Well unfortunately it's rather hard to make sweeping statements about a particular marketing strategy being the best for "all" companies looking to do some form of Internet Marketing. It really depends on what the goals of the company are, how involved they want to become in their marketing, and really boils down to how patient or impatient they are in seeing results in the form of revenue or actual sales. The interent has many ways to market yourself and although the strategies overlap and benefit each other their tactic, process and outlook are very different. EX. SEO carries many long term benefits for visibility if it is done right however results often are slow to come and can take up to a year or longer to see in the form of increased revenue...depending on how competitve the industry. Social Media is both a slow burn and a quick fix! If you are dedicated enough it is not hard to quickly stir activity in the form of traffic to your site. However it requires the effort of company members, so sometimes it is not a popular choice amongst them because it becomes another element within their business/staff to manage The chance of a companies success in Social Media is very small without direction and coaching from a professional on using this tool effectively. So each marketing type has different features and benefits and it really depends on the company and their goals/visions.

One more thing I wanted to add. I view SEO or SEM as something every website should have or a form of marketing that is the foundation of the others. Social Media, PPC, Video Marketing, etc enhance that foundation. Certainly one can be successfully done without the other and I usually only recommend that if the industry I am marketing in is extremely competitive in which case being successful thru SEO alone would take more effort and money than they were willing to spend. However I would still recommend some degree of SEO or "tuning" on their website.

Excellent Jennifer.

Thanks for your time in replying to my question. I think that, reading between the lines, SEO might be a good investment for the long-term for me and it seems that SEO alone in the short term is a risky policy (unless achieved through social media itself.)

This is an odd question. It's like asking, "Is a lighter more important than a chainsaw?" Well, it depends if you need to make a fire or cut down a tree. Both SEO and SMO are one of many tactical tools at your disposal to achieve an audience task.

If I were running an e-commerce biz, SEO would definitely be more important to me than social media. If I was building a community or trying to peddle my latest virtual currency scam, I'd be all over SMO.

If we are talking about building a vendor website audience, it probably falls into which channel mates best to specific content on your vendor site. If you want to feature your catalog of white papers or deploy a bunch of product info, SEO all the way. If you are trying to support Customer Service, brand your team, aid PR, by all means fire up the SMO machine.

By the way, my website is changing a lot. I can't reveal it yet Justin but this new one contains e-learning downloads, a news digest, various discussion boards, and links to other websites. I'll post the link when all is done. I am now toying with the idea of boltng a social networking function where posters can have their own user profile, as well as participating in the educational activities.

Actually over the last 2 years SEO and social media marketing (SMM) have converged to a great extent. SEO is all about getting better visibility on the search engines for your site - not just about the on-site optimization.

Google not only puts standard web results on the first page of Google but also Blog results, Video resultls, News results, and real-time results from twitter, facebook, etc.. which can all be categorized as social media, so from an SEO perspective it is important to ensure that you get visibility not only in the normal web results but also in the other types of results.

Furthermore having your site visible on social media sites helps with your standard web results because many social media sites have a high PageRank and authority so links on these sites to your main website can be powerful.

The ideal for both SEO and SM is to create such great or unique content that people will talk about it and linking to it from their sites or social media profiles without you having to do anything. So that is why I am saying that SEO and SM have converged.

Brian Provost has a great response with, "It's like asking, "Is a lighter more important than a chainsaw?" Well, it depends if you need to make a fire or cut down a tree. Both SEO and SMO are one of many tactical tools at your disposal to achieve an audience task."

I think they are both equally important, but I think you need to evaluate your business before determining which one is better than the other. SMB's would probably benefit more from the social networking scene because they don't have the right material to compete with enterprise level companies on SEO.

Enterprise level companies would benefit more from SEO because they have the material and they have the funding to compete with other top level enterprise companies to rank on the first page of google.

Also, with an Enterprise level company, some of your employees are going to be fascinated with twitter and the social media scene, so they'll be tweeting and engagement in social media themselves.

Just a few thoughts.

SEM combines both SEO and SMM i.e. a website needs both these activities to get good leads or traffic to the website for a longer time period.
The activities carried out has to be result oriented.

I think both are important because the way SM is getting the attention of customers today is huge, at least in USA 66% of Web surfers are using SM as a way to look for thing on the Internet. In the other side SEO is extremely important because it will help people to look for KW targeted information and spend less just looking around. A contemporary SEO service must be also working with SM.