SMO - do they make people twitt and post and blog about some product by organizing contest?
eg. LIKE my facebook page to get the entry form to win a FREE iPHONE 5; invite your friends to like this page to get a chance to win a FREE trip to Buthan.
That's certainly part of it. And there is usually some gamification centred around harassing your friends and family in return for extra tickets in the raffle. Done well, it works a treat. That usually involves some large and real reward (f'rinstance, Sony, Calumet Photo and FStoppers.com teamed up for a triple-like that resulted in somebody getting nearly $4K in camera kit for Christmas). Most folks are going to dislike you or subtract the 1 they added earlier when the draw/contest is over, but in the meantime you've got permission to jam ads down their throats for two or three months. On the other hand, you can really turn people off quickly if you trick them into opening the spam gate. But keep in mind that most of the discussion on this forum revolves around "get rich quick" ideas, like content-free forums with heavy ads and affiliate links -- very few people have any desire to sustain a business, or to put in the work required to build and sustain a business.
The ground rules have always been (1) be useful; (2) be interesting; and (3) work hard. Unless you do those, none of the SEO or social marketing (and that's what it is, not "Social Media Optimization") you do will help at all. You'll just get a few naive people to drop by, see nothing they want and move on.