The Handshake of Social Media and World Cup 2010

As the world’s biggest sport event is coming in the next three days, its heat is spreading further and hotter than ever before. The world is going to stop for a month to watch out the game.

Sport connects people. And so do social media. With more than 40 million active Facebook users, 50 million daily tweets and millions of views on Youtube everyday, social media have been becoming more popular since the previous game in 2006. So this will be the first World Cup experiencing the explosive growth of social marketing. There’s buzz about the role the social media will play in the action off the field. The only question: What have you seen, here and there?

FIFA developed its own service

FIFA has plans to get in on the action with its own social networking service called TheClub on its official website. There are more than 1.6 million members attended so far, who connect to other fans around the world.

Social networking sites are ready

The marketing strategies of World Cup 2010 include the use of Facebook sites to connect fans on global and regional levels and Twitter accounts to provide updates on the preliminary news and action. It’s expected to drive a record amount of social media traffic as users descend on Twitter and Facebook to critique refereeing decisions, celebrate goals or simply taunt the opposition.

• Facebook has an app that ranks soccer passion based on number of “Likes” fans hit for their team, divided by the number of Internet users in that country. Moreover, football fans have already participated in Facebok fanpages and groups and got daily updates about this global "social" event in advance of the 32 team competition.
• Twitter has already commented that they expect this year’s World Cup to drive more online traffic than the U.S. presidential election and the Super Bowl. Very much like the Winter Olympics look for Twitter to be a tremendous source for 2010 World Cup breaking in the moment news, insight and reactions.

Brands are getting more social 

FIFA sponsors and partners have also evolved their strategies for building and sustaining online buzz around the tournament. Brands have multiple planned online touch points for the World Cup. They are also directly or indirectly participating in World Cup social media marketing related endeavors.

• Coca-Cola has launched an online contest called the ‘Longest Celebration’ competition , inspired by Roger Milla’s post-goal dance at Italia ’90, which allegedly inspired a new generation of dance moves. The contest simply encourages users around the world to upload their own creative goal celebrations to YouTube.

• Budweiser takes creativity to the next level with the “Bud House”- an online reality show featuring one fan from each of the 32 qualifying countries living in a house in Cape Town with contestants eliminated when their team is knocked out
• McDonalds launched its online World Cup Predictor, in the form of an online fanstasy tournament, asking fans to use their knowledge to predict which teams will win which games, round-by-round
• Sony Ericsson has launched the Twittercup which appears to be an online competition at its very simplest – the more tweets your nation receives, the further they go in the cup. Launched in December 2009, the Twittercup has already amassed 43,000 tweets
• Castrol is launching the ‘Castrol Index’ and Castrol Predictor apps this month – the first a system for rating players (measuring passes, tackles and moves) housed on www.fifa.com to find the team of the tournament, the second using past team and player performance data to calculate which nations have the best chance of success at South Africa 2010

The real question is what kind of impact are these campaigns going to have on helping brands get the online traction their multi-million dollar investment demands?

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Fahion 2.0 – Not Just a Fad!

Today, I will talk about the combination of fashion and social media, my two favourites. Let's start with the recent rising of fashion bloggers, who have ruled front rows in fashion weeks of high-class brands, which is not a surprise anymore. They are young, quirky and stylist, from a 13-year-old girl, Tavi Gevinson to the shoe-loving teenager, Jane Alridge and many other twenty-something online writers. With a combined audience of half a million readers and the power to make items sell out instantly with their recommendations, these bloggers were clearly people worthy of fashion’s attentions. So, the questions are: Where is this power actually coming from?And why in fashion and beauty industry?

• Power of Word-of Mouth

There is a fact that the fashion and beauty business has always enjoyed a certain word-of-mouth evangelism. When it comes to the promotion of these kinds of products to enhance people’s appearance, consumers listen and believe more in advice coming from friends or acquaintance that they can trust. Keeping that in mind, the fashion industry has tried different approaches to leverage the power of word-of-mouth product endorsement. 

