Marketers Will Soon Find a Home in Social Bookmark Sites

If you're not familiar with social bookmark sites, now is a good time to get acquainted with them. At least in the short term, they hold a lot of potential for PR professionals and marketers.

Social bookmark sites, which include del.icio.us and Furl, are becoming increasingly popular. They are basically free online repositories where you can easily store, categorize and share online links.

For the PR professional, Furl and del.icio.us are useful on a number of different levels. First, they hold a lot of potential for knowledge management. If you head a team and need to regularly share info with them, you can file away links that they can access at their convenience, either online or via RSS. In addition, by checking out each site's list of most popular links you can look through the open window into the psyche of heavy online users and influencers. But this is just the beginning.

Furl and del.icio.us are also places where at least right now you can plant mini memes. I found this out myself recently. On October 4 I blogged that Gmail added Atom feeds. I posted the link into del.icio.us and quickly I noticed an influx of traffic from the bookmark site and also watched as the link began to spread. As of this writing my site is one of the top links on Google for the terms Gmail and Atom.

Now imagine that instead of sharing a blog link I had used del.icio.us to spread word in the influencer community about a new gadget I was pitching. Rather than offering a reporter an exclusive or running an ad, I instead elected to plant a mini meme. Sound far fetched? Not to me. Right now this tactic holds potential, but perhaps at some point it will lose its punch as these sites become a haven for bookmark spam. Enjoy it while you can.