Here is a Social Media Optimization tutorial, beginning with a Benefit/Risk evaluation:

Benefits:
A successful campaign can mean:
1) Brand Awareness
2) Brand Engagement ( pages viewed, time on site)
3) Publicity
4) High amount of traffic to your website
5) Conversions
6) Good ROI
7) Inbound Link Generation

Social Media enables the marketer to create a conversation with the target audience. Social Media can spread across multiple mediums very quickly, and increase your advertising “reach“. Social Media is trackable & measurable, so you can calculate an ROI.

Risks:
1) No guarantee the article submission will become “popular” and make it to the homepage of the Social Media site.
2) Backlash at the advertiser for some reason.

Key Factors of a Social Media Optimization:
1) Focus on a specific Social media site (eg: Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, etc).
2) Target your audience.
3) Development & Creation of quality content with a hook (humor, shock, news, etc).
4) Track, and Measure conversions to calculate ROI.
5) No guarantees the submission will hit the 1st page. A good track record is 1 in 3 submissions hit frontpage. That’s in my opinion with no industry research to back me up. Just a guesstimate.

The creation of quality content can’t be over emphasized.

Does it matter who submits the article? Maybe yes, maybe no. Powerposters definitely have a track record of submissions reaching the homepage. But, if the article is quality content, and strategically written, then it has a good chance of making the homepage without the use of a Digg Powerposter.

What determines if the Social Media campaign is successful? That really depends what the business objectives are. If it is part of direct response, then possibly a good ROI. Perhaps the business objectives are Branding. So, maybe it’s measuring awareness of a new brand or product, or Brand engagement. Perhaps the objective is to generate inbound links to assist in the website’s overall SEO objectives.

According to eMarketer: The buzz around collaborative Web 2.0 technologies keeps growing.

Related posts:

1. 12 Ways To Get Inbound Links Using Social Media
2. 10 Tactics for Video Optimization