Chapter 7 Marketing through Social News and Bookmarking sites Objectives

• After going through this chapter, you will be able to understand: – Advantages of using social news sites (Digg) – Advantages of using bookmarking sites – Features of Delicious bookmarking sites – Marketing aspects of Delicious bookmarking sites Introduction

• A social news website features user-posted stories that are ranked based on popularity. • Users can comment on these posts, and these comments may also be ranked. • Social news relies on crowd sourcing to shape focus in a bottom-up fashion, forming a type of collective intelligence. • Social news sites facilitate democratic participation on the web. Introduction

• In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. • Most social bookmark services encourage users to organize their bookmarks with informal tags instead of the traditional browser-based system of folders, although some services feature categories/ folders or a combination of folders and tags. Introduction

• From the point of view of search data, there are drawbacks to such tag-based systems: – no standard set of keywords, – no standard for the structure of such tags, – mistagging due to spelling errors, – tags that can have more than one meaning, unclear tags due to synonym/antonym confusion, – unorthodox and personalized tag schemata from some users, and no mechanism for users to indicate hierarchical relationships between tags Advantages of using Social News Sites

• One of the benefits of social media is that it can help your organization more visible to the public you’re trying to reach. • And one of the ways you can make it easier for more customers to take notice is to share great content, whether informative articles, photos or videos. • Social news sites such as Digg, Reddit and Delicious provide ways to promote this content in a way that can attract more traffic, link love and, hopefully, interested new customers to your website. Advantages of using Social News Sites

• The specifics, including how popular articles are determined and displayed, will vary from site to site, but the underlying concept is the same. • Social news sites facilitate a participatory culture, eliminating the gatekeeping of mainstream news sources and allowing the public to decide what counts as "news." • In addition to the characteristic of a collective intelligence, social news websites “implies the technical, economic, legal, and human enhancement of a universally distributed intelligence that will unleash a positive dynamic of recognition and skills mobilization.” Social News sites: Digg

• Digg is a news aggregator with an editorially driven front page, aiming to select stories specifically for the Internet audience such as science, trending political issues, and viral Internet issues. Social News sites: Digg

• It was launched in its current form on July 31, 2012, with support for sharing content to other social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. • Formerly, Digg had been a very popular social news website, allowing people to vote web content up or down, called digging and burying, respectively. • Quantcast had estimated Digg's monthly U.S. unique visits at 3.8 million. Social News sites: Digg

• Digg's popularity prompted the creation of copycat social networking sites with story submission and voting systems such as Reddit. • The site's main function is to let users discover, share and recommend web content. • Members of the community can submit a webpage for general consideration. Social News sites: Digg

• Social Marketing on Digg – Members of the Digg community can submit and share content to the Digg network under the main categories of Business, Entertainment, Gaming, Lifestyle, Offbeat, Politics, Science, Sports, Technology, and World News. – If you want your submissions to get views and diggs, the best place to start is by having a strong Digg following. – Getting followers on Digg is a bit trickier than getting followers on Twitter. Social News sites: Digg

• Tips on getting followers on Digg: – Digg and comment on submissions in your area of interest – Link to your Digg profile everywhere – Follow people in hopes that they follow you back – Add the Digg Button to your content – Share your submission on Twitter – Reach out to people directly via Instant Messenger and email Social News sites: Reddit

• Reddit is a social news and entertainment website where registered users submit content in the form of links or text posts. • Users then vote each submission "up" or "down" to rank the post and determine its position on the site's pages. • Content entries are organized by areas of interest called "subreddits". Social News sites: Reddit

• The site is a collection of entries submitted by its registered users, essentially a bulletin board system. • The name "Reddit" is a portmanteau of "read/edit" and of "read it", e.g., "I read it on Reddit". • The site is split into numerous categories, known as "subreddits". Social News sites: Reddit

• When items are submitted to the site, redditors can vote for or against them. • Each subreddit has a front page that shows newer submissions that have been rated highly. • Redditors can also post comments about the submission, and respond back and forth in a conversation tree of comments; the comments themselves can also be upvoted and downvoted. Social News sites: Reddit

• The front page of the site itself shows a combination of the highest rated posts out of all the subreddits a user is subscribed to. • Front page rank, for both the general front page and for individual subreddits, is determined by the age of the submission, positive to negative feedback ratio and the total vote count. Social News sites: Reddit

• Registering an account with Reddit is free and does not require an email address to complete. • Users are referred to as "redditors", a portmanteau of "reddit editor". • When logged in, users have the ability to vote on submissions and comments to increase or decrease their visibility and submit links and comments. • Users can also create their own subreddit based around any topic of their choosing, and interested users can add it to their front-page by subscribing to it. Social News sites: Reddit

• Reddit also allows submissions that do not link externally. • These are called "self posts" or "text submissions". • Many discussion-based subreddits allow only text-only submissions such as "AskReddit" - where users are only allowed to pose broad, discussion based questions to the community at large. • Self posts do not accumulate karma points for the submitter, but they can still be voted on like other content. Social News sites: Reddit

• Redditors can "friend" one another, which gives a redditor quick access to posting and comments of their friend list. • The commenting system and friend system, along with a certain "Reddit ethos", lend Reddit aspects of a social network, though not to the extent of Facebook, Google+, and other websites aimed at social networking. • The Reddit community socialize at local parks and bars around the world, and there are many localized subreddits for local meetings. Social News sites: Reddit

• Subreddits – Reddit entries are organized into areas of interest called "subreddits". • The Reddit Effect – Also known as the "SlashDot effect", the Reddit effect is when a smaller website has a high influx of traffic due to Reddit. Social News sites: Reddit

