Social bookmarking is one of the oldest in the social media portfolio; forums and noticeboards being by far the oldest, dating back to the first social activities for networked computers.

Social bookmarking can server many purposes, however the one thread I see from many people, particularly those in the blogging system, is to drive traffic to their pages.

The problem with using social bookmarking to drive traffic is that it causes traffic spikes with matching bounce rate spikes. The long term traffic does not really grow.

A second use for social bookmarking is to obtain backlinks to pages on sites. This can be done fairly successfully although rumor now suggests that Google will start to measure the popularity of submitted page before applying any value to a back link.

Many others use social bookmarking to do just that - bookmark pages they like and to then share them with their contacts.

I don’t criticize any of those motives. They are all valid. However there is one common thread that runs across all three motives. They will never be successful unless you have a team. For most social bookmarking sites this involves adding contacts or friends.

Friends or contacts are only going to participate if there is ’something in it for them’. This is generally the knowledge that the content you are recommending is valuable and worth looking at - in other words your reputation on that site.

If you constantly recommend your own sites then your reputation as a team player will be poor. If you recommend other good quality sites then your reputation will be high and people will follow your advice.

Why do you use social bookmarking, for your own benefit or for the benefit of all?

Professional social network Linkedin had announced the release of DirectAds, a new advertising service for small business looking to target their ads.

The Linkedin blog reported the release a day or two ago. They claim:

Like existing ads on our site today, DirectAds advertisements are intended to be non-obtrusive messages that accompany the overall experience of LinkedIn. Note that you won’t see any additional ads with the introduction of this product and every DirectAds ad includes the advertising member’s name and profile data, so you’ll know who is trying to reach members like you.

The ads seem to be directed at US traffic at present which limits its reach at present. Ads can be purchased online via credit card with premium members receiving a 50% discount.

If you have a Linkedin presence and want to promote your business then this option may meet your needs. You may be able to fine tune your geographic audience to receive more relevant, and hopefully easier to convert, visitors.

It seems that almost all social media sites are now going the online advertising route. It os one of their only sources of income.

Every web site wants to be number one, particularly number one in the search results pages. Unfortunately we cannot all attain those lofty heights. In fact getting to the top ten is no easy feat either. Fortunately we have social media to promote ourselves, our websites and our products or services. Where we may luck out on the search engines we may have better luck with social media marketing.

One of the great advantaged of social media marketing is that there is no such thing as being first, or on top. A social media presence is no different to having a presence within your own neighborhood, suburb or town. Social media marketing is about discussions. Getting others to talk about and perhaps even recommend you, your site or your products.

If you consider the off line world (yes it does still exist), mothers get together in groups to talk about what ever it is that mothers talk about. Some of their conversations are going to revolve around which products or services do or don’t work. Your social media marketing is aimed at trying to achieve the same results, only in online communities where the population in that one genre, could number hundreds of thousands.

So what is the key to cracking the social media marketing nut? In a word - credibility. As an individual, you need to demonstrate an air credibility. Your social media marketing is not going to be too pushy. Referring back to the off line world, if you could join that group of mothers, not as marketing agent, but as another mother, you can gain a level of credibility by solving problems, referring other mothers to products (not always your own - try that for a change) and generally proving to be an authority on that particular topic.

That credibility is very powerful. In fact, if you went missing for a week or two from that group of mothers you would find them on your doorstep or on the phone checking on you - wondering when you are coming back. Build that credibility online and you will get the same response.

One of the cleverest social media marketing measures that I have seen involved that very scenario. They became very active online, helping others where they could, participating in conversations at every opportunity and recommending possible solutions for problems. Then they went missing.

The number of visitors to their website doubled in that week. Of course, before going missing they had prepared their site with a new product launch campaign. The visitors now started talking about the new product. After being missing for a week, they returned and of course everyone wanted to know about the product.

That is social media marketing at its best - why - because they developed that credibility factor first!

Social marketing is different to general marketing. With general marketing, you are promoting a brand, an image, a product or a company. When it comes to social marketing, you are really promoting yourself.

