Market segmentation has been a major part of marketing for many decades. Do you apply the same principles to your online social marketing and through your social bookmarking?

According Wikipedia:

A market segment is a subgroup of people or organizations sharing one or more characteristics that cause them to have similar product needs….

and

Market segment is the processing of marketing of characterizing a market into distinct subsets (segments) that behave in similar ways or have similar needs.

If you were to take this approach, your would break your potential social market into subsets depending on different characteristics. For example, if you marketed and sold pet food, you may break your market up into cat, dogs, birds and fish. To take advantage of this, you would need to change your social bookmarking and social marketing strategies.

You could set up different identities within each of the social sites; one identity for cat, another for dog; and so on. You would then only have the cat fanciers in your cat group. Now when marketing a particular product aimed at cats, you would be marketing to and audience made up entirely of can fanciers rather than an audience with a wide range of pets. You could then use your social bookmarks to identify information that is far better target; this should result in a much higher conversion rate for visitors.

Segmenting your market can be rather time consuming if you have a broad base that you are targeting. However, if you start by taking one segment at a time and optimizing your social marketing and social bookmarking to that segment, the returns could be much higher than what you see at present. Market segmentation and social marketing or social bookmarking can go hand in hand.

When we consider social sites we automatically think of Facebook, MySpace or perhaps Bebo. Social media sites include YouTube and Flickr. There are many social bookmarking sites that can be used to deliver traffic to your sites.

Digg and StumbleUpon are the two most popular sites although del.icio.us is is also well respected. These are not the only sites around. The following bookmarking sites could well be worth a visit depending on the genre of your site.

Reddit: this is one of the social bookmarking sites that relies heavily on your interaction within the community. In fact if you don’t have the time to invest on this site then you will not get the most from it. Reddit really is a social networking site - the emphasis is on the networking. The more you network the more successful you will become.

De.lirio.us: this site is very similar to del.icio.us - in fact you can import your data from del.icio.us if you wanted. De.lirio.us works in a similar fashion to del.icio.us although when submitting a post, you need to use your own tags - but then you already use tags don’t you?

Linkagogo: a site that is perfect for novices. It is easy to use and easy to get a good understanding of. Whilst no where near as big as some of the other sites, sometimes smaller is better - there is certainly less competition and as the site grows popularity, so too will your authority as an ‘old hand’.

These are just three social bookmarking sites that could be used to bring in new traffic. The keys to these sites include good tagging and good networking skills. The more you network the more authority you will gain.

For every positive there is an equal and opposite negative. At least, thats what I was taught at school - well something like that anyway. It runs true to social bookmarking sites as well. Often, no matter how many places your submit your site too, it may just take time to see any results.

I said there were positives and negatives. For many sites, social bookmarking can bring very good results very quickly. For other sites, the progress may be a little slower - and that is the downside.

There is one unarguable fact when it comes to the internet, some genres are simply more popular than others. Any content devoted to marketing, SEO, celebrities, cars and wide range of topics are going to be popular. If you site is devoted to less popular genres like mens ties (do people still wear them) or mens underwear (yes - we do still wear them - sometimes) then you are going to struggle to get visitors. It is no different when it comes to social bookmarking.

If you can accept that some genres are more popular than others then you can see that even i social bookmarking sites, there is going to be a similar balance of popular and not so popular genres. The popular sites are going to get instant action. The not so popular sites are not going to get that same ‘instant action’.

This does not mean that sites that sit in the not so popular categories should ignore social bookmarking (or any other form of marketing for that matter). It does mean that often you are going to have to work a little harder for smaller results. However, social bookmarking delivers more than just traffic. The long term benefit of social bookmarking is the increase in the number of inbound one-way links - since these sites have fairly high rankings, that is some valuable link juice you are receiving.

If your business or web site sits in an unpopular category, don’t discard social bookmarking as an option. The benefits down the track will be invaluable.

You often hear that each social bookmarking site is different, and it’s best to focus your content on the social bookmarking platform that values that type of content most. Good plan. But how do the different sites value content?

SocialMediaTrader did an analysis of 500 front-page articles from February, 2008, for several different popular social bookmarking sites. The sample size isn’t huge, but results could give you a guideline of the best sites to bookmark your content.

