SUBMIT 2.0

Social bookmarking, though it has been around a couple of years, really hit it big in 2007. I thought I’d take this chance to describe what social bookmarking is and why as a business or organization, you should care.  

Everyone knows what a bookmark is. It is a way of saving the link to a webpage you’ve been to in your browser so that you can find your way back to it quickly in the future. Wikipedia gives a good definition:

Social bookmarking is a meta-data based method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet. In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.  

When the search engines weren’t great at returning relevant results, creating bookmarks was extremely useful to find stuff at a later date. Over the last several years search engines have become better, so most people have been relying on search engines for finding sites again. Creating and saving bookmarks in your browser has pretty much been abandoned.  

Enter social bookmarking. Social bookmarking is rapidly becoming an easier way of finding more useful information than search engines provide. The downfall of current search engines (Google included) is that you have marketing companies spending big money to be the top ranked sites for keywords that you are looking for online. This means you are not necessarily getting the best results you want, you are actually getting the best marketed websites.

 Social bookmarks have a leg up over search engines in that the sites people bookmark the highest are those that the masses have determined are valuable. This type of “voting” helps to drive the better content to the top of the heap, and it usually occurs pretty quickly. From a marketing perspective, this means you can no longer just consider optimizing your site for search engines. Social bookmarking is turning into a type of search engine. The top search engines are scrambling to release their own versions of social bookmarks just to keep their loyal users. Social bookmarks deliver real value to those people who use them.

The downside to social bookmarks is that you can have the best content in the world, but if people don’t know about it, it won’t be used. Additionally, the top items are voted on by the masses, which isn’t necessarily what researches want, but it for a marketer, its gold. For businesses that take Internet communications seriously, that want to build awareness to drive sales, social bookmarking can not be ignored. You have to start generating relevant news, blogs and content that people will want to bookmark and use these applications to attract an interested audience.

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Filed under: Social Bookmarking