If your not promoting yourself, you should be. Social marketing, as I have mentioned in previous articles, is about being social. Products cannot be social. Socializing is a human interaction and as such becomes a one-on-one or one-to-many event.

The biggest mistake that many novices make when socializing on many of the social websites is that they are trying to promote their website, blog, or products. In effect, they are trying to hard. All that is necessary is self promotion. You become your own brand.

Over time, people associate you with your website and eventually with your product. Overtime, by promoting yourself you will be promoting your everything that surrounds you. If you take a look at some of the bigger names in blogging, particularly when it comes to marketing, they promote themselves, their blogs and products are taken along for the ride.

A good example is Andy Beal and his site, Marketing Pilgrim. Throw in his new product Trackur and there are three images to consider. However, most ploggers have heard of Andy Beal. Some will associate Marketing Pilgrim with his name, fewer still will associate Trackur with him.

However, over time the three become as one. Andy has developed a good reputation over a long period of time. His name is trusted. Because of that, his sites, and now his products, gain the benefit of that trust.

Social marketing can go along way to developing a similar ‘trust’. You become the product and where ever possible, you promote yourself. As your reputation grows, so to does your website - this is where you can be ‘found’. Obviously, unless your products are crap, they will gain the same ‘trust’ factor. With social marketing, you should consider yourself the product first.

It seems it might be. As I start to look around the internet I see signs of social blogging, or micro blogging as it is often called, everywhere.

There are a couple of quite humorous videos floating around Youtube centered on the addictive nature of sites like Twitter. Blog writers are probably the biggest users, and certainly the biggest culprits when it comes to spending at lot of time social blogging - but then blogging comes naturally to them anyway.

It is going further than just spending time on the sites. There are plugins available now to include your social blogging on your sites, and other plugins available to send new content from your site to your social blogging account.

Social blogging is perhaps a sign of the times where reality television is starting to wane in popularity. Micro blogging is starting to take its place. For some, you will know exactly what they are doing at any given time of day. What they are eating (must be some market research use there), what they are drinking, watching of TV. Even down to who they are dating, where they are going and what they are doing - really must we get all the details including their bathroom visits.

Fortunately we don’t have film footage to go with these tweets although it wouldn’t surprise me if that become the next fad, video tweets.

Social blogging is fine and some of the bigger bloggers and web owners have learned how to master them. They can participate in some of the micro blogging activities and then switch off and put their mind back onto the job at hand. For these users, social blogging is all about keeping the ‘fans’ happy and the traffic coming in.

For many others, social blogging does not provide any real marketing benefits, it just chews up valuable time. Are you addicted to social blogging?

Social media - whether is social bookmarking or social marketing - is one of the fastest growing areas on the internet. Millions of businesses are now accessing these sites and promoting themselves, their businesses and their products or services - there are three main reasons why!

1 It’s Free:
Pure and simple - it is FREE. Compared to many other forms of online promotions - social media is free to access and free to participate. The only real investment is in your time.

2 You’re In Control:
With social media, you can stay in control. You control who you allow onto your contacts lists, you control where you go, who you talk to and what type of discussions you participate in.

3 It’s Effective:
Interact within these social communities for the benefit of everyone, not just yourself, and the results can be tremendous. You may find your businesses profile and reputation growing, the number of quality visitors to your sites growing, and, ultimately, your sales and profits growing.

Social media is an interactive event. Where old fashioned marketing focused on the business and products for the benefit of the business, online social marketing needs to focus on the community. The most important term is ’social’ - be social, be a part of the community, and the results will speak for themselves.

There are millions of users online everyday and statistics show that social media such as Myspace and Facebook attract a high proportion of these users. However, when it comes to social marketing, social bookmarking, or just plain socializing, bigger is not really better.

Given the opportunity, would you prefer to try and socialize at a football stadium with 100,000 people, or at small gathering of 30 or 40 people, drinks and nibbles included.

