Use Delicious Bookmarks for Social Media Marketing

Sep 10, 2008

Delicious bookmarks are an easy and effective way to promote your business. They’re a great example of a Web 2.0 social media tool that can be used to share valuable information and insight, while at the same time establishing yourself as a resource in your field and building your brand.

In our Twitter seminar in Seattle last night, Web 2.0 Media Group colleague Wayne Bishop and I talked about identifying tools that you can learn to use quickly, and that bring a good return on your investment of time and effort. Many social media tools are free or low cost, so obviously it’s the time and engergy required to get up to speed and put them to use that you have to weigh when deciding which ones to use.

We also stressed the importance of understanding the audience you want to reach before jumping on any Web 2.0 technology bandwagon. If your ideal customers don’t use Twitter, then it may not work for you as a marketing tool. But if the articles, blogs or reviews your ideal customers read online are written by Twitter users, Twitter may well be a good place to spend some time – at least to see what those influential writers are talking about.

Delicious is an example of a Web 2.0 technology that has value for you as you use it, and it has additional value for those you share it with. Setting up an account is fairly simple. http://delicious.com/ Send me a comment below if you need help.

Be sure to use an effective username, like your name as one word in lower case, or the name of your business.

Here are two accounts I’m using. Wayne Bishop and I share access to the second account, so we can both put bookmarks there, and we use these bookmarks for the seminars we offer:
http://delicious.com/mcbuzz

http://delicious.com/web20mediagroup

You can connect one account to another by adding a user to your Network. I have added web20mediagroup to the mcbuzz Network so that anytime I save a bookmark to the mcbuzz account, I can send it to the web20mediagroup account, as well.

Anyone can visit your bookmarks online unless you mark them as “Do not share”. To share your bookmarks, just send someone a link for your account like the links above. And, you can do all sorts of other cool stuff with your bookmarks, or a particular subset of your bookmarks. You create subsets of your bookmarks by assigning tags to them.

One example: put your Delicious bookmarks into a sidebar on your blog or website. In WordPress, this is really easy to do using a sidebar widget. To see how to use WordPress widgets, check out these Business Blogging 101 tutorials:

How to Use a Text Widget to Customize a WordPress Sidebar

How to Add Flickr Photo Widget to a WordPress Theme Sidebar

There is a WordPress widget for Delicious that you can use to put bookmarks into a sidebar just like you see here on the Web 2.0 Media Group website (in the right sidebar – scroll down a bit to see them).

Since you are probably already creating bookmarks for yourself, why not put them on Delicious where you can share them with others and show people the kind of reading you are doing and what you think is important. And when you want to bookmark that Shopping Channel Jewelry Specials page, just be sure to click the “Do not share” box!