It's Delicious!

If you haven’t heard of the social bookmarking site, Delicious, you may be living in a cave. But seriously, the social media revolution is here and Delicious is becoming as important as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. In fact, in a study of almost 900 marketers (see Social Media Marketing Industry Report), it ranked 6th as most used/important. What is it, how does it work, and why should you be using it?

Delicious is a social bookmarking service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source. With emphasis on the power of community (Web 2.0 Principle: Leveraging Customer Self-Service to Reach a Broader Audience), Delicious improves how people discover, remember and share on the Internet.

When you sign up as a Delicious user and start bookmarking your favorite sites (including your firm’s site and blog), you get to share your bookmarks publicly so your friends, colleagues and others (clients and prospects?) can view them for reference, amusement (not your firm’s site but maybe your blog!) and/or collaboration. The cool part is that you have access to everyone else’s bookmarks too; and everyone on Delicious chooses to save their bookmarks for a reason. You can see if two people have chosen to remember a link or whether it was useful enough for a thousand people to remember. It’s like a popularity contest for websites with a beneficial outcome, especially if your firm’s site or blog ranks at the top.

The bottom line is this; Delicious search results are ranked by relevance, which takes into account bookmark titles, notes, tags and how many other users have also bookmarked the site. Search engines like Google work the same way; the more places you show up and the more people who are looking at your site (social networks and blogs included), searching for your site and bookmarking your site and linking to your site (including outbound links from your site), the higher up you get (it’s a popularity contest now; it’s not just based on keywords and metadata anymore).

Here’s my challenge to you: in the comments section below, post your web address. I will bookmark your site in Delicious using the following tags (*****,cpa, accounting, cpafirm, accountingfirm, firmname, city, state). I encourage you to create your own account and bookmark every page of your website in the same way. To return the favor, I ask that you bookmark my website, www.savvysocialmediamarketing.com using the tags (SMM, socialmedia, socialnetworking, networking, consulting, cpa, accounting, marketing).

Social media marketing is a tasty treat for savvy marketers...it’s just plain Delicious.