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Why your business may benefit from social bookmarking
By Jamie | August 8, 2007
Do you and your co-workers often exchange website links via email or MSN, or maybe you don’t share any of your work related websites? Social Bookmarking could give your business a valuable resource that all members of staff can contribute and use.
Before I explain how you could use a Social Bookmarking within you business, here are the excellent guys from Common Craft to explain a little more in a short 3 minute video…
Credit to Ewan for this one
Social Bookmarking and your business
Okay, now you understand the concept, here are some ideas on how you could use social bookmarks (delicious in particular) within your business…
Knowledge Base - Using a Social Bookmarking within your business is almost like creating a knowledge base system. Maybe someone in your company is excellent at finding reference material for legal cases, free Office templates or good restaurants to take your clients to. Harvest that knowledge using Social Bookmarks.
Website Content - Place your latest bookmarks on your website as a widget or integrate them as daily links posts using delicious to post them or use Feedburner to integrate them into your RSS feed. If you don’t update your website or blog on a regular basis, this may help to keep the site fresh.
Be a good middleman - Find out if your clients or suppliers have a social bookmarking account. That way you can send website links that might be useful to their field of business. Think of it as a similar idea to recommending suppliers to clients and friends.
Research - Maybe you’re needing a new supplier for office stationary. Ask your staff to tag any potential suppliers with “stationary supplier”, after you have harvest a number of sites you only need to click on the tag to retrieve them all.
Alternative to Google - As Social Bookmarks are driven by people not machines, typically the quality of search results is often better.
Internet Traffic - Bookmark your popular blog posts or company website, someone else may find it useful and bookmark it too.
Private and Public - You can choose whether bookmarks are available to the public, your friends or just within the company. That way any ideas, clients and suppliers are kept within your business if you so wish.
Backup - Even if you work on your own or don’t want to share your bookmarks with co-workers, how often do you backup your bookmarks. With Social Bookmarking your website links are accessible from any machine and under any user profile.
Some excellent resources
Absolutely Del.icio.us Tools Collection - Every possible tool you could ever want for Delicious.
30 Largest Social Bookmarking Sites - For business bookmarking I would stick with delicious, but you may want to look at others.
MySQLicious - Now many businesses, especially large enterprises are concern about out sourcing groupware solutions to third parties, preferring to keep everything in house. MySQLicious allows you to mirror your delicious account in a MySQL database; allowing your company control over its valuable resources.
Visualizing delicious - Visual ways to represent your delicious bookmarks.
del.icio.us A-to-Z by Functions : All 150+ hacks - More delicious resources.
Top 10 Ways to Use del.icio.us - This post talks more about how to use delicious, rather than what you can use it for.
http://del.icio.us/help/ie/extension - Internet Explorer delicious tool, although you should be using Firefox.
Add me
If you enjoyed this post why not add the Terinea weblog to your delicious account, click here, thanks.
Jamie
Topics: Hot Posts!, Marketing & Social Media, Web development & eCommerce |
Article Tags>> business ideas | delicious | social bookmarking | video
August 10th, 2007 at 5:04 pm
Hi Jamie, this is a good post, however I have a question - I often got labeled as “spam” when bookmarking my own sites on places like digg.com or newsvine.com
I sent maybe 2-3 links per week and I don’t have any spam pages or websites.
Any idea why social bookmarking site users might respond so aggresively?
Thanks,
Mike
August 15th, 2007 at 11:42 am
Michael - Sometimes people simply don’t like the look of your website or feel its trying to sell something. I would never link directly back out root domain, http://www.terinea.co.uk.
Jamie