Levi’s is a good case. This year, they launched a campaign named “Levi’s girl”, targetting the female fan base, to find a voice for their brand on Facebook community, following their successful “Levi’s guy” last year. That person should ideally already have a strong social media presence and be passionate about fashion and style. Videos of finalists will be shared and voted by Facebook community members. This campaign is just great as it helps the brand to engage with existing Facebook fans and attract new fans from contestants’ social networks. What’s more, it will create a huge word-of-mouth for Levi’s on social media.

• Consumer-Created Content

On the first generation of fashion brand websites, marketers have promoted and sold products directly. They did miss the word-of-mouth factor, which has been playing an important role in consumers’ mind for building their own “colour”, image and personality. Consumers want to be fashionable and beautiful in their very own way. Therefore, the absence of this important dimension to personalized selling was soon corrected with consumer-created content. Many brands, such as Nike, Longchamp, etc, allow their consumers to design and personalize the product themselves online through the interactivity of web 2.0. Inspirational online stores and social shopping trends are also blooming.

• Peer Recommendations

Blogs, social networks, discussion boards, and so on are containing consumer’s recommended brands and also their reviews and comments on different products. It opens a new era of peer recommendation on the internet. Many consumers started to take notice of these newfound opportunities, and developed a whole new category of must-visit web destinations. From the traditional “point of purchase” concept, marketers are now familiar with the new concept of “point of recommendation”. 

Nowadays, to catch up with the trend, powerful fashion bloggers have been cooperating with brands to “recommend” their products to readers. They have been attending fashion events frequently and even becoming brand designers. Jane Alridge, author of the fashion blog SeaOfShoes, who was invited to design a new shoe collection for the Urban Outfitters, is one of many examples for this.

To sum up, social media can dramatically increase return on investment and allow brands to generate a global following of loyal customers with relatively low investment. Marketers in fashion and beauty industry seeking to leverage these exciting new trends should pay attention to social media as they represent the best opportunities to take full advantage of the Internet for your brands. 

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Six Reasons of Using Google Adwords for Your Advertising Campaign

To compete, you need to be found. Then to be found, you need to say something. But to build sales lead, you need to connect to your targeted customers. So it's all about competition on the internet. And it is undeniable that search engine marketing helps marketers a lot to enhance the performance online. The topic seems outdated but should be reviewed frequently. Anyone who is interested in or curious about online marketing in general or search engine marketing in particulars should understand thoroughly how it works and benefits your organization. Here it comes with 6 reasons for choosing and using Google Adwords, the leading search engine advertiser, for your online campaign:

• Google Adwords can generate qualified sales lead

It is fundamental to any Google Adwords campaign to identify and select relevant and profitable keywords. Popular and obvious keyword may cost more, while keyword combinations or more specific keywords are better for the market niche. Therefore, smart key word selection can increase the qualified the sales lead according to 80/20 rule.

• Google Adwords can reach worldwide and reach targeted customers 

Google's AdWords match up advertisers with content that their target market peruses regularly. It can also reach markets which were previously hard and expensive to access.

• Businesses only pay Google when the ads were clicked

As a pay-per-click advertising form, businesses only pay when their ads work.

• Google Adwords is a very affordable form of advertising

With low entry fee and spending on performance, Google Adwords is very cost-effective in comparison with other traditional advertising channels

• Google Adwords offer opportunities to improve the search engine optimization (SEO). 

Generally, SEO can be defined as the activity of optimizing Web pages or whole sites in order to make them more search engine-friendly, thus getting higher positions in search results. Therefore, it helps to improve quality and popularity of the corporate website.

• Google Adwords is easily to monitor and control.

Google Adwords Service allows advertisers easily monitor the performance of their ads, provides detailed report on their spending and analyzes the effectiveness of the ad campaign.

So that's the point. Hope you enjoy it and welcome discussion!

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Corporate Blogging – DOs and DON'Ts

There is a truth that you can’t avoid, that is your story being cut by traditional corporate communications. The story is diluted with every single layer when going through the “traditional” routes of corporate communications, thus, often delivering a watered-down product. Blogging is different.

