Archive for June, 2008

More on Social Bookmarking

Posted by writer

In my last post I spoke about the basic concept of social bookmarking. Today, I’ll go a step deeper to see how social bookmarking sites can be used. Later, we’ll discuss the different sites in detail along with their value and benefits.


To start off, heres a good video explanation of the concept of social bookmarking in plain English.

Social bookmarking sites can get your traffic to spike up significantly - but that does not mean that you can go online and try to randomly instigate that traffic. It has to happen naturally, or else you can risk losing your credibility online.

The voting concept in bookmarking sites allows the popular stories to get to the first page. So, its important to understand what makes content popular by carefully studying the trends in those sites. If you can manage to drive your content there, be prepared for a lot of traffic. However, this does not mean that you can copy or mock your way into the first page of these sites.

If you use these sites to genuinely share things that interest you, chances are that you can create a following where people watch the sites that you bookmark. A thing to note is that the online community is ever-so-watchful of manipulated or self-interest driven content. If you want to use social bookmarking strategies for your business, you’ll have to adapt it as a regular use tool for things that interest you.

There are a number of social bookmarking sites - a few of the popular ones are Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, Furl, Stumbleupon. Today, I’m just briefly going to talk about Digg.

Digg:
Digg is a community-driven news source. The community decides the popularity of stories - the most digged stories make it to the front page and result in huge traffic spikes to the source of the stories.

Most online businesses thrive on traffic - if that is your case as well, then you should spend time to carefully study what kind of content makes it to the top.

Good content gets dugg. Sales pitchy content doesn’t. Content with lots of lists and guidelines gets dugg. Content that is lame doesn’t. Focus on creating valuable content instead of wasting time playing tricks with the social bookmarking tools. If your site content is good and you have an active following, your chances of rising to the top are higher. Micah has some nice guidelines for social bookmarking that you can put to use.

Why social media?

Posted by writer

Social media is something which you just cannot ignore. Whatever industry you are working in, it is amazing how much influence social media can have on your business, you just need to know how to use it to your advantage.


Social media marketing basically defines how you can use online channels to market your products, get traffic, convert people into customers, get your conversation started, etc. So when you’re planning your marketing mix, it is important to understand the dynamics of different social media tools to find the right ones for your business. You can’t just put them all up and expect magic to happen. What works for a online clothing store may not work for a web services company and so on.

That is why we keep reminding you not to follow someone else’s best practices by the book, figure out what will work for your business or get a consultant to do that for you. If you are an event manager, figure out what tools to use for maximum impact: e.g. you may want to create an online page for an event and choose not to for another. Will a short-lived fame from getting highlighted on Techcrunch or Digg help you or will creating an authoritative blog about your industry? Are different internet marketing techniques like SEO and PPC going to work for your launch or event or are they just hyperboles? You need to know how to make these important decisions effectively, and for that you need to understand the impact of social media on launches, events and any other services.

The truth is that the world has changed. People, audiences, consumers, business are all looking for more value from everything that is offered to them. You see it all around you in the offline world, where even food joints are giving out upsize meals. Translate that to the online world and everything multiplies exponentially. Its easier, its more powerful, it has more of an outreach and most of it is available for free.

Well, the question that comes to mind is that if there are so many free ways of marketing online, why isn’t everyone doing a great job at it. One of the reason could be that the face of the online world is constantly evolving and you need to be at the foremost in order to know what’s going on. I guess that’s where posts like these come into place - we’ve worked, consulted, tried, tested, experienced, experimented and think that we have gained considerable knowledge that we can now share.

We will be sharing a whole series of step by step guidelines on how to market your events through multiple channels and how to use different online platforms to your advantage. The guidelines will be posted on a daily basis on this blog. Do check it out whenever you can.

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