SOCIAL BOOKMARK(ET)ING
By Mansi Trivedi, Communications Strategist
www.mansitrivedi.com | manasi.trivedi@gmail.com

Social Bookmarking is a tool that enables one to
save and share bookmarks but with the
emergence of new platforms and modifications
to the old, it can be used as an effective tactic
for marketing. Often times, brands create great
micro-sites worth a million views but get only a
thousand. Some sites, find their way back into
storage when the hits go low. Social
Bookmarking can help revamp these sites, bring
them back to life and tell their stories all over
again. While the websites help create the
stories, social bookmarking sites can help tell
the stories well and make sure everyoneʼs
listening.

TS
EN What is Social Bookmarking?
T
ON
C
How has it evolved?
Who uses it and why?
What kind of content gets most circulated?
How can marketers leverage this tool?
How can marketers measure success?
Whatʼs next?

What does ‘Social bookmarking’ mean?
Social Bookmarking is a way to share, store and organize your links and webpages
online. While bookmarking might help you save your links, ‘social’ bookmarking adds a
dialogue dimension to it. Social bookmarking tools and sites help you discover and
share interesting finds online. In 2003, del.icio.us pioneered ‘tagging’ and became the
widely used social bookmarking site. Now, more than 150 social bookmarking sites
dab for our attention, while Digg, Delicious, Stumbleupon and Reddit prove to be the
most popular because they are easy to use, navigate and tag.

We all started with collecting our favorite news on our Firefox bookmarks, but as the list grew, going back to
the shared suitcase became difficult and inconvenient. In 1996, a few tools emerged that enabled users to
save links online. In 2003, Delicious was found and changed the way we perceived ʻbookmarkingʼ. Recently,
tools like Tumblr, twitter and facebook integrated the function of sharing links, news items into personal
profiles and blogs.
1.0
Social
2.0
bookmarking
Clip2
Quiver
HotLinks
Backflip
itLists

Understanding the bookmarkers
THE LIBRARIAN:
THE SPECIALIST: THE OPTIMIZER:
She is a knitter, interested in fashion and She has very organized tags and does not
He can give lessons on hacking 101. He
design. She harps on creativity and is use more than two social bookmarking
optimizes the social networks he uses by
always looking for inspiration from her sites to store most of her information. She
applying tricks and traits to the headlines,
network. She is primarily a hunter of uses the links/data she shares for a
descriptions or tags of the links. He
information related to knitting and fashion. specific project she’s working on. She is
might not have relevant things to share
She filters through her links and posts mostly a gatherer of resources but seldom
but his bookmarks will receive the
them back on her network only if they are a pass-it-on-er. She mainly uses delicious,
highest hits because of the
worth sharing. She uses Tumblr, stumbleupon, reddit. Her twitter account is
words/phrases he uses. He mainly uses
Weheartit and Delicious. invitation only.
digg.
THE SELF- THE IMMIGRANT: THE DISTRIBUTOR
PROMOTER:
Attracted to all things pop-culture, he uses
He is popular in the bloggerville and is an A mom of three, she just overheard her
tumblr, twitter, facebook, myspace, digg,
expert voice in this industry. He stores most friend talking about delicious and reddit, and
weheartit and stumbleupon to always be
of his links and keeps his bookmark suitcase she decided to join the bandwagon. She is a
ahead of pop news and know the latest on
fairly private.He constantly shares links to his new entrant in the world of social media,
youtube. He’s a digital native, grown up with
blogs on his account on twitter and linkedin but uses these sites and facebook to share
internet, a content creator on the web and
where he constantly updates links to his blogs latest news from around the world. She
is the first one to share everything online.
and waits for them to be retweeted. He uses likes the tool because it is a great upgrade
He appreciates links that will help his image
stumbleupon and reddit, discards digg for the from email forwards and ‘have you heards’.
in his virtual/social circle and breeds on
casual users. He follows very selected few on She also maintains her private blog to
borrowed intelligence.
twitter but a lot follow him. update her friends on her life.

Combining the old
and new Social
Bookmarking
platforms present
an opportunity for
brands to invoke
organic
conversation
around your
product.

