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.

Social bookmarking. What is it good for?

Posted by writer

A background of my relationship with bookmarking: I remember the old days when I’d have a set of fancy rectangular bookmarks (something I got for myself from Barnes and Noble) lying on my desk at all times. I’ve always found it natural to organize myself while I’m working or researching with simple yet effective techniques. I used to color code the bookmarks with tags like “to show to clients”, “interesting event ideas”, or “vendor lists”, etc. Of course this was the “pre-web 2.0 era”. The era when we had to figure little productivity things out our self. Come web 2.0 and I was perhaps one of the first few to adopt online bookmarks. This is not because I’m tech savvy but simply because the concept of bookmarking is very natural for me. I do most of my research online, maintain my contacts online, I brainstorm online, I plan online and I even market my events online. What better way to manage my content than using these tools to organize the work.

Social Bookmarking: Now this is where it gets interesting. The online world thrives on sharing and community-centric approaches. So, I can tag things on my browser, cluster them up into categories if I want to, share them with other like-minded people or just open up the web feeds of the bookmark lists for public view. How does that benefit me as an event organizer? Well, I get to learn from other people, I get to rate and comment on other’s bookmarks, I get to collaborate to form richer information sets and, most importantly, I get to meet people interested in the same topics. That, to me, is invaluable for business; since my business is all about networking and relationships. Shifting bookmarks from my home computer to the office computer; or from my laptop to my team’s pcs has been as simple as exporting and emailing a single file.