I finally started catching onto the social bookmarking craze a couple of months ago. Sure, I have been a Delicious user for the last 18 months or so, but I had always been slightly frustrated by the interface. And candidly, I approached tagging in too formal a manner -- a "folder" paradigm -- versus thinking about it from a search perspective. And then along came Diigo. The combination of a far more glitzy and practical UI -- providing things like the ability to manipulate and edit several bookmarks at once, a highly intuitive and usable menu bar that easily drops into Firefox or Explorer, and a plethora of "social" features have made this a winner for me. Plus, for those folks who don't want to give up on Delicious, you can easily set up an automated link that creates the same new bookmarks in Delicious as you create them in Diigo. And that's a nice touch, because despite the rumors that Yahoo! is falling apart at the seams, and that because the founders of Delicious had abandoned Y!, an update would never happen...the Yahoo! team DID roll out a new version of Delicious, and it's quite impressive. That said, I'm sticking with Diigo as my primary bookmarking site.
But it's the social aspect of bookmarking that I'm having trouble getting my arms around...for me anyway. I'm not a small or large business owner. Therefore I don't have a compelling need to manipulate the Web to drive more traffic to my own site. Sure, I could bookmark every post to this blog (hmmm....perhaps I will), but lately I've had a hard enough time just writing posts, so forget about merchandising them. I'm also not necessarily a "here are the brilliant thoughts I've been thinking lately" kind of guy, so "watch my breadcrumbs and you too can be brilliant, or be impressed by my brilliance." And yet when I see how Diigo appears to primarily market itself...as a "research tool," I wonder if it's under-reaching. I know this is fairly facile, but I see two potential applications for these types of tools that I don't read about too often. And perhaps I'm living in a cave and businesspeople are using these tools...in these ways.
1. The corporate reading list: You know the folks who are always passing around articles in emails. Sometimes these people are EXECUTIVES and you'd be really well served to read those articles. Wouldn't it be nice if instead of getting one-off emails, these people simply bookmarked their selected articles and shared them with a "community?" Then over time one could easily access ("easily" is the operative term here) a plethora of articles, or better yet, subscribe to the respective sage's RSS feed.
2. I work at a company that MOSTLY provides fairly sophisticated software which requires an "investment." This implies a lengthy sales cycle. The marketing term bandied about our hallways is that prospects require multiple "touches" in order for an inquirey to convert to a qualified lead, and then into a customer. Once that qualified lead finds its way to a sales rep who accepts the lead as an opportunity, and then "works" that opportunity, wouldn't it be nice if s/he used tools like social bookmarking sites to share relevant articles of interest to that prospect (i.e., industry developments, competitive news, information that would help the prospect make a more qualified purchase decision, etc.)? Of course, everything here is in the "how." There is no better way to annoy a prospect than by relentlessly spamming her or him. But I have to believe that done right, there is a pretty compelling and informal "application" here for salespeople, and that done right, prospects would appreciate that a particular sales rep is showing intellectual curiosity for their business versus merely trying to sell.
So that's what I've been thinking. While I'm not a terribly SOCIAL bookmarker, I've only begun to explore the power of these tools. In closing, a big shout-out to the folks at Diigo. They're a small team, but are quite responsive. About two weeks ago I gave them some praise in a quick Twitter tweet. 15 minutes later I received an email from a Diigo employee in my inbox. She thanked me for my "kind support of Diigo" and asked how I use the application. That's a nice "touch."
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