Chapter 7:Marketing through Social News and Bookmarking sites
In this chapter, we have discussed about Marketing through Social News and Bookmarking sites. 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. Since their emergence with the birth of web 2.0,
these sites are used to link many types of information including news, humor, support, and discussion.
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.
In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share.
These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or
groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The
allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search
engine.
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. In a nutshell, here’s how social news sites work:
users post content to a social news website, and other users can choose to promote content they like
further.
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. 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. Digg's popularity prompted the creation of copycat social
networking sites with story submission and voting systems such as Reddit.
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. These broad categories allow for almost any area of content to be submitted. When
content is voted upon by other members of the Digg community, it gets the chance to be discovered not
only by your own followers, but also the community at large by making it to the Holy Grail – the Digg
homepage. While the exact formula to what gets on the homepage is a mystery, the general theory is that
a submission which receives a high number of votes within a short amount of time will likely make it to
the top of the list. Digg is also a little bit more marketing friendly than their main competition Reddit.
Some of the tips that can be used to make followers on Digg are:

Digg and comment on submissions in your area of interest
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Follow people in hopes that they follow you back
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Add the Digg Button to your content
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Reach out to people directly via Instant Messenger and email
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". Reddit
was founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian. It was acquired by Condé Nast Publications in
October 2006 and became a direct subsidiary of Condé Nast's parent company, Advance Publications in
September 2011. As of August 2012, Reddit operates as an independent entity. Reddit is based in San
Francisco, California. 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. Reddit communities occasionally coordinate to skew polls on other websites, such as in
2007 when Greenpeace allowed web users to decide the name of a killer whale it was tracking. Reddit
users voted en masse to name the whale "Mr. Splashy Pants", and Reddit administrators further
encouraged this by changing the site logo to a whale during the voting. In December of that year, Mister
Splashy Pants was announced as the winner of the competition.
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".
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.
StumbleUpon is a discovery engine (a form of web search 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. Toolbar
versions exist for Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, Internet Explorer, and Safari. StumbleUpon also works
with some independent Mozilla-based browsers. Native mobile StumbleUpon apps exist for Windows,
iOS, Android, and the Amazon Appstore. StumbleUpon is website that helps you to “stumble upon”
articles, posts and photographs that match your interests. After reading the article presented to you, you
can choose whether or not to “like” it. The more likes an article receives, the more times it will be
presented to future stumblers, which in turn means more pageviews for that website owner. Many website
owners and bloggers encourage the sharing of their articles to StumbleUpon in hopes of driving traffic to
their sites. 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.
Delicious (formerly del.icio.us) 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. Its collective nature makes it possible to view bookmarks
added by other users. Delicious also allowed users to group links with similar topics together to form a
"Stack", and include title and descriptions for the Stack page. 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. 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.