• The Reddit Effect – In order for users to see crashed websites, several Reddit bots have been created that take a snapshot of the website before large amounts of traffic flood the affected website. • Be active in the community • Don’t promote your submitted links Advantages of using bookmarking sites

• A social bookmarking service is a centralized online service which enables users to add, annotate, edit, and share bookmarks of web documents. • Many online bookmark management services have launched since 1996; Delicious, founded in 2003, popularized the terms "social bookmarking" and "tagging". Advantages of using bookmarking sites

• Tagging is a significant feature of social bookmarking systems, enabling users to organize their bookmarks in flexible ways and develop shared vocabularies known as folksonomies. • Unlike file sharing, social bookmarking does not save the resources themselves, merely bookmarks that reference them, i.e. a link to the bookmarked page. Advantages of using bookmarking sites

• Descriptions may be added organized by tags. to these bookmarks in the • This allows subscribers to form of metadata, so users become aware of new may understand the bookmarks as they are content of the resource saved, shared, and tagged without first needing to by other users. download it for • It also helps to promote themselves. your sites by networking • Many social bookmarking with other social book services provide web feeds markers and collaborating for their lists of with each other. bookmarks, including lists Advantages of using bookmarking sites

• Social bookmarking has become a powerful tool for SEO experts for its unique features as following: – The first feature lies at bookmark share which not only enables the marked link to be public to everyone but brings a respectable number of visitors back to your site as well. – A highly interesting in Social Bookmarking is its interconnection. Advantages of using bookmarking sites

• Social bookmarking has become a powerful tool for SEO experts for its unique features as following: – The more bookmarks a link gets, the better value. – Also it is a signal for search engines to pay special attention to your site, then improving its rank in Google. – There are two kinds of link: • Internal link to the articles on Gizmodo & the other link redirected to your post named Dofollow link which is in connection with the title of your article; therefore, such a link can put influence on the ranking of your page. Social bookmarking site: StumbleUpon

• StumbleUpon is a discovery engine that finds and recommends web content to its users. • Its features allow users to discover and rate Web pages, photos, and videos that are personalized to their tastes and interests using peer-sourcing and social-networking principles • StumbleUpon uses collaborative filtering to create virtual communities of like-minded Web surfers. Social bookmarking site: StumbleUpon

• StumbleUpon Video – On December 13, 2006, StumbleUpon launched their StumbleVideo site at http://video.stumbleupon.com/. – The new site allows users without a toolbar to "stumble" through all the videos that toolbar users have submitted and rate them using an Ajax interface. – StumbleUpon launched a version of StumbleVideo for the Internet Channel Web browser that runs on the Wii console on February 12, 2007. – This version of StumbleVideo is optimized for the Wii's smaller screen resolution and offers similar functionality to that of the original version. Social bookmarking site: StumbleUpon

• StumbleThru – The StumbleThru service allows registered users to stumble on specific sites, rather than the entire Web. – Paid Discovery is StumbleUpon’s ad system. StumbleUpon’s platform lets users surf the web by Stumbling to sites that match their interests, simply by hitting a button on their browser or mobile device. – Up to 5% of all stumbles are reserved for Paid Discovery where the advertisers directly insert their web page into the user experience. Social bookmarking site: StumbleUpon

• Marketing on StumbleUpon – StumbleUpon is website that helps you to “stumble upon” articles, posts and photographs that match your interests. – StumbleUpon can be a very powerful tool; when used correctly, some stumblers have garnered up to several thousand hits on a single post, in a single day. Social bookmarking site: StumbleUpon

• How to Thumb Up a Post Facebook Like. – By clicking it, you are telling StumbleUpon that you give that post your vote. – If the post you thumbed up has been liked before, the Thumb Up button will turn green and you’ll remain on that web page. – StumbleUpon’s Thumb Up button is similar to a Social bookmarking site: StumbleUpon

• StumbleUpon provides two plans – Standard and Add- On. – The Standard plan is ideal for Brands and marketers looking to make big impact and is priced at $0.10+ Per Unique Visitor. Some of the salient features of this plan are: • Priority Serving in content streams • Allows brands and marketers to target by gender, device, and interest bundles • Advanced reporting includes robust site performance and visitor data, traffic analysis, and website quality score • Integration with Google Analytics Social bookmarking site: StumbleUpon

• StumbleUpon provides two plans – Standard and Add- On. – The Add-On plan is ideal for Brands and marketers seeking to engage target audience and is priced at $0.12+ Per Unique Visitor. Some of the salient features of this plan are: • Priority Serving in Content Streams • Allows brands and marketers to target by one or more targeting add-ons such as; Age; Precise Interest Social bookmarking site: Delicious

• Delicious is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. • Delicious uses a non-hierarchical classification system in which users can tag each of their bookmarks with freely chosen index terms • Delicious has a "hotlist" on its home page and "recent" pages, which help to make the website a conveyor of Internet memes and trends. Social bookmarking site: Delicious

• All bookmarks posted to Delicious are publicly viewable by default, although users can mark specific bookmarks as private, and imported bookmarks are private by default. Social bookmarking site: Delicious

Features of Delicious

1) Introducing the 2) Consolidating 3) Marketing on Delicious-Facebook tags and stacks Delicious Connector Social bookmarking site: Delicious

• The marketing aspect of Delicious – Create focused content • One thing that you have to realize when marketing with Delicious is that you need to keep your content consistent. • People bookmark sites to find up to date related content, so you’ll need to keep it fresh and focused on one particular area, or it will go largely ignored. Social bookmarking site: Delicious

• The marketing aspect of Delicious – Create focused content • You’ll also want to give a lot of consideration to the title of your post, because most Delicious users post their new bookmarks to their personal walls on a daily basis. • So marketing with Delicious requires captivating headers. • You may want to also consider using your company name in the title, so that when you appear on the front page again and again then people will associate it with your company.