Social Marketing Strategies from Social Marketing Expert Peter Lenkefi

Social bookmarking is a relatively new means for web users to store, share and search Internet bookmarks. One user stores a bookmark and another user with similar taste can view the links by topic, category, etc.

These users may then take the bookmarks saved by others and add them to their own collection. Users can also vote for the best bookmarks submitted to create a unbiased ranking system.

Who Does It?

Anyone can participate in social bookmarking. It is about to become a worldwide phenomenon both for Web sites offering Social Bookmarking and for web users.

How Does it Work?

It opens ways of organising and categorising information. Common web users assign tags resulting in an “amateur” or informal method of classifying information.

Because social bookmarking indicates who created bookmarks and provides access to that person’s other bookmarked resources, users can easily make social connections with other individuals interested in just about any topic.

So What’s the Big Deal?

This technique of bookmarking allows like-minded people to find one another and create new communities while the collection of info is continually changing because of the number of people involved in the bookmarking process.

Social bookmarking helps users take advantage of the interests and opinions of other users to find information related to the topic they are researching

Are There any Downsides?

Yes. Mainly because bookmarking is done by normal web users or amateurs, it can lead to inconsistent or otherwise poor use of bookmarks. This results in some info not being associated with the original bookmaker and consequently lost.

A common example given is, if a user saves a bookmark for a site with information about greyhounds but only tags the site with the term “greyhound” and not also with “dogs” or perhaps “dog racing,” that resource might never be found by someone looking for information about breeds of dogs.

What Does the Future Hold?

The future looks bright. Social bookmarking is not a particularly complex idea and its idea is being adopted worldwide and is being extended to other types of resources, such as multimedia files and e-mail.

It is also a great tool to announce your content to the world and get a substantial amount of traffic to your sites.

Implications for Teaching and Learning?

Social bookmarking has the potential to change how we store and find information. It may become less important to know and remember where information was found and more important to know how to retrieve it.

Social bookmarking simplifies the distribution of reference lists, bibliographies, papers, and other resources between users.

Larger social bookmarking services:

DIGG

Reddit

StumbleUpon

ShoutWire

NewsVine

Marktd

Plime

SpicyPages

PlugIM