Uba Kontrovasie

Digging Bookmarks

Soo every other brand or website is dying to be on-trend in regards to “social media” and “web2”. This has sparked a number of webmasters and developers to add “add this” or “tell a friend” buttons to their blogs or websites.

It’s a good move, and a quick win that I would certainly recommend, however, brand owners fail to realise that adding the little social bookmarking widget to their webpages only equates to half a job being done.

Social media evangelists and Brand Marketers should use social bookmarking websites to build social relations, I will illustrate how to do this with an example:

If I owned say…a shoe website and I added a social bookmarking widget to it, I would be sure to have people “digging” some of my pages. Aside from a few Digg’s and traffic from Digg itself I wouldn’t receive any other significant gains as result of adding the widget.

So…how do would I utilise Digg more effectively?

Well if my own website is all about shoes and fashion, I would scour the web for good content on these very topics and submit them to my very own branded Digg account.

This activity serves two purposes it would allow me, the brand owner to find out more about my trade and industry and it would also make my brands presence on Digg legitimate.

With this in mind I would be able to build relationships and communicate with other people who have shared interests. The good thing about using this approach to social bookmarking is that it is completely transparent and although my account would be branded, people would still engage with me as I have been harvesting information which is of a shared interest.

It’s not rocket science really, it’s merely using a platform for its intended purpose, however, the early days of “social media optimisation” saw a rise in spammer’s trying to game the system with alias accounts etc.

Like other types social engagement activity, if it’s done the right way and by this we mean the ethical way, it will work!

What’s the key ingredient? Just a little bit of graft

Tags: bookmarks, digg, social bookmarking