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What is Social Bookmarking and How Can You Use It To Improve Your Business Networking?

Social bookmarking is one of the flagships of Web 2.0. The basic concept behind social bookmarking is that when thousands of people get together, bookmark their favorite pages, and apply descriptive tags to each page that they bookmark, certain websites will rise to the top as being more popular. The result of this is that surfers will be able to see what websites are currently popular among users.

The idea of social bookmarking seems to have been originated by Del.icio.us back in 2003. Just by visiting the front page of Del.icio.us you can see the social bookmarking in practice. On the right hand side of the page there is a column labeled 'Popular'. These are websites that currently are receiving a lot of attention from users under specific keywords and phrases. These websites are listed under common 'tags' that users have given.

Wikipedia gives a fairly good explanation of social bookmarking. You can find that explanation at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking. You can also goto Del.icio.us and try out the service which is a great way to learn about social bookmarking

Digging for the News

Del.icio.us is not the only Web 2.0 flagship that relies on the power of the collective people. Arguably one of the most successful Web 2.0 enterprises is Digg. Digg is a news website which presents headlines from across the Internet. Unlike practically every other news website to date, however, Digg does not rely on editors to determine which news stories are worthy of their front page and which news stories they should ignore. Rather, Digg relies on the input of their users.

The system behind Digg is simple. Registered users can navigate their way to "Digg for Stories". Here everyone can see all of the stories submitted to Digg. If a user likes one of the stories, they simply clïck on the "Digg It" link. If they do not like the story they can either ignore the story or report it as being lame, a duplicate story, or outright sp@m. If a story receives enough Diggs in a fast enough amount of time, it gets promoted to the front page.

The system seems to work fairly well. Digg has been smart enough to put into place anti-cheating devices which do a fairly good job of catching manipulators of their system. And if someone does break through these barriers, Digg users (often referred to as Diggnation) are usually pretty quick to point out the offending users.

Why Should I Care?

This is all fine and interesting, but you might be wondering why you should spend your precious time reading more of this article. The answer is simple: websites like Digg and Del.icio.us represent the opportunïty to get a lot of new traffïc as well as quality links to your website.

Digg and Del.icio.us offer the absolute best type of web traffïc: viral traffïc. Business owners know that the most reliable prospects are the prospects that come from the referral of someone else, and Digg and Del.icio.us offer just that. In order to get seen on a large scale from any of these websites that rely on a community of users, your content must be good enough to meet the approval of enough people to warrant the elevation of your site to the front page. This, in effect, is like one great recommendation for your website.

So how much traffïc are we talking about? Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net noted that when a post of his reached the front page of Del.icio.us, he saw around 8,000 visitors that day from Del.icio.us alone. This does not take into account all the bloggers and website owners who discovered his site from Del.icio.us, posted a link to it on their site or in a forum, which would in turn generate more traffïc to his site.

Tech-Recipes, a relatively common website on the front page of Digg, wrote a great post on what the digg effect is like. The traffïc numbers they post are quite astounding. From being featured in Digg, they regularly see 5,000 – 10,000 visitors per day. This is not unusual either – websites that are featured in Digg are often subject to what has been dubbed the "Digg Effect". It is quite common, unfortunately, for a dug website to receive so much traffïc that it brings down the server.

Nöw both Del.icio.us and Digg users do not tend to be very active users. This has been pointed out by more than one person. Typically they do not clïck on ads, they do not comment on blogs, and they do not register for an account with you. But the name of the website marketing game is always going to be frëe exposure, and social bookmarking services like these are great ways to get a lot of frëe exposure for your website. In addition, these sites will often have secondary and tertiary effects which you may not be able to link back directly to your initial exposure on them.

The point of the article which I referenced above was not to state that Yahoo was washed up, but rather that Yahoo was on the cusp of a new Internet and a new förm of search. They recognized that Google would not be beat in the search market; however, this does not mean that they can not beat Google by creating a market more effective than search.

Social bookmarking is already becoming a very effective way for experienced web surfers to find the latest information on a particular subject. Do you want to see some of the latest videos to become popular? Just goto http://del.icio.us/tags/video and you can see what others are discovering and bookmarking as valuable. Want to find some rather obscure guide on Ruby on Rails? Lookup the common tags for Ruby on Rails and search through these resources.

Social bookmarking has the great ability to reach where search engines cannot: by using viral marketing and popular opinion, social bookmarking has the ability to discover what is important before any bot can spider the site and rank it among the thousands of sites available. Granted, social bookmarking will nevër replace search completely, but as it grows in popularity, web users are quickly discovering a whole new way to discover web pages that they would nevër discover otherwise.

So take the time today to examine Digg and Del.icio.us. Take a little more time to find new social websites like Digg and Del.icio.us (they are popping up all over the place) and learn what seems to make users on these sites clïck. Social technologies are here to stay, and they are only going to grow in popularity. Right nöw is a golden opportunïty for you to gain great exposure for your website if you simply learn how to use these services.