5 Reasons to Start Social Bookmarking

How Social Bookmarking Works

This is another great tutorial from CommonCraft.com covering "social bookmarking". Social bookmarking is a fantastic tool that I have used a long time now, and have found to be an absolute "must" tool. Learn how to do it, then I'll discuss other advantages.

5 Reasons to Start Social Bookmarking Today

Awesome right? No more wishing you had that bookmark you saved on your work computer after arriving home. Here are 5 more advantages.

People Benefit From Your Social Bookmarks

Want to know where my bookmarks on SEO related sites are... http://del.icio.us/cheyennejack/seo, or do you want my tall bookmarks... http://del.icio.us/cheyennejack/tall. Search them all. Check them out. I bookmark them mainly for myself, but if others find value in them, then great. If others use them to get an instant answer to that site I was telling them about last night without having to wait on me to respond to their call, email, or IM, even better.

You Benefit From Other Peoples Social Bookmarks

Whether its your friends tagging your username for extra bookmarks or strangers thinking you might be interested in something, suddenly you have a human element looking out for you. This has to be a little bit better than just the Google "I'm feeling lucky" button. The other advantage is that you can see who else bookmarked a site that you bookmarked and traverse through their similarly tagged bookmarks. Just the other day I found a user who had bookmarked 100s of medical journals and sites after I saw they had bookmarked one our disease state sites, CaringForDiabetes.com

Marketing

The power of discovery is a driving factor for people. They see you are bookmarking sites that are also of interest to them, then they check out what else you are bookmarking, what secret gems you may have. The bonus being if the secret gems are sites you are trying to promote. It may be a small impact, but sites like quarkbase.com and others are starting to show website value based upon data like delicious bookmarks, stumble upons and diggs. There is also the fact that Yahoo owns delicious and these sites are fairly easy to crawl. One has to assume they play a role in how the search engines order organic search rankings.

Organizations Sharing Bookmarks

Set up an account for your organization, and then let members know about it and have them tag relevant organizational worthy bookmarks with "for:MeditechMedia" as an example. In this fashion, not only do members help themselves by bookmarking content for them personally, but they help the organization have a long-term memory in their bookmarks. Delicious also offers several different views for your bookmarks so that you could automatically add a bookmark cloud or other similar offerings to your corporate intranet. Several weekly podcast and webcast shows use this to have their links readily available for each show; and even let fans suggest bookmarks.

Desktop Support and Other Bookmark Heavy Activities

Find yourself having to fix random peoples computers a lot. Head to their computer and realize they need to start installing the basics like firefox, flash player, plug-ins, drivers, anti-viruses and spyware removal tools? Set up a tag for yourself, go to these sites, bookmark them once and when its time to fix Aunt Edna's computer again, you'll know where all your bookmarked needs are without having to re-remember them all. If Aunt Edna is kind of savvy, she can at least go to your tools and start downloading from your links. In fact you could do this with any kind of subject matter as a tutorial for others to easily and instantly access.

TTSJ Bonus Tip

When you get started, make sure to Bookmark The Tall Street Journal homepage, and your profile page along with your other profile pages on other websites. This way when you need to update passwords, or just know what networks you are on, you can go to your social bookmarks and look-up all bookmarks tagged with "me", "myprofile" or any tag of your choosing.

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