Many organizations are still finding their voice online and corporate blogging is one way to achieve this. It is not surprising that they are still making mistakes. The secret to success is accepting that a blog is not a traditional marketing tool. So basically, what are Dos and DON’Ts in corporate blogging?

DOs

• Identify the corporate blog’s primary objective. Internals or externals?
• Know your audience
• Create blogging policies. 
• Decide who should blog. CEO or employees or both?
• Use your company knowledge wisely by encouraging contributors within the company
• Embed thought leadership, connection with leaders, corporate culture, and branding
• Decide how to obtain feedbacks and handle them
• Engage readers and encourage them to contribute through comments and constructive criticism
• Make a mix of forums and blogs by allowing people continue the conversation in a more constructive forum.
• Trust bloggers and readers to go and find out for themselves the answers
• Provide time and long-term commitment to your blog
• Keep it short, fresh, consistent and professional. 
• Update regular content
• Be structured
• Monitor frequently
• Have fun and enjoy!

DON’Ts

• Say "We should have one but..." or “ We have no time to blog”
• Keep in mind that“build it and they will come” mentality. Because a blog will not magically generate traffic. 
• Act like faceless corporation. As people don’t like interacting with organizations, corporations or machines. People like talking to people. So throw the "corporate" out the window. 
• Make it a marketing blog. As people prefer to read something with personality rather than advertising posts. So marketers should think of yourself as an editor rather than an author
• Post all the robotic press releases and boring business jargon.
• Worry that their competition will read it and rip off their expertise and ideas
• Expect too much from your readers
• Give up!

Again, these are some guidelines, not rules. Make your blog unique, but do remember that it is likely to be a popular touch point for the people you want to reach, probably more so than other areas of your website. Use it to inform, educate, inspire and engage.

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Quit Facebook Day – To Leave or Not To Leave?

May 31st is the first officially unofficial Quit Facebook Day. To mark protest against issues such as privacy, data management, fake warnings and phising attacks, the day is when users plan to delete their accounts and leave Facebook altogether. It was formed by a teamed-up group of dissatisfied Facebook users in an effort to organize a mass, coordinated exodus from Facebook--and they're using social networks to do it.

However, quitting Facebook isn't easy. Facebook is engaging, enjoyable and addictive. It keeps people in contact with family and friends. Quitting Facebook is like quitting smoking. To many people, Facebook is the internet. 

Therefore, not many people have seemed to like the idea of quitting Facebook. Up to this moment, only 34506 have committed to delete their Facebook accounts (counts on quitfacebookday.com) Considering the fact that Facebook has somewhere in the range of 500 million users, 35,000 just doesn't seem substantial enough to make Mark Zuckerberg shed a tear. The lack of interest thus far is a telling indication of the average Facebooker's indifference to the ongoing privacy debate.

Currently, Facebook’s privacy policy has 50 different settings, 170 different options and contains almost 6,000 words, longer than the US Constitution! Although there is an evolution in privacy issue to protect users (check this LINK for more details), Facebook makes it difficult for the average user to understand or manage this.

So the simple rule is this: if you don’t want your personal information made public, don’t post it on the web. That’s especially true for sites where data sharing is an integral part of the system.

In the end, what's your decision? To leave or not to leave?

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The Essential Digital Marketing Books

"Digital Marketing asks the questions todays marketers must answer to meet tomorrows challenges. Digital consumers are decision-makers, no longer decision-takers. Successful marketing strategies will have to focus on helping them to optimize their decisions." —Dr. Ulrich Cartellieri, Member of the Board, Deutsche Bank AG Frankfurt.

Today, Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Podcasts are mentioned everywhere and will continue to be talked about. If you really want to learn about Digital Marketing, you're going to do heavy lifting, reading and self discovery.