The effect that a large crowd has can be quite daunting and can often make socializing difficult. Add to this the ‘crowd’ mentality. By this I refer to spammers and those whose motives are often uncomplimentary - too put it kindly.

Smaller sites don’t attract spammers in the same numbers. They still attract them but being small communities, they are soon removed. Socializing on these smaller communities can be a lot friendlier, easier to handle and easier to gain a large following of individuals.

The hardest part of joining some of these smaller communities is simply finding them. For every niche their is a community of sorts, whether it is a forum or social site like Facebook or Myspace. The moment you join you find yourself approached my moderators trying to help you get started and mix in easily.

What may comes as a surprise to many individuals is that most of these sites actually have extensions of themselves into some of the larger communities. Once you become fully immersed in the smaller community, you can move across to the larger sites like Myspace or Facebook and join the extended community there.

To continue the above analogy, it would be like being invited to the corporate boxes at the football - you have the large crowd in front of you, but you are also within a much smaller social environment - the best of both worlds. Big is not better - often small is the best place to start.

Which is more important - social marketing or search engine marketing? My first response is why not both! Surely they are not exclusive - and they aren’t.

There are however times when you need to focus more on one area than the other. If you have a website that is competing in an area that has an lot of competition then search engine marketing may be a long term proposal. Social marketing on the other hand can be a short term option that produces better results.

The whole online social environment is booming at present. While there may be arguments about Facebook outdoing Myspace, or vice-versa, it doesn’t matter. They are both performing reasonably well, besides which they are only two players in a large environment. Social marketing has a greater difficulty in deciding where to start - not who is the bigger player.

You can obtain some great results from social marketing if you know the how, when and what aspects. Whilst not considered by many to be social media, forums can provide sites with some of the best targeted traffic available - often better targeted than the search engines.

I have worked with sites that concentrate all their marketing efforts on forums alone. They undertake basic SEO techniques but ignore all the traditional social marketing or social bookmarking sites. Why?

Forums enable them to communicate with others in the their specific field. By offering free items as part of their marketing strategy they receive a lot of traffic - more importantly - they are continually being discussed. They have found that by providing an extremely good service including doing everything possible to ensure customers are happy, along with good products and good prices, they have been able to build a good reputation.

They could probably do a lot better if they wanted to ramp up their marketing to include search engine marketing, social marketing through other avenues and some of the more traditional forms of advertising. Their response - why? They are growing at a steady pace - a pace they can handle. They are receiving a lot of backlinks because others are talking about them and recommending them.

In this instance, social marketing far outweighs search engine marketing. I do note one thing however, their social marketing is, in the long term, doing a lot of the search engine marketing for them!

If you spend any time on any of the social sites you will soon come to recognize the ‘desperate’ social marketing users. There are lot of them around too.

The strange thing is, you don’t need to be desperate to get results and you can get those results fairly quickly if your approach is sensible. Perhaps I should add sensitive - sensitive to the needs of others. What marks a user as a ‘desperate’ social marketing wanna be?

Friends - they add a lot of friends in a very short period of time. On sites that allow it, they will view a profile and that users friend list and proceed to add everyone from that list. They will then select someone from that list and add all of their friends. Desperadoes believe in quantity - not quality.

Votes - they will Thumb, Digg, Sphinn etc every request that comes their way. Look at their favorites lists and in a matter of days they will have gone from zero to zillions. Have a closer look and the topics will be a real mish-mash with little connection between the topics.

Language - on bookmarking sites you will start to get messages such as ‘I always promote yours - please promote mine’ even though they have only been there a short while. They really don’t know if they have promoted yours - they have promoted so much they are lost in their own tangle.

These are just three indicators. With a little commonsense you can achieve much more. Being a little selective in your friends or contacts. Promoting content that deserves promoting. Providing good quality content that others will promote without being asked too. Social marketing is a phrase in which the majority of users forget the first part - being social - just don’t become the desperate wanna be.

Whether you are launching a social networking site or just learning how to market your small five page informative site SEOmoz can help you with all aspects of your online marketing approach. If you are internet savvy and realize that search engine optimization is must to allow your e-commerce site to grow and prosper but you lack a bit of direction than SEOmoz can help you get on the right path.

