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.

Comments

[You Wish]

Is there anything good that dogsh** like you can't pervert to sell?

[Steve Rubel]

Note - prior comment was edited to remove foul language.

[Evelyn Rodriguez]

I admit the thought crossed my mind as I used del.icio.us over time that one could easily plant one's own article or post - or even more surreptitiously those of a client. It didn't feel ethical to me. It smacks of astroturfing and darker sides of stealth marketing, in my opinion.

[Steve Rubel]

Evelyn, I see you point of view. Just to be clear, I am in no way condoning PR people spam their press releases in these sites or post items multiple times. Rather, I am saying they should share and consider it a venue for launching products.

[Constantin Basturea]

Steve, being paid to "plant mini memes" has nothing to do with sharing - not in my book, anyway.

[Stephen O'Grady]

Interesting point re: bookmark spam. I actually think the risk of bookmark spam is actually relatively low with these services, at least for many uses. True, tags like "cool" or "gadget" could easily become gunked up with a deluge of placed links, but my principal interest in del.icio.us and other similar services is the individual aspect, i.e. people that link to things I follow, for precisely that reason. As a result, bookmark spam is not a tremendous concern to me at the moment. Or do you see a way that that could be affected as well?

[Steve Rubel]

Stephen, I think that any service that becomes popular and spreads the word can also become a haven for marketers.

[Satyajeet]

I suppose with google coming out with the "no follow" tag spamming social book mark sites can be effectively curbed?
Not much change in code required...

Cheers
Satya

[Jeremiah Owyang]

Steve

Great coverage on how marketers will be using social media tools

I've given some thought and expanded with more detail about how Marketers can use Flickr for Marketing, Branding, PR and Product Demos

http://jeremiahthewebprophet.blogspot.com/2006/06/web-strategy-flickr-for-marketing-pr.html