Is del.icio.us a Marketing Tool?
Of course del.icio.us is a marketing tool - if you know how to use it.
For the uninformed, del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site that allows you to store your favorite sites, tag them for quick reference, and search and share these favorites with others.
Let's look at one way a user might find something on del.icio.us.
Cindy and I are baking cookies this weekend and want a few new ideas. Let's search to see what other sites users have tagged "cookies" by going to the URL http://del.icio.us/tag/cookies. Notice how I just added "/tag" and "/cookies"?
I wonder what the folks at Betty Crocker are thinking about this list? Are they findable?
We can find out how many people have del.icio.us'd the Betty Crocker homepage by using this URL: http://del.icio.us/url and typing in Betty's site:
But does everyone save just the home page? Doubtful. In fact, the Recipes page has been saved by six people. The Cookies Exchange page has been saved twice.
The Betty Crocker team can see which pages are bookmarked most often, but also see what the community is using as tags for each page.
You know what else they could do? Yep - make it easy for users to bookmark and share by adding a button like this to each page: 
Best part is that these history searches have a RSS feed so you can Search Once and Subscribe.
Other Del.icio.us helps (elsewhere):
- Ultimate Guide to Using del.icio.us (Kyle Eslick)
- Become a del.icio.us Power User (David Brunelle)
- The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users (Brendon Connelly)
Other Marketing Tools? (here):
- Is Blogging a Marketing Tool?
- Is YouTube a Marketing Tool?
- Is Flickr a Marketing Tool?
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