Online Marketing Blog

The super popular social bookmarks tool that Thomas created last year has recently been updated. We’ve been keeping him exceptionally busy with “client projects that are fun, interesting, challenging” for quite a while, but he was still able to sneak in a quick update and added several social news and bookmarking services.

New services added:

• Google Reader
• Diigo
• Netscape
• DZone
• Squidoo
• Looklater
• RecommendzIt
• Segnalo
• StumbleUpon
• Mr. Wrong

Several of these should have been added a long time ago, but hey, we’re busy helping clients.

If you’ve used the TopRank social bookmarks tool in the past, you may want to “freshen up” your links with Google, Netscape and StumbleUpon. Hint hint.

As a reminder here are the distinguishing features:

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Well, maybe that should be Neil and Cameron of Advantage Consulting Services, since they are not strangers to after conference festivities nor are they strangers to some of the most successful social media optimization campaigns being run in the SEO industry. Cameron covers the fun part and Neil talks about the SMO or social media optimization panel he spoke on regarding Wikipedia.

Cameron and Neil write an excellent blog at Pronet Advertising.

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Social Media News Release - Separating Fact From Fiction 

Of the many motivating factors for the use of social media press releases, there are two driving forces that stand out: The changing needs of the end consumer and increasing ease of use for the media.

Due to the increasingly social and sharing nature of the web and the increasing importance of press releases as direct to consumer communication tools, it is important for marketers and public relations professionals to adjust their message format and delivery to correspond with the needs of today’s web savvy audience.

It’s a day for announcing acquisitions I guess. I just read over at TechCrunch that the popular social news and bookmarking site Reddit has been acquired by the parent of Wired Magazine, Cond?© Nast.

“All four reddit employees will relocate from Boston to Wired‚Äôs San Francisco office and become part of Wired Digital.”

Congrats to Steve, Alexis, Christopher and Aaron!

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The buzz amongst online marketers and bloggers about marketing with social media has generated a lot of interesting discussion. One of the memes I’ve been noticing is the issue of spamming social media. A particular aspect brought to my attention recently is the idea that by making it easier for users to bookmark or “vote” for content on social news and bookmarking services, perhaps by using our social bookmarks link tool, that it’s an invitation to spam.

There’s a difference between ease of submission and getting to the first page of a social news or bookmarking site, where the most benefit is. The communities of those social media sites provide a self policing effect against most types of SM spam. I agree, that making submissions easier may attract abuse, but it will be noise hanging at the bottom.

Read/WriteWeb has posted an excellent review and comparison of the major social bookmarking services. Digg was not included as they are considered a social news service. The bookmark services reviewed include: BlinkList, Blogmarks, del.icio.us, diigo, Furl, Ma.gnolia, MyWeb, Shadows, Simpy and StumbleUpon.

The result? Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon were the clear winners. I seem to remember something a while back about how StumbleUpon Rocks.

Personally, I like tend to use del.cio.us the most for work and StumbleUpon for more recreational surfing. But I have found some excellent resources for work that way.

This information is pretty handy for when you creating your social bookmark links.

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If you’re a social bookmark and tagging fan, then you’ll be interested in this post on jp’s domain, “Digg the Rigged“.¬† More at SEW.

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With all the buzz about social media optimization the past week, I thought it would be timely for us to present two updated tools for encouraging the sharing of and linking to content as well as distribution. These are concepts that are fundamental to the notion of social media optimization or SMO.

The first tool is one we’ve received excellent comments on and it’s called the Social Bookmark Creator. In order to make it easy for readers to save a blog post or a web page for reading later or to aggregate resources using a social bookmark service, we’ve created a tool that allows you to add a social bookmark menu after each post or on a static web page.

Todd Defren posts a nice rundown on using del.icio.us for an online PR initiative for bzzagent. Deli.cio.us is used to create content of value to journalists covering WOMM - the word of mouth marketing industry of which bzzagent is the focus.

What are we doing here? Providing any writer who is interested in WOMM with a customized research page containing the top news in the space, including first-hand reaction — on a daily basis — by a WOMM industry pioneer. For media types, et al., who subscribe to the RSS feed of that del.icio.us page, that’s a daily dose of Thought Leadership!

A few recent articles on social search got me thinking about how much search has changed and continues to change. In a meeting with a staff member last week I was explaining the notion of “collective intelligence” and how millions of individual editorial decisions people make through social search and tagging is taking the user search experience to a new level.

Over at iMedia Connection, iProspect’s Naga Krothapalli talks about the pros and cons of social tagging and search. The pros include: an alternative to browser based bookmarks, ease of use due to tags and the “theoretical” improvement in ability for the search engine to provide relevant and more accurate results. The cons: limited number of user adoption and doing tagging as well as limitations of tagging.

PRWeb is at it again with a new announcement on the addition of Technorati and PRWeb tags to the PRWeb news wire and press release distribution service. The press release, “Holy SHIFT! PRWeb Plays Tag with Social Media” comments that the new features will make it easy to add Technorati and PRWeb specific tags to your press releases.

The SHIFT Communications’ social media release was in part a motivator for the new services as the release from PRWeb states:

“If you spend the time to create a press release following the template
outlined by SHIFT Communications, all you have is an electronic
document unless you have a distribution platform that supports its
features. PRWeb is that platform,” said David McInnis, CEO and Founder
of PRWeb.

Piers Fawkes from PSFK sent me a heads up on his latest channel, Marktd which is a library of marketing articles weighted in importance by users. It works like digg or del.icio.us where users submit articles and others vote on them. Articles are displayed as “New”, “Latest” or “Top” based on votes. The categories range from BtoB to Word of Mouth with some Public Relations in between. But nothing about search marketing. Perhaps that’s a category that should be added?

Submit your marketing stories to Marktd.com

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