Here are the Top 20 Digital Marketing Business Books (in alphabetical order) that you should a look on:

• The Cluetrain Manifesto - Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls & David Weinberger.
• Crush It! - Gary Vaynerchuk.
• Groundswell - Josh Bernoff & Charlene Li.
• Here Comes Everybody - Clay Shirky.
• Life After The 30-Second Spot - Joseph Jaffe.
• The Long Tail - Chris Anderson.
• Made To Stick - Chip & Dan Heath.
• The New Community Rules - Tamar Weinberg.
• The New Influencers - Paul Gillen.
• The New Rules of Marketing & PR - David Meerman Scott.
• Purple Cow - Seth Godin.
• Tribes - Seth Godin.
• Trust Agents - Chris Brogan & Julien Smith.
• Waiting For Your Cat To Bark - Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg.
• Web Analytics 2.0 - Avinash Kaushik.
• Web Analytics - An Hour A Day - Avinash Kaushik.
• What Would Google Do? Jeff Jarvis.
• The Whuffie Factor - Tara Hunt.
• Wikinomics - Don Tapscott.
• Word of Mouth Marketing - Andy Sernovitz.

I got some e-books of these titles, PM me if you are interested in.  So what's yours?

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Should Marketers Do Social Marketing in Vietnam?

As somebody may know, I’m a Vietnamese living in Singapore. So sharing my understanding about social media in Vietnam is something I enjoy to do. This article is writing based on reliable research and reports on Vietnam online consumption behavior and digital landscape, and certainly my personal insights and experience. 

“Social Media is like teen sex. Everyone wants to do it. Nobody knows how. When it's finally done there is surprise it's not better.” says Avinash Kaushik at Google. Coincidentally, this is quite matched to the situation in Vietnam, where social media is emerging and businesses are seeking opportunities online. To understand more, there are 5 main points to mention in the large picture of Vietnam social media landscape.

1. Who are online in Vietnam?

Vietnam internet population is very young with 76% from 15-34 and they spend a lot of time online and enjoy the increasing high-speed connection. It makes Vietnam the fastest growth in internet penetration, outweighing other neighbours like Thailand or Philippines. 50% of urban Vietnam is regularly online - even more in Hanoi. If you live in urban Vietnam and do not access the internet, you are fast becoming the minority.

2. What are they doing?

According to Cimigo's recent report of Vietnam NetCitizens , main online activities of Vietnam online users are:

• Gathering information. Reading news and using search sites are the most common activities online. Google is the most widely used website in Vietnam. Online newspapers are also in top-visited websites
• Online entertainment. Online music, movies and gaming are most popular. Zing, the integrated entertainment and networks website, shows the second largest penetration in Vietnam. 
• Online communications. Communications is a further key activity on the internet. The most frequent usage is chatting and emailing. SMS online and instant messaging are coming next.
• Blogging and social networks. Social network become familiar with Vietnam online users with the blogging trend. The need of interaction and networking increases significantly
• Online business. Although there is an increase in online business activities, Vietnam online commerce has not been highly developed yet. The payment system is still weak and the threat of illegal payment is quite high.

3. How’s the social media landscape?

As Vietnam has only had internet access since 1997, social media in Vietnam is relatively young; however, it has been growing rapidly for the past one decade. Some popular social media platforms includes:

• Social networks. Self-expression demand in Vietnam is very high. In the past, social networking in VN just means “blogging”. While the world was eyeing on bloggers.com and wordpress.com, in Vietnam, Yahoo!360 ruled with more than 2 million users. It was not a tool specifically designed for the Vietnam market, but the market took it anyway, with great passion and enthusiasm. Since it closed in July 2009, Facebook becomes the fastest growing market in Vietnam. Local social networks also grow significantly.
• 
• Photo-sharing sites. Most of popular photo sharing sites in Vietnam are forum based with online gallery. The community used to focus more on professional photographers but now it opens to everyone who is interested in photography. And Flickr is the largest and most popular photo-sharing community in Vietnam
• Video-sharing sites. There are two popular video-sharing sites in Vietnam, YouTube and Clip.vn. However YouTube shows more advantages with better speed,great navigational and usability, reasonable advertising and huge community, while Clip.vn has slow speed, too many banners, weak usability and can not expand community. Therefore, YouTube is leading in video-sharing in Vietnam with fast growing community
• Music sharing sites. Popular sites are Yeuamnhac.com, Nhacso.com, Zing MP3. However, majority of users just visit, listen and download music without community interaction
• Career network sites. These websites, such as Cyvee.com or Caravat.com, are for sharing resumes and discussing about career and recruitment trend.
• Integrated-service sites. These “all in one” websites,mostly locally designed, such as Zing.vn or Zume.vn, offer everything from blogs, news, videos, music to photos. 
• Forums. Forum seeding is still very effective in Vietnam. Popular forums are Webtretho.com, Otosaigon.com, TinhTe.com, Hihihehe.com, DDTH.com and GameVN.net. 

