Tuesday, October 16, 2007 SMX Social Media, NYC
3:00pm-4:20pm
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
We just had 20 minutes for a break, with cookies, which I was too busy to eat. I had mentioned to Danny that the poor quality of the chairs we're sitting on was a new topic at his social media site, "Sphinn". He checked it out and then told the audience he apologizes. SMX is still new. They'll be making improvements as they get feedback like this.
He introduces Guillaume.
He speaks to us in French and Deb Mastelar and I are having hot flashes. She takes his picture. Funny stuff. He discusses an example of a site they did that made top SM sites in 24 hours. It was about sea creatures. They were able to reuse some of the hype and get several stories from it. This translates into being bookmarked. They have a lot of friends who help them promote sites on different sites.
Social bookmarking allows you to organize inside social search sites. Not a lot of link juice because most have "nofollow" links. However, sites that don't have "nofollow" will pick up the site that you submit. Tagging is popular on these sites. Sorta like keywords. Help with organizing and cateories for your sites. Benefits include better search engine rank, natural linking, traffic, but keep in mind all the efforts not as strong as Digg. Increase brand awareness. Influence traditional media. Creates a presence in online social communities. Helps build links from alternative sources.
How to tag. Every time you enter a site, take an hour or so to see how people are using tags. Are they spamming? What are the popular tags? When in doubt, pick the one that's most relevant. You can co-ordinate your efforts and establish a set of standards on how to tag resources you want to share with others. You can coach them. Ask them to choose certain tags. It's organizing the content - that's the ultimate goal. Manual tagging is anchor links, hyperlinks, keywords. Create your own set of tags to represent your content. Tags work best with sites with images and videos. Top SM sites feature tagging. Automatic tagging is more "blackhat". Automatically extract tags from content. Incorporate other people's tags in the automatic process. Does not benefit creativity. It's more a "usability thing". It should improve the user experience. There are problems, such as poor choices. If we abuse the tagging system, creates problems in the long term.
Technorati - search engine for blogs that uses tag system. Popular blogs ranked by number of unique links. Set up a blog for clients, write blog posts with high profile tags and claim it through Technorati. High amount of pings signals popular site. Use Digg, Reddit, Propeller, etc. If you have a new blog, it needs really good content to do well here. Field is diluted now.
Flicker - popular for photo sharing, use tags for photos. Google didn't put nofollow on comments in Flicker. Select the right tags. Use the photostream on your blog. Participate in comments on popular pictures there. Encourage users to link and comment on photos. Add links to profiles. Let friends share pictures.
Youtube - Mashups work well here. Content is more important than tags. Use Digg to promote. Share your submitted video with friends. Use your blog to promote your video.
Facebook - Create profiles, use it for corporate profiles, brainstorm on widgets and get application unique to your industry. Offer a good reason to join a group. Add incentive to join there. Moderating these groups is needed. You can use it attract people to your company.
Next up is Michael.
"Del.ico.us is not the government". Everyone laughs. It allows you to share your bookmarks with people. You enter a title. Tags are basically a label or a folder. No limits on them. This is for work, or travel or whatever. You can see how many people have saved your page. You can add notes when you save a bookmark. You can see how they inerpret your page. These are clues on what is important. What tags did they use? Tag clouds show importance, with bold words being more popular. Tracks the first person who bookmarked it. They may be an important person or leader in the field. You want to watch this. There are friend networks. You can add people there. You can subscribe to certain tags. You can get all the stories in that topic. People can send you links, but this is not effective unless someone is logged in. The homepage changes a lot. You get a bit of a preview. You can see what's popular or not and see the tags assigned to it. The homepage shows active tags on the right side. This is how to find popular tags.
Digg is young, male, tech savvy audience. Del.ico.us is everybody. You don't have to be tech related there. You can see how many people have saved your post. If you do a search on Del.ico.us, it will give back things you bookmarked first. Next, other things people bookmarked. High number shown first. You can see a list of all the tags people used. Sometimes words come up you may not have thought of. You can use plural. You can use "+" to combine words.
When you submit, enter the url, title and description. You can save just for you. It will show all the tags you've ever used for everything. IF you want to send in someone in your network, you'll see the tags they use. Tag clouds show popular tags and equals more bookmarks. See if you can apply popular tags to your piece. Look for leaders in your subject and add them to your network.
How to expand exposure. Taylor your content to tags. Make it easy to add to Del.ico.us. Suggest anchor text.The popular page updates every 4 hours. Time your submit to when you can get in there.Don't create many sock puppet accounts or you may get discounted. Your friends can help influence the suggested tags.
Neil is next.
He'll talk about Stumbleupon. Why should you care? He shows the homepage of it. There's over 3 million users. Over 12,000 visitors in 1 day. Traffic keeps coming. Great for branding. Traffic lasts for months. More males, less females. Older people - age 45 and up. They have credit cards!
Install the toolbar. You click on the Stumble button. There's an "I like" or "I don't like" thumbs up or down icon. More thumbs up, more traffic from members. You can send stories to people. Create an account.
Step 2 is to Add Friends. He added 200, and if they don't respond, drop and add more. Find content on your site and submit it using the submission page. Add a title. Can use keywords for this. Don't stuff with keywords. For review, put something like "A great resource for...." Pick topics. Add tags. Be relevant. It asks if adult site. Use the send-to feature and send a message to them. Your friends can vote. This brings in fast traffic.
