Consumers are sharing best-of-Web content with bookmarking and tagging sites like Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. Flickr, YouTube and Technorati tap into “tagging” to categorize material, so people interested in topics can locate community finds. This session is a marketer’s guide to using bookmarking and tagging effectively.
Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land
Speakers: Guillaume Bouchard, CEO, NVI
Michael Gray, President, Atlas Web Service
Neil Patel, CTO, Advantage Consulting Services
Danny introduces Guillaume Bouchard the CEO of NVI Solutions who is the first speaker of this session.
About Social bookmarking, Guillaume says it is when Internet users can store, organize, search and share bookmarks. Thanks to “nofollow” links, there is lesser less link juice. Popular social bookmarking sites are Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon and Furl.
On the other hand, bookmarking sites also use tags. This is a collaborative practice through which you can identify content in a certain way. These help in:
- Indexing your site better on search engines.
- Receiving a high number of organic incoming links.
- Creates a strong presence within social communities.
- Promotes brand awareness.
- boosts traffic from alternate sources.
- impacts traditional media.
How To tag Effectively
- Find out how people are tagging the sites you want to remember later.
- If you are clueless and doubtful, choose the tag that is most popular and relevant in the tag clouds.
- Avoid separating tags with commas.
- Set a list of standards by which you want to exchange with others.
Manual Tagging
- It should have been online for more than 10 years(hyperlinks, anchor text, keywords).
- Design your own set of tags to represent your content.
- Incorporate images, boost high participation rates by letting users personalize and make. their own tags that they associate to the given image.
- These should also be submitted to del.icio.us, stumble, and flickr.
Automatic Tagging
- Automatically, through an algorithm it extracts tags from the content
- This can incorporate different user’s users tags
- This does not grow or expand due to human creativity.
- This is all about the user experience.
- A great example is FaceBook.
- However, automatic tagging is considered more “blackhat”.
Abuse & Content Degradation
- Content visibility is often created through the intentional misuse of tags
- As social bookmarking and tagging sites become more mainstream, the added incentive for manipulation will result in decreasingly reliable content unless their algorithms get a lot smarter
- Leading social marketing sites use tagging
Technorati
- A search engine for blogs that works on a tag based system. Popular blogs get ranked on the basis of unique links.
- Start a blog for your client, write several blog posts with high -profile tas, and claim it through Technorati
- If you receive a high amount of pings in a short period of time, it means you will feature in the popular section of the site for searches, blogs, videos, movies and news.
Flickr
- Submit photos that make sense to the industry that you are trying to reach.
- Select the correct tags from the list of popular tags
- If you want your images to appear in Technorati, tag them appropriately and make them public.
- Use the photostream on your blog
- Make other users link and comment on your images with the same tags that you initially selected.
- Make friends and share pictures.
YouTube
- Mashups area hit here.
- In YouTube content has more importance than the tags used.
- Use Digg, StumbleUpon and other social marketing sites to promote your video.
- Ask friends to comment on your videos.
- Pass on your video to friends.
- Make attractive and interesting corporate profiles.
- Brainstorm on widgets and use the application that is exclusive to your industry.
- Offer a good enough reason to join your community.
- These groups needs a moderator.
- Invite people in your company.
Next up was Michael Gray, President of Atlas Web Service who gave the audience a comprehensive tour of del.icio.us. Michael compared tags to old-fashioned Internet Explorer and Mozilla FireFox bookmarking albeit with more flexibility and community features. A really great thing of del.icio.us is its feature that lets it subscribe to tags. Michael says tags are like labels, but one must keep a check of the commas. Different groups of people will have a different perspective of your pages, giving your pages more “tags”.
Obviously, you want to be in the ‘popular’ page. As this can bring in as much traffic as Digg. The benefit of del.icio.us is that it has a wider demographic reach and has less to do with techie things. Like Digg, you too can do a ‘shoutout’ in del.icio.us, this is not as powerful but is pretty effective. del.icio.us does not apply the ‘noFollow’ tag, so you wouldn’t be receiving any link love. However, there will be incoming traffic. A word of caution : Separate words should have a ‘+’ as tag delimiter and not space.
How to Expand Your Exposure
Find the type of posts that people are bookmarking for your subject. Tailor-design your content to fit popular tags. Your page should integrate bookmarking widgets and buttons, good titles, careful timing and advised tagging. Remember that del.icio.us updates its popular page every 4 hours. Time your bookmarking efforts in such a way that you can take advantage of update timeframes. Make your friends influence the suggested tags. Lastly, do not create multiple sock puppet accounts, they will get discontinued.
Last speaker of the session is Neil Patel, the CTO of Advantage Consulting Services who is here to discuss StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon has over 3 million users and brings in over 12,000 visitors per day. And the best part? The traffic lasts long. This is great for branding. The demographic of users show more men and lesser females. However, users are aged 45 and above. Meaning, they have more money to spend.
First, you got to install the toolbar in order to use it. There is a feature of an “I like” or “I don’t like” thumbs up or down icon. The more thumbs up you get, the higher the incoming traffic.
Second,Create an account, make friends and send stories to them. At StumbleUpon, titles don’t carry much weightage as here the pages are being served. However, keywords are required for StumbleUpon. Review carries equal importance as topic or tags. Sending stories to your friens is not considered spamming as it is a StumbleUpon service.
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