The recent disappear of some popular social networking sites such as Facebook due to government censorship has raised another issue in Vietnam social media situation. It pushed Facebook’s users in Vietnam looking for “black” tips to access to the site. Before that, the government mostly blocks pornographic and political websites, which are against the culture and the government. But this recent censorship on social network sites for invisible reasons is not widely supported by online users.

4. Why doing social marketing in Vietnam?

• Decreasing traditional media. It is undeniable that TV and Print still dominate in Vietnam but they are losing their attention and all decrease for a “new kid on the block”, online marketing, which is more effective and cost-saving in the current economy situation. The size of the online advertising market in 2009 is estimated at VND 278 billion VND (approx. USD 15.5 million)
• High penetration rate. Internet user in Vietnam is expanding with “miraculous” speed with 66% home penetration in 4 key cities in Vietnam.
• Targeted. Social media provide chance to reach the “right” target, especially young audience. 
• Easy to measure and tracking. With the provided tools and programs designed for social marketing, it is easier to measure the effectiveness.

5. How to apply into practice?

• Follow the users. Marketers should understand and use what they are using. Interacting with them on Facebook, Blog, RSS, Twitter, Flickr , YouTube , Newsletter and Forums reasonably and wisely should be considered
• Increase traffic by quality. In order to maximize your traffic, microsite is still ideal for short or seasonal campaign. However, in long terms, marketers should ignore “quantity” and go more for “quality”. A well-designed strategy from the beginning including SEO, SEM, E-mail marketing, E-PR still an effective way to drive traffic.
• Have an umbrella. Nobody remember tons of micro-sites everyday. Therefore, building and maintaining the corporate website together with your micro-site campaign is crucial. Having brand account on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, etc. is necessary.
• Measure, measure and measure. Marketers should use social marketing statistics, tools and program, such as Google Analytics, traffic tracking, site ranking, conversion rate, etc. to analyze and measure the effectiveness of their online marketing plan.
• Connect with offline activities. In Vietnam, social media is not everything. Lots of people are online, but also lots of people are still out there. Social media is just wings for tiger, it’s not replace everything

Overall, there are a lot of opportunities in Vietnam with 25 millions of online population. Young people become more and more familiar with social media. Many online emerging trends have been established in a fast pace. Vietnam online advertising spend continually reaches new highs. So the opportunity is here but the challenge is also here. The decisions are all in hand of marketers.

(Sources: Cimigo’s Vietnam NetCitizens report, Vietnam digital landcape by Mr. Hieu Nguyen)

 

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Does What Happens in Facebook Stay in Facebook? - How to Control?

Definitely unsure. Today, what happens in Vegas stays in Facebook and what happens in Facebook may stay…everywhere. So has society become less private or is it Facebook that's pushing people in that direction? Is privacy online just an illusion anyway? Do people no longer need to keep access to some of their personal information online limited just to trusted friends?

Nowadays, people probably are becoming more comfortable telling the world at large about more and different parts of their lives. But it doesn’t mean it's ok to take away peoples' choices and force them to make public some of their information all the time. Facebook became a huge success on that premise and ought to be able to continue to thrive without doing a 180-degree turn on privacy. 

More than millions, tens or hundreds of millions of people around the world have reason to limit visibility of their personal information from the web but still want to be able to share that information with trusted contacts. But privacy doesn't mean secrecy. Therefore, people need to know about privacy settings to monitor their social networking presence effectively.

Have a look at the answer of what really happens on Facebook in this video below before thinking of making some changes for your Facebook profile.

Facebook's continuous security problems make its users not happy. Among its 400 million users, many have been threatening to delete their account due to the security and privacy issues that keep surfacing. Most of the complaints are stemming from the older users, mostly aged over 35.

