Welcome to Social Media

Marketing, monitoring and sharing via delicious

June 30th, 2009 written by Heidi Cool

Delicious bookmarks displayed on FriendFeed

The other week, at the Cleveland Webloggers meet-up, George Nemeth and I had a brief discussion about this site. While we were chatting, George mentioned that since our focus is social media, we'd like to open about the project. My thought on this matter is that we can use this blog to let you, our readers, see behind the scenes as it were. So I thought I'd tell you why I just spent 3 minutes or so bookmarking the Welcome to Social Media eBook chapters on delicious.

I use delicious to bookmark any blog article, Web site, social media service, or page that I want to be able to access again. It let's me access my bookmarks from any computer, but more importantly it makes it easy to find things in the future. If I'm building a Web site and use some WordPress tip I've found, I want to save that for for future reference. Next time I'm working with WordPress I may want to use it again. Or, if I'm writing a blog entry on writing and language, I'll save all the pages I find while doing my research. These may become pages I link to in the article. By tagging them with a common tag such as language, I can have them all grouped together for easy reference.

I also have made it a habit to bookmark my own content. I don't do this to be able to find it—obviously I know where my pages are. I do this to see if others are bookmarking it too.

Delicious is a cool tool for measurement and marketing

Last year, in Things we can learn from del.icio.us—for use in our marketing endeavors, I covered this subject in greater detail, but here's an overview of what I've just accomplished by bookmarking the social media chapters.

Saving this content lets me monitor its popularity among delicious users

When you save a site on delicious you can see how many times it has been saved by other users and who those users are. If a site has been saved by more than one person, you will see a blue box to the right of the link showing the number of times it has been saved. When you click on the blue box, you will see a list of delicious users who have saved that page. I've saved the Welcome to Social Media Chapters on delicious with the tag: WelcomeToSocialMediaV1.

This site has been live less than a week, so I'm not expecting to see many blue boxes just yet. Thus far only one chapter has been saved by another person. But over time, more pages will get saved. If I look at this tag in a year I'll be able to see which chapters were saved most often. I can also see who saved them—in case I want to add them to my delicious network. This will let me see what other useful content they've found and it will also let me share specific saves with them. Thus when we publish Volume 2, I can share the links with the people who saved chapters from Volume 1.

My delicious saves serve to announce (on multiple channels) what content is important to me

I bookmark things because they are helpful or interesting to me, but many of these things may also be of interest to the people who follow my Web Development Blog, follow me on Facebook, Friendfeed, etc. Delicious makes it easy to share things with the people who follow me both on delicious and elsewhere. Many of us see delicious as a useful bookmarking tool, but it is also designed to be social. I can add other people to my network to see what links they are saving and vice versa. I can also subscribe to a user's RSS feed using Google Reader.

For example, my friend Wayne Smallman, a Web designer in England, saves many links related to Web design, development and science to his delicious account. By subscribing to his feed, I don't have to remember to go visit his bookmarks page, I'll just see the links while I'm catching up with blog reading on Google Reader. Similarly Wayne, or anyone else can subscribe to my delicious feed to keep up-to-date with my bookmarks.

Publishing your delicious bookmarks to other channels

By saving links to delicious I've passively shared them with anyone who knows about my delicious account. But I can also take a more pro-active approach. I can re-publish the feed in other places. For instance on my own site I created a page for My Social Media Profiles in which I list the services I use most and why. When appropriate I also pull in the related feed. Thus the description for delicious also includes my 5 most recent bookmarks.

I've also set up Facebook to pull the delicious feed into my wall. I find this very helpful as I don't have the time to update Facebook very often. This way information is added whenever I save a bookmark, and I don't even have to think about it.

At first I wasn't sure if this was a good idea, would people on Facebook want this? But so far the feedback has been positive. Friends in the design field have thanked me for sharing useful links and after I saved a dessert recipe my mom left a comment wondering if any cake was left.

Now you are probably thinking that there are some bookmarks you save, that you just don't want to share with the rest of the world. There's no need to worry about that. Every time you save a link to delicious you have the option to mark it as private. These bookmarks will only be visible to you.

Promoting Welcome to Social Media on Facebook via delicious

As you'll recall, I started writing this post because I had saved the Welcome to Social Media chapters to delicious. Thus those links were pushed out through my RSS feed to my own site, to my delicious friends, to Friendfeed and to Facebook. While I only wrote one of the chapters myself, I am part of the project team and thus want to spread the good word about the eBook. By sharing the links to the eBook chapters—as part of the usual stream of links I share throughout the week—I've let my Facebook friends know that these pages are worth reading. Naturally many Cleveland Social Media Club members have also announced the site on Facebook, so I'm not the only one. But by bookmarking the chapters on delicious I was able to reinforce our message by sending page specific links to Facebook. As a result of our combined efforts, 12.6% of the traffic (this week) on the Welcome to Social Media site has come from Facebook.

Conclusion

Delicious is a great tool for bookmarking, but if you've not used it to do more, give it a try. Whether you want to see which blog entries are most popular among delicious users or want to share links on Facebook, delicious offers numerous possibilities to aid you in your social media and marketing endeavors.

Delicious Resources

• delicious
• Things we can learn from del.icio.us—for use in our marketing endeavors
• Social Survey: Del.icio.us

Social Bookmarking in Plain English

Topics: Social Media Blog

Tags: Delicious, Facebook, marketing, monitoring