SEOmoz has tools such as page strength and keyword difficulty to guides that will allow you to build search engine friendly websites and professional link building campaigns. SEOmoz is a true industry leader and provides nothing but excellence for its members. Search marketing professionals and CEO’s across the world have been using SEOmoz for many years and continue to rely on it for the success of their organizations. SEOmoz has grown into a staple in the online marketing industry being a go to destination for helpful inside tips on how to grow your company online. SEOmoz allows you to take the knowledge you have and put it all together to execute a winning equation.

For more information on how SEOmoz can help you grow you business please visit their website and get started today.

A trend that is slowly growing is the self promotion of profiles on the various social networking and social bookmarking sites. In fact self promotion of any online activity.

Take a look at some of the blogs around you. You will see in one of the sidebars a list that probably reads something like - ‘Find Me On’ with a list of links to all their online profiles. Is it a good idea.

From my perspective it definitely is. If I come across your site, whether it is a blog or standard website, or even a profile on Facebook or Myspace, see that you are also on Bebo may encourage me to add you to my Bebo circle of friends - particularly if Bebo was my primary networking ‘hang-out’.

By promoting your presence, you can increase your networking base. You can also decrease your workload. Using the above example, if we both use the same social site, say Bebo, then we don’t need to be engaging with each other on any of the other sites.

Tell me where you are and I may just add you to my list of contacts if I like what I am reading. If you don’t tell me where you are, I wont even know you exist in any of these social sites. Never miss an opportunity to promote yourself.

Social networking can be a real winner if you know how to use it properly. There are however always going to be negatives if you are not careful and do not have some form of self control. some of these negative include:

Productivity: Social networking can be counter productive at times. If you spread yourself too thinly by trying to communicate across more than network, you may find you are spending more time ‘keeping up’ and responding to others in your networks.

Solution: Limits; limits; limits. (1) Place limits on when and for how long you participate in social networking. (2) Limit the number of social networks you can reasonably deal with in your time frame. (3) Limit the number of people in your network.

Personal or Business: It is very easy to get distracted into discussing non business matters, like sport, the weather or perhaps politics. In small doses this can help to personalize your social networking experience, it can however become a huge distraction.

Solution: Stick to business matters whenever possible and try to keep control of both yourself and the conversation. If there is something that interests you but is not related to your social networking activities, bookmark it and come back when time allows - or during your own time.

Following: Are you a follower or a leader. If you start conversations, do others follow or are you ignored. There is nothing wrong with being a follower, however it quite easy to follow and find yourself completely off tangent to your goals.

Solution: Learn to be a leader or learn to ‘read’ where a conversation is going and conclude it when it is going off track.

Social networking can be handled in a completely relaxed cup of coffee in hand aimless style, or in an in control focused goal setting way. If you can achieve your goals and still maintain productivity then social networking is for you. If you cannot focus and remain in control then you need to reassess your social networking strategies.

I converse frequently with several people in South Africa and these calls are important. With my being in the United States, it can be a bit costly. However last year I discovered a seemingly great site - www.SpeakPrePaid.com. I had bought a card roughly every week from them and was loyal to their site despite there being several other calling card sites that I could have purchased cards from. To date, I’ve spent over $800 with this company so I’d consider myself quite loyal to their company.

A few months ago I purchased a card and to my dismay the pin was expired. I wrote to them and they promptly wrote back giving me a new pin. Days later it happened again with two cards I purchased. I then wrote to them and received no response back. As someone who needs to call out with these cards, every day that passed without a response back was NOT good. These
calls were important and I felt that the money I had spent shouldn’t go to waste so I waited patiently again. One day out of desperation I bought one more card and there was an error on the page — this time the order went through only I received no card number! I wrote AGAIN - No answer. I wrote back roughly three times before I finally got a response. It wasn’t until I wrote that I may file something with the Better Business Bureau that someone responded.

