Pulse on the Blogosphere

StumbleUpon Takes the Social Bookmarking Lead
I can't say I'm surprised but StumbleUpon wins the ProBlogger popularity contest with 40% of the vote, del.icio.us had 21% and Digg had 19%. Are you still trying to figure out how to get 'stumbled'? Read The Guide.

Blogger Tips - How to Get Noticed
Whether your a new blogger or an old timer this quick post with three main tips is worth a read. If you looking for more ideas to gain popularity check out this top 50 list. Once you start putting these tips to work you'll want to measure your success right? Well check out this post for a good framework for for success.

Adobe Wants You to Share
Sharing, collaborating and doing it online is the trend of the decade and Adobe surely can't be left out in the cold. Their new web service - Adobe Share - allows you to share docs online. Check out this post for a product review and product comparison.

MySpace Follows in Facebook's Footprints
On Tuesday MySpace launched it's own developer site allowing anyone to build apps onto their platform. Is it too little too late? I don't think so but we'll just have to wait and see...

Reputation Marketing
What a great post by Paul Dunay - this one liner sums it up "A reputation that took decades to build can be threatened by a single event." Read his post for a three-step approach to that could save your reputation.

Can You Handle the Truth?
Matt Dickman doesn't think so and I have to agree - the biggest challenge corporations have with Social Media is letting go because they are afraid this "truth" will surface. What they fail to realize is that they are already surfaced. Ok, let me stop before I get on a rant - check out Matt's post for suggestions on how to get your social media feet wet.

A Social Networking Experiment: Cisco’s Connected Life Contest

Merry Christmas
Ever hear that you should be careful what you ask for because you just might get it? Well, Christmas came early for me this year. I was challenged with applying some of this crazy Marketing 2.0/social networking/new paradigm stuff I’m always talking about to help boost the exposure of a program to promote Cisco’s Connected Life Contest.

The idea behind Cisco’s Connected Life Contest is to generate innovative ideas for a connected life (for example: using your cell phone to pay for your Starbuck's coffee). Cisco is awarding a grand prize of $10,000 for the best idea and ten runner-up prizes of $1,000.

Your Mission, should you choose to accept it . . .
Most of the focus around Marketing 2.0 in my current role is about strengthening ties with current customers. This is a different animal. For this project, I won’t be using Marketing 2.0 techniques to improve the quality of customer conversations but rather to dramatically increase the quantity of conversations we’re having. Whereas most of my marketing focus is on building brand, reinforcing message, and enabling better communication – this is straight up promotion.

What took this from being just another cool marketing project to being a real life Apprentice-style jam session is the lofty objectives, short timelines, and limited resources. We’re working with a very limited budget, a very small (yet obsessively dedicated) team, and 51 days to reach a record setting goal (internal bragging rights only), measured in contest entries.


Ray Hopewood, meet Joe ConnectedLife
We’re relying heavily on social networking to create and sustain buzz for Joe, the central character to the Connected Life Contest. An important early task was to build our online presence for the campaign. “Joe ConnectedLife,” has a profile on Facebook and MySpace, communities on YouTube, Ning and LiveVideo, profiles on 40+ other video sharing sites, and you can tag the Connected Life Contest page with digg or del.icio.us.

Shameless Plug & Cry for Help
In addition to all of the social networking I’m doing to build Joe ConnectedLife’s online presence I’m hoping to inspire my audience to take action. Submit your idea (did I mention there’s a $10,000 Grand Prize!), write about it in your blog, befriend Joe ConnectedLife share the landing page through digg, del.icio.us, or whatever other social bookmarking tool you use – or send me your ideas on what else we can be doing to spread the word.

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