Social media is all the rage these days because these venues offer interactivity and the chance to share ideas: let’s face it; we like to know what other people are thinking and have been doing lately — and we often want to tell them what we’ve been up to as well.
This extends beyond “the real world” and on to the Internet — encompassing several sharing phenomenon known broadly as social bookmarking, which allows folks to show their friends the latest sites they’ve found online — but the applications go well past this.
Social bookmarking systems can be public, semi-or privately accessible, featuring tools that allow bookmarks to be viewed categorically, chronologically, by tags, or found through a search engine.
According to Wikipedia, “Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to organize, store, manage and search for bookmarks of resources online. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren’t shared, merely bookmarks that reference them.”
Wikipedia notes that users may add metadata descriptions to bookmarks as a means of better understanding the resource’s content, providing benefits for Internet marketers.
“Such descriptions may be free text comments, votes in favor of or against its quality, or tags that collectively or collaboratively become a folksonomy,” Wikipedia continues, adding that folksonomy — more commonly known as social tagging — “is the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content.”
It is this peer review process that provides value for such services; with the model providing intriguing options for prospective adult social review site owners, for example.
Social bookmarking systems can be public, semi-or privately accessible, featuring tools that allow bookmarks to be viewed categorically, chronologically, by tags, or found through a search engine.
Relational systems automatically group like-topic tags together, developing robust clusters of pointers to relevant and related materials, while feeds allow users to easily stay abreast of the latest updates.
Two social bookmarking services that suit online marketers are Digg and Delicious.
Strictly speaking, Digg (www.digg.com) is a social news service offering bookmark sharing functionality.
According to its website, “Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our community.”
As with many mainstream oriented services, adult users of Digg should be careful as to how they tread; as the company’s terms of service expressly prohibit not only obscene material, but “pornographic” content. If you are successfully promoting your adult offers via YouTube, for instance, then working with Digg should not be too problematic.
Delicious (www.delicious.com) allows its users to “save, stack and share the web.”
“Instantly save your favorite links, collect your discoveries in stacks, share what you find, and dig deeper into your favorite topics,” states the company’s website, which goes on to explain how a stack is a collection of links built around a common theme….
Creating a stack is as easy as clicking “create stack” on your profile page’s stack tab. Add at least three links with well-crafted descriptions and with well-targeted images, then choose the layout and set the link order. Finally, click “publish” to share your new stack.
The company notes that browsing through stacks is a great way to explore interesting topics and find the best online content, with Delicious collectors garnering followers that wait to see the latest material they uncover.
It also offers a bookmarklet for web browser toolbars that allows links and stacks to be instantly saved, making the system easy to use.
These sites are only two examples of the many social bookmarking services available. Adult operators should consider a traffic building plan that including as many as possible.