Internet Marketing School

Social Bookmarking - Bookmarks have gone through a fairly dramatic evolution. Once long ago, a bookmark was a slip of paper or a spare postcard, or even something made especially for the purpose, which you slipped in between the pages of a book so you would know what page you had got up to next time you picked it up. Along came computers, and some clever bod liked the name and adopted it for their method of saving a web address to your ‘favourites’ folder so you could access it later from your browser. It was a digital version of folding the corner .

I still remember the days when I bookmarked a site in Netscape and then was very confused next time I came back to the computer, opened Internet Explorer and couldn’t find my bookmark even though I was sure I had saved it…Naturally enough, along came the need to be able to access everything, anywhere, at all times. It meant that suddenly bookmarks had to become portable and so we saw the rise of the social bookmarking sites.

But why is it social?

Social bookmarking, according to Wikipedia

“is a method for internet users to store…and manage bookmarks of web pages on the internet with the help of metadata.”

All well and good – your favourites are now accessible at any time and in any place (as long as you can access the internet of course), but why leave it there? Why not share those bookmarks with your colleagues or friends? And, if you want to take it one step further, why not share them with the world at large? Suddenly, you can access them, people you know can get the heads up on good web sites, and even people you don’t know can search through tags and be directed to the sites which you think are worthwhile. It certainly saves them clicking through unendorsed sites in the search results, and we all becomes one big happy family.

It even goes a step further…

Initially, when one said social bookmarking, sites like del.icio.us would come to mind. Essentially, this is precisely what social bookmarking needed to start with – online access, ability to make your bookmarks available to everyone or no-one and so on. Del.icio.us is fantastically useful, and I know we haven’t used it to its full extent, but it was very soon eclipsed by sites which almost fell outside of the social bookmarking genre into what could be called ‘social news’ sites. These are the Digg type sites which allow for peer review, voting systems, popularity contests and masses and masses of traffic if you happened to get it right. They are the epitome of web 2.0, leaving the memory of your IE favourites a work of ancient history.

That’s all lovely and philanthropic, but does using a social bookmarking site help my reputation?

Absolutely - it helps your reputation in four key ways:

1. Personal popularity and visibility: if you use the sites as they are meant to be used (i.e. don’t spam, annoy everyone or undertake any underhand tactics), then you become a part of the community. That in turn means people become curious about you, so will dig deeper to find out about you.
2. Link popularity and visibility: if your site, article or post gets bookmarked, and voted upon favourably, you can suddenly find yourself with more traffic than the M25 at 4.30 on a Friday afternoon.
3. Trust: This follows on from the previous two, but if you consistently bookmark and tag excellent, useful information, then others in the community or outside of it will learn to trust you and will be more likely to approve of, follow or promote your selections.
4. Backlinks: this is a slightly more difficult claim. Not all social bookmarking sites provide DoFollow links. There are several blog posts out there which list those sites that do – the one post I would trust would be Caroline Middlebrook’s list (note: this trust has been built through her social bookmarking activities among other things!) But I think it is as important to consider the backlinks you may foster from the combination of 1, 2 and 3 above as it is to consider them directly from the social bookmarking site itself.

Social bookmarking and social news sites are essential in any Online Reputation Management (ORM) campaign. But they are slow burners. Just like you can’t just walk into a party uninvited, pour the bowl of punch over your head, take off all of your clothes, drag the hostess off for a two-step and still expect to have a great reputation, nor can you leap into a social bookmarking site and expect results without getting to know the etiquette, people and rules first.

Just on etiquette, people and rules, I know that many of your have really worked hard with del.icio.us and found it an invaluable tool. I’d love to hear about your experiences. What worked? What didn’t? What’s the best way to use it? And do you find it an essential part of your social media armoury?

This valuable article was contributed by Nancy Williams (United Kingdom), the Managing Director of Tiger Two Ltd, (ie. http://www.tigertwo.co.uk).

Published on the IMS community blog portal by the Internet Marketing School team.