Social Bookmarking: A Useless Tool or Clever Marketing Strategy?

Since the dawn of man - okay maybe not the dawn - people have been using social bookmarking sites traditionally because it was a way to get beyond one's Favorites folder and store well thought out information on a third party website. The idea was, and should still be, to enable you to go to one spot, put in a tag, and pull up information you wanted to reference back to at some future date.

I say "traditionally" because like just about everything, the concept seems to have gone awry in many cases. Have you recently bookmarked a special page? Think you'll remember how to retrieve it?

The retrieval part is the key issue for social bookmarking. Unfortunately, it's loosing its luster because social bookmarking sites have also become the mecca for some to spam their way to what they believe will be keyword recognition.

However, let's take a good look at why we socially bookmark sites, what the true purpose is all about. According to Educause.edu:

"The technology behind social bookmarking is not complex, which means the threshold to participate is low, both for Web sites offering such services and for users. The ideas that social bookmarking is built on are working their way into other applications; the practice of tagging information is being extended to other types of resources, such as multimedia files and e-mail."

So you can see, initially bookmarking a website or webpage meant an easy way to retrieve it by means of tagging it with relevant keywords. Within your (one or more) social bookmark accounts, in theory, you should be able to log in, type in a relevant keyword, and have returned to you all the pages you found interesting enough to bookmark under that tag or tags.

In terms of data organization, social bookmarking is a dream! In actuality, it may be turning into somewhat of a nightmare when unscrupulous characters wedge pages into a system jammed up with tags that have no meaning, no connection to the webpages at hand. Sure, perhaps within your account you've planned ahead to keep your own organization in tact. However, another purpose to social bookmarking sites, again in theory, is to allow you a spot to go to, type in a keyword, and hopefully find returned results really fitting what you were looking for.

As a social media tool, yes social bookmarking ranks right up there so you can have your webpage(s) associated with given keywords. Again, the problem may be sifting through all the results to find the one golden nugget worth investigating.

Using common sense, along with the right attitude (remember the golden rule?), social bookmarking could remain a viable way for everyone to get what they need. Again assuming a sense of fairplay enters your picture as you use this resource.

Keep in mind these words again referenced from Educase.edu's pdf:

"... It may become less important to know and remember where information was found and more important to know how to retrieve it using a framework created by and shared with peers and colleagues."

The key to that statement is, of course, the ability to find it and share it. Without organization, without some sort of control and ethics, it may not be too long into the future where social bookmark sites become as "helpful" as all those search engine returned results that never match what you need...

Just be aware of the downsides and use this, and all social websites, with integrity. Who knows who will be needing what generations to come...

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Diane Scott and her friend and partner Scott Jeffries share their internet marketing strategies and knowledge with everyone who cares to take the time to visit and hang out at Online-Internet-Marketing-Strategies.com