So how to control things, not to end it up? These are some Facebook’s basic privacy settings, which could help to avoid threats caused by the public to your personal life

• Grouping friends into lists (using “tags”) to apply specific privacy policies to them. 
• Remove yourself from Facebook search results. There are numerous reasons you may not want to be found by others on Facebook.
• Remove yourself from Google. If you want to be easy to find, making your search profile can be a great idea. However, many other people may feel unpleasant when everyone can “google” their name and comes out which every single aspects of their personal life on different social networking sites. 
• Make your contact information private. Frequently people we don’t know end up contacting us and we have no idea how they got our contact information. So it is better to public your contacts to people you want to share only.
• Avoid the infamous photo/video tag mistake. You let loose for a few hours one night (or day) and photos (or videos) of the moment are suddenly posted for all to view, not just your close friends who shared the moment with you and the result can be devastating. 
• Protect your albums. By setting specific privacy on them , you will ensure that the only people that can view your photos are the ones who you really want them to see.
• Prevent stories from showing up in your friends’ news feeds.  Sometimes it is not good to let all of your friends and business contacts hear that you just break up with your girlfriend or are in any new relationship
• Protect against published application stories. Frequently, a news feed item is immediately published to your profile when you add an application. But it is unsure that your professional contacts are interested in seeing “Nick just published to the world that he is having sex!” after your visit to a so-called “Have sex” application. 
• Avoid embarrassing wall posts. Just because you use Facebook for business doesn’t mean your friends do. That’s why once in a while a friend of yours will come post something embarrassing or not necessarily “work friendly” and it can end up having adverse effects. 
• Keep your friendships private. It’s often a good policy to turn off your friends’ visibility to others to avoid people make use of your friends’ profile for different purposes while some of your friends may not want to live public lives. 

All in all, the best way to prevent embarrassing items from showing up on Facebook in the future is to not make bad judgments in your personal life. We’re all human though and being completely paranoid about every choice you make is probably not the best way to live your life. Be aware of what privacy settings are available and be conscious of what your friends may be publishing about you.

In the worst situation, when your online presence is turning bad, there are some websites could provide solution to delete your existing social networking profiles and virtual friends such as Web 2.0 Suicide Machine or Seppukoo.com or DeleteYourAccount.com. However these sites are facing the social network giant Facebook’s strong protest. Whatever it happens, they still receive a lot of visitors and do many “deleting” actions each day. Hopefully everything goes well with your social networking experience, so you do not need to visit these sites. Good luck!

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Key Facts of Social Media across Asia and in China

One of the biggest stories in 2010 is going to be the exponential growth of social media in Asia, not only in terms of reach but also content created in varied Asian languages. Web users in China, Japan, and the rest of Asia comprise a massive online population, and no surprise; they're adopting and interacting in online social environments at incredible rates. While Facebook and Twitter might rule in the US and Europe, it’s a whole different game in Asia

The raising question is: “What is different about social media in Asia as compared to North america, Europe or Australia?" Are they the factors of “the scale of users”, “cultures and languages”, “monetization strategies” or “the localization”? Let’s find out!

The answer was significantly revealed in these below insightful presentations by Thomas Crampton, Asia-Pacific director of 360 Digital Influence for Ogilvy, and Mindy Zhang from China. There are also some takeaways extracted from their presentations for readers to remember and think of.

Social Media in Asia

Takeaways:

• Facebook would be the fourth largest country in the world in terms of users

• Facebook makes money from advertising, while Asian social networking sites make money from digital goods

• Dominant Social Networks: QQ in China, Cyworld in South Korea, Mixi in Japan

• Dominant Search Engines: Baidu in China, Naver in South Korea, Yahoo in Japan

• China has over 300 million netizens (larger than the US population)

• Chinese people have more online friends than offline (real world)

• Asians enjoy creating and sharing content significantly more than people in the US

Social Media in China

Takeaways:

• Government censorship promotes local players who innovate, not just copy

• Nearly a half of Chinese netizens are urban, but rural base is growing 

• Chinese netizens mostly access the internet by mobile phone (46%) or in internet cafes (35%)

