This is a rough guide to social bookmarking and a site promotion technique called ‘Tagging & Pinging’. It is not definitive, it is based upon the author’s imperfect understanding and memory.

Context.

First there was the web. And it was small and everybody knew each other.

Then it grew and David Filo and Jerry Yang made a list of all the websites they knew about, then they asked other people to add sites to their list. That is what became Yahoo!  - not the first search engine, but the first major internet directory. It was managed and run by humans, based upon their likes and dislikes.

Then the internet grew some more, it was bigger than humans could deal with so search engines grew up, these used software to scout through the links of the worldwideWEB. Google was nowhere near the first. For information about the history of search take a look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine 

Then as the internet grows even bigger it is becoming obvious that the internet is too big to be even catalogued by computers. Google, which has the largest database, indexes only a fraction of what is available, the rest is hidden away in what is called the ‘darknet’ - databases and other sites that are not readily spidered and sites that simply have not been found yet.

So a new solution is needed. We go back to people, as the internet is now too big even for computers we go back to the beginning and we build communities -that is where social bookmarking sites spring from. social bookmarking sites are communities of people who share the pages and sites that they think are interesting and worth sharing. Imagine, if you will a myriad of Yahoo! directories and you’ll be about there.

As internet marketers we want people to see our pages, we want to have our pages judged worthy of sharing. The search engines also have a vested interest in social bookmark sites. Their controllers know that if people think a page is worth sharing then it should be in the search engine indexes. SEs also know that people extend the reach of a search engine. For example, I have an interest in historical grain prices in Ukraine in the mid-late 1990’s. The information is available, but is hidden away. If I, as a human, know how to get that information from a website and share it, now Google can find it and share it with their users. Search engines use humans in social bookmark sites like flesh and blood search engine spiders.

How Does Social Bookmarking Work?

At its core, social bookmarking is much like the ‘favorites’ tab in your browser - it saves web pages that you may want to come back to in the future. Social bookmark sites make the job easier by adding the facility to ‘tag’ each page with keywords that will help us to recognize the page in future and to share our bookmarks with others who may be interested in the same things. Social bookmarking basically works as follows:

1) I see a page that I want to return to, or share.

2) I open my social bookmark page (there are tools to simplify the process - bookmarklets etc) and fil in a little form with the address of the page I want to keep, the keywords (tags)  I want to use to recognise the page again and maybe some notes about the page.

3) Later, if I want to find the page again I simply go to my social bookmark page and look among the tags  and descriptions for the page. Other people can see my keywords and descriptions and find the page as well.

4) In order to assess the relevance of a page to the community there is almost always some form of voting or ranking of pages. The most relevant pages are always presented before the less relevant ones. 

5) Search engines come sniffing around the social bookmark sites to see what real users are interested in. Usually they gobble up the social bookmark links hungrily - it is just about the best sort of data they can get. Real links that have been chosen, found useful and been ranked by many, many human users.

6) The search engines include the links from the social bookmark sites in their index, enabling the vast majority of web users who have never even heard of social bookmarking to find pages that they would otherwise never have seen.

How Can Internet Marketers Use Social Bookmarking?

Ultimately I guess we are all seeking the same thing: (i) people coming to our sites who (ii) do the things we want them to do.

Social bookmarking can help with both these things. 

Directly

1) If our pages are visible on a bookmarking site then we might expect other people to visit our sites.

2) Because we are using tags that identify pages we can be reasonably sure that the people visiting have an interest in the tags we have used

3 Because people are interested in our tags and thus, hopefully, our pages we might be able to persuade people to take our desired action. After all, these people have not been tricked or hijacked to our pages.

Indirectly

1) Because search engines are always hanging around bookmarking sites there is a good chance that they will take the next step and visit our linked pages

2) Because our pages are indexed in the search engines we have the chance to receive additional traffic from the search engines

3) As most search engines give value to sites with greater quantities of links, the links that are made from bookmarking sites to ours may well suggest to the search engines that our sites are worthy of promotion above other, less well endowed, sites. This to should then bring us more traffic.

