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.

One of the best ways to jump-start SMO is taking advantage of the wide variety of tools that can automate social media activity and extend the reach of your content with no or little manual effort.

For example, TwitterFeed is a easy way to link an RSS feed to Twitter so that every time you have a new blog post, it automatically creates tweet.

Ping.fm is another excellent tool to quickly content to distribute updates to dozens of social media platforms – everything from Twitter and Facebook to LinkedIn, Flickr, Friendfeed, MySpace and Ning.

Hootsuite is a Twitter publishing tool with lots of great features, including the ability to schedule tweets, which means you can create a bunch of tweets at one time, and then have them appear throughout the day.

The underlying theme is using tools to make social media work for you as opposed to working social media. This is not to suggest that social media doesn’t require a consistent and sustained effort but there are lot of ways to optimize how you use social media.

So, let’s have more discussions about SMO to complement the growing obsession with ROI.

For another take on SMO, check out Oren Todoros’ post on “Max Your Brand With 4 Social Media Optimization Tips”.