SES New York: Social Media & Why It Matters (Part 3)

By Brian Cosgrove

The post covers the third speaker, Tamera Kremer. Temera focused on Social Bookmarking sites for her presentation.

Temera's Introduction: Social bookmarking adds a folksonomy and taxonomy to the web.  It is just one ingredient in the social media mix. 

Sharing Good Sites

Sites such as Del.icio.us, Furl, Ma.gnolia, Faves, Simpy, etc… let you view how popular an article by the number of saves. In addition to pages becoming part of a popular list, users create profiles that others can follow. People share links with other users in their network who may save and tag those links as well. A browser plug-in lets you share sites on Facebook and they become part of a feed.

Tagging Sites

Tag any page on the web with which ever words seem most appropriate. A person will tag the article with terms relevant to that individual. You can use tags to augment your keyword research.  Further, people may then browse other users’ tags by keyword.

Del.icio.us (The Big Dog)

-          Serves over 4mm users and continues to grow

-          Has over 100mm web pages bookmarked

-          Purchased by Yahoo! in 2005

Tag Clouds

Del.icio.us tag clouds are prominently displayed on the sidebars of a considerable number of blogs. Many of the a-list bloggers automatically integrate their saved bookmarks into their blog posts as a standalone posts.

The Notes Field

The notes field lets consumers put what they think about a company when it is tagged. Comments can be very powerful.  Jeff Jarvis demonstrated the power that user’s comments can have on a company with his Dell Hell posts in 2005.

Title

Del.icio.us automatically imports your title tag making it much more important.

B2B Case Study 

A Canadian marketing association successfully used social bookmarking to put together a resource library that would grow and it became a valuable resource building awareness of the association. A tag cloud was included and promoted.

Social Participation

Reciprocity is phenomenal in social bookmarking sites. By including other quality sites in your network, you’re more likely to get your own sites saved.

Getting Started

1. Set up an RSS alert for your URL to see who is linking to you.
2. Set up a personal account and start tagging pages.
3. Search through the keywords you associate with your brand and see what types of articles are tagged with that folksonomy.
4. Tag content accordingly and take note where new content may need to be generated.

Be sure to see these other posts from this series:

• SES New York: Social Media & Why it Matters (Part 1)
• SES New York: Social Media & Why it Matters (Part 2)
• SES New York: Social Media & Why it Matters (Part 4)