For those being not herborists, taraxacum is a genus of plants in the family Asteraceae. A number of species of Taraxacum are regarded as seed dispersed weeds. After pollination is finished, the dandelion flower dries out and then the seed-bearing parachutes expand and lift out of the dried flower head.
The Taraxacum's Paradigm in Online Communications
This is an interesting metaphor to illustrate how your communications should spread. Once defined accordingly to your target audience, your key messages should flow through different channels – combining offline and online means. Such a process could be named “taraxacoms”.
The original concept was first brought by Antoine Peeters – a Brussels-based social media expert – who recently created his own consultancy Taraxacoms. Having met him, I strongly advise you to attend his regular workshops on social media to better understand its impact on European affairs.
In this context, social media plays a major role to help you increase your online visibility. While you should also aim for optimizing your online press releases, the strategic use of social media will multiply the gates to which your messages can be discovered by your target groups.
Hereby, comes the concept of SMO (Social Media Optimization) a subset of Social Media Marketing (SMM) consisting into promoting a brand, a product or a service through social media. Generally speaking, SMO is also ideal for Online Reputation Management (ORL).