They claimed that their customer service had been down (or something of the sort) for the past few weeks and that they would promptly issue a refund. I thanked them and looked at my Bank Account for the $30 that was owed to me. I waited, and waited and nothing. I wrote to them two times after that and still no response. On another note - from a business standpoint…what is a business like this doing without a customer service number? Granted if you are too small and cannot afford a 24 hour service
line, that is fine but at least have some sort of toll free number that is open a few hours a day. To have to contact this company via email and only email is utterly ridiculous.

To say you’re going to clear it up and not follow through with rectifying the situation makes matters even worse! I am disgusted that as a loyal customer to this company that they are this disorganized and careless in their response. I know it’s “just $30? but come on now. It’s more the principal than anything else. I have given up with contacting them and whether or not their customer service is going through some “issues”…having these “issues” for months on end is absolutely unacceptable. When you say you’re going to do something…follow through. With a recession teetering, customer satisfaction is more important than ever. If you can go the extra mile to please your customers, they will be more apt to spread the word about your services (which I have about this site in the past) and use you more frequently. People are reluctant to spend their money these days so
keeping your recurring customers is VITAL to the success of your business.

In terms of reputation management, a company must keep on top of the ball because bad reports mean bad business. One bad mark and it can stay on your search engine report card forever. It’s a blemish in what could have been a perfectly untarnished record. You must always be conversing with your customers keeping them pleased as they can use social media (such as
my blogging about it right now) or review sites and tear your company to shreds. I will say…I would never write a bad write up about a company unless they truly deserve it. In this case, they certainly do. Needless to say - I will be writing the report and never using them again.

BUYER BEWARE - www.SpeakPrepaid.com - you may not get your calling card OR your money back.

Humans are fickle and what attracts them today may not attract them tomorrow. There are however some things that will always be attractive if presented in the right manner. To gain traffic from social bookmarking sites is not always that difficult - we just have the wrong expectations.

Many website owners, and more so bloggers, expect every page submitted to a social bookmarking site to suddenly get traffic. It’s never going to happen. You can however encourage a regular readership by using these sites appropriately.

Humor and controversy along with shock are the types of content that never seem to die. However it still comes back to the magnets that will draw individuals in and they are the oft repeated trio:

Killer title
Good first paragraph
Great content

You have read it a million times and the reason it gets repeated is because it’s true. Think of your own experiences, the title sparks your inquisitive nature, the opening paragraph sucks you in and from there before you know it you have read the whole article.

The key to attracting traffic from the social bookmarking sites is to understand the climate of each site. Some topics and genres work well on one site and not on another. Pick the right sites and promote your content there. When promoting, you are often better off submitting your pages to sites over a period of time rather than just mass submitting.

By spreading the submission period you will spread the traffic and not get a reputation for spamming. Just be sure to submit to the right sites - not mass submit.

A different marketing gimmick that is creeping into many businesses, particularly bricks and mortar businesses, is to establish a catchy URL, set up a page on Myspace, and have that URL redirect to the Myspace page.

A slightly different twist to alternative domain names that all redirect to the one main domain. It’s a clever marketing ploy, particularly for bricks and mortar businesses as a page on Myspace can be easier to establish than creating a web site from scratch. After all, you are after traffic to your products in the stores, not necessarily your web site.

SmallBusinessNewz has a post on a slightly different topic, making use of your packaging, where they described one company’s promotion of their URL which does redirect to Myspace.

Orbit’s strategy is a little different. The URL they provided does not simply go to the Orbit product page at wrigley.com (the site of Wrigley, it’s manufacturer), it goes to GoodCleanFeeling.com, which surprisingly redirects to a MySpace page.

The Myspace page has video clips, downloadable ringtone, competitions and wallpapers. All promotional material for Wrigley’s. As a marketing move, it is clever. You have the offline promotion of a friendly URL - GoodCleanFeeling.com - A Myspace page that offers a lot to the visitor, and an online promotion tool through Myspace it self. Clever use of Web 2.0 philosophies. No wonder they have over 1300 friends.