The Value of Social Bookmarking for Marketers

In my efforts to explain the value of social bookmarking for an internal marketing group I created a presentation that outlines:

• What is Social Bookmarking?
• The Growth of Social Bookmarking
• Marketing Value of Social Bookmarking
• Good Use Case Examples of Social Bookmarking
• Recommended Best Practices: What to do & What NOT to do

For marketers, social bookmarking is more than just a way for users to store, classify, share and search their sites - if used correctly it's a way to drive traffic and fuel a viral campaign. The growth of social bookmarking isn't slowing down either. According to Hitwise from August 2006-February 2007 Digg was up 9% and del.icio.us was up 130%.

HP and IBM are ahead of the curve and have already adopted Social Bookmarking in their marketing programs. HP has even created their own widget to encourage users to bookmark their sites and they were also one of the early adopters of Social Media Releases (read an earlier post on this topic). IBM is also using Social Bookmarking links as a way to encourage users to 'tag' them.

Here are some best practices I recommend to get started:

What to do:

• Encourage social bookmarking by adding links to make it easy for users – consider asking email subscribers to bookmark your site as a call to action
• Consider developing a custom widget that matches the corporate website look and feel to leverage multiple bookmarking sites (like HP did)
• Consider what pages of your site make sense to use social bookmarking on (ie. news, events, tools, resources). Typically, anything that is updated regularly or acts as a resource
• Make sure your approach is consistent and sustainable - try to avoid dramatic fluctuations in ranking algorithms

What NOT to do:

• Don't submit content just to get traffic without taking into account whether the content would interest the community – if you waste their time, they’ll stop giving it to you
• Don’t make multiple accounts to artificially promote your content – this is an act of desperation. If you have good stuff, they will keep coming back
• Don’t use software programs to automate the process by spamming as many social sites as you can – nobody likes a spammer
• Don’t pay someone else to do these things either – there are people out there who are obnoxious for a living. Let’s not encourage them

Resources for this post:
Social Bookmarking & Marketing
Hitwise Intelligence Analyst Weblogs
Wikipedia
HP Web Usability, Experience and SEO Blog
HP Social Media Release
IBM Social Bookmarking Examples
Earners Blog

B2B Marketing 2.0 – Conversation Enablers

Someone at work asked me how to 'leverage the power of Web 2.0' and what I have done to take advantage of some of the new technologies. I responded by saying that Web 2.0 technologies are useful for creating conversations with my customers, not just for pushing content (why pushing content isn’t good enough anymore is a post of it’s own). Then I was asked what training wheels I would suggest for someone looking to get started. I came up with this list of things I started with and would love suggestions from expert readers on others:

Blogging: Corporate blogs are becoming more common with companies like Cisco, HP, NetApp and Boeing which already active participants in the blogosphere. The common platforms for business or corporate blogs are WordPress, Movable Type and Leverage Software which goes beyond blogging to create communities.

Wiki's: Corporate wiki’s are collaborative websites which rely on a community of users to generate content and build pages. Wiki’s can be used in so many ways here are some example that come to mind –improve internal communications and expand the reach of your internal knowledgebase, use it to build a community within your customer base to create user generated documentation, use it with partners to co-create proposals. Some examples of external corporate wiki’s sites are: Linux Questions, IBM and Adobe. Three popular corporate Wiki platforms that come to mind are Confluence, SocialText and TWiki.

Social Networking: There are many social networking sites and although most of the one’s I’ve come across are personal in nature they do touch on certain business topics and can be exploited to reach a community that shows interest in topics related to your business. This site lists a few of the more popular social networking sites.

Second Life: Second Life is a ‘3-D virtual world’ – it offers a platform that can be used to host online events and collaborate with a broad audience in addition to just starting a hallway conversation with other avatars online. Notable companies on Second Life are Cisco, Reuters, Sun Microsystems and IBM.

LinkedIn: An online community of business professionals – this site can be exploited to build an expert within your company on a specific topic by taking advantage of the ‘Answers’ area of the site. It can be a good place to find potential clients and partners – and of course it’s more obvious use is finding potential job candidates.

I have limited this list to ‘conversation enablers’ – I'll be working on a follow up post around widgets and which ones are most likely to have “business value” which I think is even more interesting.