• Internet usage is primarily for entertainment, information and communications

• A quarter of 120 million social networking sites’ users login primarily to play games

• A third of video content is user-generated while the rest is pirated

• Bulletin Board Services are very popular, especially for exchanging product info

• Viral memes quickly become cultural phenomena through social media

• Chinese users are more engaged in their online lives compared with Americans

It is obvious that social media in Asia is dominated by local players who, although partly inspired by the success of western services, have diversified their offerings to suit local tastes and interests. Outsiders will find it hard to compete in this space but may utilize the tools they offer as a platform for targeting their users. Mobile and gaming are also big factors here with a greater emphasis on having fun and the form factor content is consumed on playing a major role in its consumption. All requires marketers to understand the difference of local social-media consumption-behaviors across Asian markets in order to achieve successful social media strategy in this area.

(Sources: Thomas Crampton, SocialMediaToday, RandomWire)

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6 Things about Social Bookmarking

Recently, I had a research and analysis on social bookmarking sites and found that nowadays several websites have benefited from the social bookmarking in terms of driving traffic to the site. So I have been thinking about sharing information of this interesting and effective social marketing tool.

Basically, social bookmarking creates a true web of resources and connections—one that is not limited to individuals and their folders but represents the interests and judgments of a community of users.

1. What is it?

• Social bookmarking is the practice of saving bookmarks to a public website and “tagging” them with keywords. Basically it means that if you like something, you capost it to a social bookmarking site who'll then put it on their site. If other people also like it, they can vote for it and give it a better ranking and thus more prominence. 
• Visitors to social bookmarking sites can search for resources by keyword, person, or popularity and see the public bookmarks, tags, and classification schemes that registered users have created and saved.

2. How does it work?
Social bookmarking opens the door to new ways of organizing information and categorizing resources. Because social bookmarking services indicate who created each bookmark and provide access to that person’s other bookmarked resources, users can easily make social connections with other individuals interested in just about any topic. Users can also see how many people have used a tag and search for all resources that have been assigned that tag.

3. Which sites are operating social bookmarking?
Social bookmarking dates back just a couple of years, when sites like Furl, Simpy, and del.icio.us began operating. Here are some popular social bookmarking sites:

• Del.icio.us
• Digg.com 
• Reddit
• Furl
• Clipmarks
• StumbleUpon
• Newsvine
• Mixx
• Diigo
• Propeller 

4. Who uses social bookmarking?


Lots of people. They are young and might be a bit geeky, but overall they are the people who are going to be contributing to your website. If you want user generated content, you can get this in here. Social bookmarking users not only go around bookmarking pages but comment on your pages as well. They'll make suggestions of things you can change. They'll blog about you on their own websites. These are the people who generate the noise.



5. What are the benefits?

• Give users the opportunity to express differing perspectives on information and resources through informal organizational structures. It is a chance to build your personal branding as most of the social bookmarking sites allow users to develop your own page on their site. 
• Allow like-minded individuals to find one another and create new communities of users. It lets people take advantage of the insights of other users to find information related to the topic you are researching, even in areas that aren’t obviously connected to the primary topic. 
• Encourage users to keep coming back because the collections of resources are constantly changing, therefore, increase website traffic.
• Bring opportunity to get a better Search Engine Optimization (SEO) system, as social bookmarking sites help to build more relevant links easily. Normally, it is difficult to do that in a mass scale without going round lots of sites asking them for links or going around blogs and posting comments so that they'll link back.

6. What are the downsides?

• Social bookmarking is done by amateurs. There is no oversight as to how resources are organized and tagged. This can lead to inconsistent or otherwise poor use of tags.
• There is a risk of presenting a skewed view of the value of any particular topic because social bookmarking reflects the values of the community of users, For example, users might assign pejorative tags to certain resources
• Social bookmarking means storing data in yet another location that you have to maintain and update.

From all the aspects considered above, it is seen that understanding social bookmarking, taking its advantage and applying it properly can help marketers enhance their brand’s online performance and increase their social media campaign’s effectiveness.

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