Bookmarking In Practice

So, now we understand why bookmarking exists, how it works and how we can use bookmarking, in conceptual form at least.

Let us take a look at how we can use bookmarking in practice.

1) To start with we can simply bookmark our pages ourselves. This is a tad tedious to do entirely by hand so there are some helper tools, often called bookmarklets. Most social Bookmarking sites have them, but they handle only that sites needs. There are some that go a stage further and link to several sites. The best of these is run by Onlywire http://onlywire.com . Onlywire have a bookmark tool that enables a user to bookmark 16 separate sites in one single operation. All the others require a user to open each site separately, albeit from a single interface.

2) The next step up is to make it easier for our users to bookmark our pages. To do that we can provide bookmarking tools on the pages of our sites, for example here, at the foot of each article: http://knowhow-now.com is a bookmark tool based upon the Onlywire bookmarklet, it allows simultaneous links to 16 sites at once. Then many blogs have a bookmarking tool as well, as shown here: http://umbilicalcordpreservation.com/cord-blood/cord-blood-preservation-information 

The problem with the first two approaches is that both are very labour intensive and, frankly, most users simply will not add a page to a social bookmark site, they are just not enough interested. Social bookmarking is, for some people a hobby, but these people are not likely to be profitable visitors to your sites either.

As we need volume of submissions we need new tools and techniques.

3) Tag & Ping

This is the process of tagging our pages, as above, submitting them to bookmark sites and adding a new step. Now, in addition, we can take the RSS feed from our bookmarked sites and submit those to RSS directories, use them on our sites or wherever seems appropriate; spreading our links and keywords even further.

There are various tools to automate the posting of bookmarks, most are very expensive. I have used two that are pretty reasonable. SocialBot which is my favourite and Ultrabookmarkertool”>Ultrabookmarker.

Because we are dealing in wholesale quantities of pages and sites we need to automate the process as far as possible. This section deals with using two tools. SocialBot and Ultrabookmarker in a particular and unforeseen (by the coders) manner. As yet I have no way to automatically submit RSS feeds, other than RSS Announcer. There are other and better submitters, at greater cost, but I know of no way to take a page, tag it, submit it and announce the RSS feed all in one fell swoop.

I will not go over the details of using these products, the information is better covered in the product documentation.

Using SocialBot and Ultrabookmarker Together 

SocialBot/Ultrabookmarker Mashup

Both Socialbot and Ultrabookmarker have drawbacks in practical use

The biggest issue that I saw was that Ultrabookmarker  had no way to spider the pages, otherwise it looked a very useful tool. Socialbot has a decent spider and interface. It can extract SEO info but it is pretty slow, it has a limited range of sites and one can not spider and post at the same time. 

I had a think… 

SocialBot has a database export function. 
Ultrabookmarker has an Excel import function. 

Could the two play nice with each other…? 

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. 

So, I exported the database file from SocialBot. It gives no export options but no worries, Excel has LOADS of import options. 

Next, I kicked up Excel. I opened the file from Socialbot. I was given an option to select which table to open. ‘My Pages’ seemed appropriate. Sure enough, a few seconds later I had a big ole Excel file nice and clean. Thing is that there were several columns I did not need. I wanted only the columns that corresponded with the import needs of Ultrabookmarker: 
“Url”, “Title”, “Tags”, “Note” 
In the spreadsheet these were called URL, Title, Description, Keywords. 
So, I deleted the columns I did not need. Leaving the four, but not in the correct order. 
So, I inserted a column between Title and Description and cut/pasted in Note. That gave me all the data in the correct place. 

Next step was to remove the header line. I am sure that the titles would have made Ultrabookmarker’s import routine choke, so to save messing I removed the first row of the spreadsheet. 

