How to win Business through Social Bookmarking Services
Robin Whitlock
Social bookmarking is a fairly recent phenomenon, having arrived just a few years ago with the appearance of sites like Delicious, Furl and Simpy. It has quickly become very popular, mainly because such activity has a number of very obvious benefits. If you are in the position whereby you find you can’t search among your browser bookmarks these days without getting severely stressed, as you search among the hundreds of bookmarks you’ve saved there, then do please read on, the solution to your problem is just within reach.
A handy PDF document courtesy of EduCause Learning Initiative will tell you the basics of how social bookmarking works. Employing the example of a Professor Smith who does much of his work online, the document explains that the academic has found the storage of bookmark’s in folders on his web browser to be inefficient, for example many topics he is researching fall under a number of categories, not just one. Furthermore, he can’t access essential bookmarks that are stored on his home machine when he is at his office at the University. Finally, finding one bookmark out of hundreds has become much more labour intensive than simply refinding the document with a simple Google click.
It’s clear then that social bookmarking is of inestimable benefit to the busy professional, whatever his area of expertise. All you do is register with an appropriate social bookmarking site, for example Delicious which is easily accessible and easy to use. Then all you have to do is carry on saving your bookmarks, tagging them under appropriate categories and sharing them with whoever else is online who may benefit from them. In return, you can also examine the bookmarks already tagged by other members. Over time, what happens is that an online research-sharing community develops, which is popularly known as a ‘folksonomy’.
As with everything however, there are downsides. First of all, the social bookmarking scene is very much an amateurish method of storing and sharing information, primarily because there is no centralized rule defining how subjects are tagged and stored. Secondly, the information gathered reflects the views and opinions of its users and therefore the available information can often be skewed in particular ways. Third, many of the features of social bookmarking are being built into other applications, social networking perhaps being the most obvious case.
That said, there are still many people out there who still believe social bookmarking as an essential aid to business. Lou Dubois for instance, writing on the website Inc cites the example of Isaac Marion, a writer who marketed his short story I am a Zombie Filled With Love on his website which was bookmarked on the StumbleUpon network. A Hollywood producer by the name of Cori Stern saw it and told Marion that it had lots of potential and that he should convert the story into a longer novel. The result was Warm Bodies which has now been adapted into a movie produced by Summit Entertainment the company behind The Hurt Locker and the Twilight series.
Another benefit of social bookmarking, which ironically takes advantage of that skewed information phenomenon I was talking about earlier, is that it enables companies and individual users to identify trends and fashions through scrutiny of the ‘most popular’ categories on social bookmarking websites. This could be of enormous advantage to those involved in particular marketing campaigns for instance.
There are loads of bookmarking sites, many of which can be very beneficial to business. Twitter is known most commonly as a social networking site, but because it operates essentially through the distribution of links, in practice it is also a bookmarking site. Alongside Delicious, Digg has a reviewing feature which works to push bookmarks up or down a scale according to popularity, therefore enabling immediate identification of current hot topics. Yahoo Buzz gives the user editorial control of sorts by enabling the promotion of particular bookmarks while StumbleUpon actively sorts through bookmarks according to category in order to find those that are most relevant.
Lou Dubois identifies a number of ways in which bookmarking sites can work for business. She points out that companies who have easy access to a large amount of information are going to be particularly attractive to customers. Furthermore, social bookmarking enables companies to accumulate and promote testamonials thereby elevating status and reputation. The creation of folders and tags can assist in the tracking of progress for a particular project or campaign since it enables relevant stories and comments to be easily accessible and highly visible.
In essence then, social bookmarking is still very much a key business tool and should remain so for some considerable time to come.
www.millhousedata.com
I am a freelance writer, researcher and administrator with an interest in many contemporary issues across a wide variety of genre’s and business sectors. I have a particular interest in energy and the environment which is the main theme of my blog. I have been published in a wide variety of magazines since I started writing in 1997 and I also write regularly for the social media forum of a technical recruitment consultancy based in Milton Keynes. More recently I have started writing articles for the website of a business software company and also work as an online data input administrator for a London-based research company involved in gathering investment information for the food and renewable technology industries. I am a graduate of Bath Spa University with a BA (Hons) in Psychology and English (2/1).
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