways of measuring of ROI. Everything can be measured... everything can be tracked. It's just a matter of how we do it and how we interpret that data.