What gets dugg, stumbled upon, approved
to be delicious, read it, tumblred, twittered
and faved a few thousand times?

Delicious users mostly use the tool
to bookmark technology related
stories, environment news and
personal subjects. When you
notice the most number of tags,
theyʼll range from Adobe tips to
free software downloads, from
politics to green solutions.
Stumble Upon is used as a tool
for networking and messaging or
sharing links with friends. Most
stories distributed here vary
based on personal interests.

Reddit is mainly used for sharing
news, personal finds and strange
happenings.
Digg is mainly used by a
younger, geeky user base who
like to share links based on
current affairs.

How to
leverage
various social
bookmarking
sites to help
generate
social
currency for
your content -

Entertain and invoke action: Make content thatʼs
capable of spurring strong emotions, mostly
good.

Pepsi ʻleakedʼ its formula
for its new logo which
involved an articulated
step by step process of
what each element
means and the purpose of
its placing. The logo
formula was immediately
picked up by influencers,
experts and fans.

Burger King went viral with the news of offering free
Whopper to those who would sacrifice 10 fair “weather
web” friendships on facebook. The news fired across
the web and within a few weeks of the announcement
10,000 friendships had been sacrificed.

Break a story: Look at it as a free PR tool. Make
your content bookmark worthy.

If you canʼt get people to
visit your website, visit
theirs. Skittles replaced their
entire homepage with its
twitter stream. This
uncommon approach of
letting real testimonials
about your brand become
your mainstream voice took
thousands by surprise.
These thousands then
faved the idea and passed it
onto others.

Attract: Tell your story in your headline.

In an ad, Dominoʼs CEO
David Brandon tossed a
cease-and-desist letter
from the Subway
Franchisee Advertising
Fund Trust into the pizza
oven. The ad immediately
went viral which directed
people to visit the
Dominoʼs website where
people could bake their
own letters.

Enable Narcissism: Make content that will help
the bookmarkers look good.

A new way of playing with online content emerged when Mini released
its “augmented reality” ad. The car company created a print ad which,
when viewed through a web cam produced a virtual 3D model of their
MINI Cabrio convertible on screen. In March, GE released the Youtube
video of its Smart Grid Hologram ad which traveled across the web.
Immediately, links started being reblogged and retweeted onlinw.

Bloggers and Tech geeks strive to be the first ones to break “Apple”
news with relation to rumors or facts about new products or
applications. Apple has generated and recognized its distinguished fan
base who have proved to be an army of bookmarkers whenever thereʼs
an announcement about the brand and its products.

Be the Authority: Give the final verdict and let
them follow you.

When the domestic Auto
industry was slumping in sales,
Ford decided to shake things up,
recharge its image and help
clarify the misconceptions. Scott
Monty, the head of Social Media
at Ford, started twittering,
conversing and answering any
questions people might have.
This, along with some other
efforts, helped Ford become a
great example of a brand that
used social media to solve its
image issues. Now, Scott shares
news about Ford and watches
as the links get shared and
retweeted along the way.

After all thatʼs
said and done,
measure the
effectiveness
of your efforts -

It is very important to measure the efforts that were fed into
the social bookmarking tribes, to scale a brandʼs viral
success. These are some of the sites that help you monitor,
measure and track mentions of your brand, news link or
campaign online:

The communications industry is changing,
the advertising budgets are sizing down and
everyone is questioning the traditional ways
of sending a message. Everybody is talking
about the power of twitter and facebook. But
today, as the need for higher visibility for
brands rises, so does the need to recruit
various channels and integrate them into one
big circuit, which allows you to tell your
stories and place your bets back into the idea
of organic outreach. While Social
bookmarketing can not be implemented as a
stand alone social media effort, it can help
augment the current strategies by playing by
the simple rules of Chinese whisper.

I hope that you enjoyed this deck as much as I did working on it. If you wish to
talk about it more or have any questions, contact me at:
manasi.trivedi@gmail.com or DM me on twitter: www.twitter.com/media_reveries.
Hope to have a discussion with you soon.
Thank You.
References:
http://delicious.com/mansi.trivedi/socialbookmarking