My spreadsheet had about 2500 lines in it and a quick view showed that not all the URLs were appropriate. So, I decided to tidy up the spreadsheet a little - you could skip these editing/cleaning steps if you already have very well tagged sites. 
At a minimum I wanted every page to have a title. So I did a sort on the title column and removed all pages without a title. 
Then I did a sort on URL and removed as many duplicated URLs as I could find. 

Then I did a search and replace for various elements of keywords or notes that were heavily duplicated. 

Eventually I had a reasonably clean spreadsheet with about 1600 URLs to bookmark. 

I saved it as an Excel file (thinking I might have to resave as csv but wanting a nice file to work from - CSV is a bugger to play with later.) 

Now for the big test! 

I opened up Ultrabookmarker. 
Then went to ‘Load’ on the main screen. 
I had the option to load CSV files or Excel. I chose Excel. A few seconds later and the main Ultrabookmarker display had all my URLs. I saw no sign of the keywords or descriptions…. 

So, I clicked on ‘Edit’ and saw that the first URL was listed with keyword and description! 
W00T!!! W00T!!! 

Next stage was simple, I set some delay parameters in the Ultrabookmarker preferences (don’t want to seem to big a spammer!) 
Clicked ‘Start Bookmarking’, waited to see that it was working and wrote this little piece. 

Ladies and Gentlemen, if you have SocialBot, run don’t walk, to the Ultrabookmarker purchase link. Get with the programme! 

If you have Ultrabookmarker, get a copy of SocialBot. 
If you have neither get both! 

Now you have the perfect toolkit! 

You can spider with SocialBot and bookmark with Ultrabookmarker and you can do it at the same time, with better data than you would have with Socialbot alone and to many more sites.

Pinging

Many, but not all, social bookmarking sites offer the ability to make an RSS feed from submitted links. Usually one can make a feed of just one’s own links. This feed should be titled and a description made. This can then be submitted to RSS directories using RSS Announcer or other similar applications. Also. consider adding your feed, to your blogs or web pages. Not only can you then improve the uniqueness of your pages, the links that you generate are your own!

Another possibility that arises is to use a feature of Del.icio.us. This takes all the pages that you have bookmarked through a 24 hour period and posts them to your blog. A brief description of the technique follows:

Sign up or Login to your del.icio.us account
Start bookmarking and tagging your pages.

Log into your Del.icio.us account and look for the ’settings’ tab. Then, on that page look for the column heading ‘blogging’, at the bottom is a link marked ‘daily blog posting’ - click it.

A new page opens up headed ‘Blogging: daily blog posting’. Look for a link ‘add a new thingy’ and a form appears
Enter the following into the form, and enter your relevant details in the [boxes]
job_name : Andrew’s Loada Links (or any title you fancy)
out_name : [Your WordPress Username]
out_pass : [Your WordPress Password]
out_url : http://[YourBlogsURL]/xmlrpc.php
out_time : 4 (the GMT that you want the post to happen. 0 = 8pm EST)
out_blog_id : blank (not applicable to WordPress I presume)
out_cat_id : 15 (this is optional, but put the number of whatever category you want to use)
Hit ‘Submit Query’ and that’s it!
Simply wait for the glorious moment when you understand why you don’t need RsstoBlog and your links automagically appear on your blog!

From now on, simply add bookmarks to del.icio.us every day and you’ll have a new list posted every night. 

 

Conclusions

Social Bookmarking is both a step forward and back, it is a realization that the web is not a single entity but a series of communities that are vastly interlinked. Social Bookmarking allows for greater communication of the nature of the ‘real’ internet to the search engines. For internet marketers bookmarking provides the ability to enhance the standing of a site or page and make it more visible to the users of the web. It can and does increase traffic flow and it can and does provide good quality links to sites - for free! Because bookmarking sites are about humans we need to take care not to destroy the user experience for humans by not over working sites and by providing good quality and appropriate tags and descriptions; in this way we can add to the internet for all users rather than destroy it. 

Additional Resources:

Social Bookmarking course with audio and and a social networking report.

SocialBot purchase link

Ultrabookmarker purchase link