February, 2008 # of Front-Page Stories

StumbleUpon

1. Technology 105
2. Offbeat 93
3. Arts 73
4. Politics  47
5. Lifestyle 48
6. Science 25
7. Videos 24
8. Tutorial 20
9. News 18
10. Business/Make money 17
11. Environment 15

DIGG

1. US Elections 44
2. Tech News  34
3. World News  32
4. General Sciences 30
5. Odd Stuff  28
6. Environment 27
7. Politics  27
8. Comedy 25
9. Movies  24
10. Business 22

Del.icio.us

1. Technology 51%
2. Offbeat 12%
3. Arts 9%
4. Tutorial 7%
5. Business 6%
6. Lifestyle 6%
7. Politics 3%
8. Science 2%
9. Videos 2%
10. Environment 1%

Propeller

1. Politics 68
2. News 63
3. Technology 57
4. Health 48
5. Money 37
6. Humor 25
7. Celebrities 23
8. Do No Evil 21
9. Science 20
10. Personals 14
11. Music 11

MIXX

1. Entertainment 64
2. Politics 59
3. Informative 53
4. Tech 23
5. Business 21
6. Lifestyle 20
7. Other 19
8. Education 13

These stats give you an idea of what each community is looking for, and should give you a start on finding the 1 or 2 sites that give you your best chance of submitting your own niche content that goes viral.

People get confused about where to start or what to focus on when they begin social bookmarking or any other aspect of social networking. Just remember the basic: it’s a relationship game. And the key to building relationships with people is to share your story. Which means you’ve got to have a story.

Start with the short version. You can build on it later. The short version is ALWAYS useful, in any situation, online or offline. In sales, this has been called your “elevator speech”. That’s what you’d say to someone in the few seconds you share with them on the elevator, to get them to say, “Hey! Can we get together? I want to hear more!”

Your story is in the form of an elevator speech, but it’s focused on YOU. You want to network with people, and you want to make it imperative in THEIR mind that they network with you. The biggest success in social bookmarking or any kind of marketing comes when people knock on YOUR door, not the other way around.

Facts tell. Stories sell. To put together your short story, answer these questions:

1. What’s your background? (What did you USED TO do?)
2. How long did you do it?
3. What did you like about it?
4. What did you HATE about it?
5. How did it lead you to what you are doing now? (The more irony & contrast, the better.)
6. Talk briefly about the social networking benefits of what you do now v. what you used to do.
7. What do you LOVE MOST about social networking?

Write up your “About Me”. You should be able to speak it in a minute or less. One reason it’s effective is, it’s short. It personalizes you to other social bookmarkers. And, of course, you can use the same story over and over and over.

This social networking tool will help you build relationships, and that is what gets you the real benefits in social bookmarking.

Keeping your social blogging simple is getting more and more complicated.

You know there are a gazillion distractions these days, making it tough for your articles to get attention and tougher to keep it. You want your writing to pay off for you, so you optimize.

• You optimize a headline that offers a great benefit and/or arouses curiousity and/or is controversial.
• You optimize the first sentence of your blog post because if the headline got them this far, now you must hook them into reading the rest of your article.
• You study StumbleUpon and Digg and the other social bookmarketing media so you can optimize your entire blog post to capture votes, not to mention hearts and minds.
• With your keyword list in hand, you optimize your post to attract your target market searchers who use the search engines.
• You go back over each sentence to find the places where you can optimize the humor or irony or alliteration or word picture or plain old intellectual impact (See? Alliteration!).
• You optimize “you”s vs “I”s, so you are writing about your reader, not about yourself.
• All these optimizations have certainly left something messed up, so you go back over the whole thing and re-optimize spelling and grammar, so the darned thing makes sense.

Pretty good plan. Have we missed anything?

Well, yes. How about … was there a point to your post? In the midst of all this optimization to attract eyeballs, did you actually give them some valuable insight or information? It’s not that unusual in social blogging to totally lose sight of the fact that a real live reader is looking for actual value. And if you trick them into reading something without value, they won’t be back.

So, definitely keep it simple. But add one more optimization to your social blogging: make it good!

StumbleUpon can be a great traffic generator - if you give the Stumblers what they want.

It’s a 2-part puzzle:
1. How can you get a LOT of “Thumbs Up”?
2. How can you turn those folks into dedicated fans of your blog?

Here’s a 10-step StumbleUpon plan that works:

1. Focus on a very clear-cut, targeted niche market. Who are they exactly? Describe them. Which StumbleUpon categories appeal to them? Write your article very specifically for those categories. Get your posts submitted to those exact categories.
2. “Lots of significant detail, clear and concise.” As you write and edit, hold that thought. The StumbleUpon reader craves examples, but they don’t want your life history.
3. Your 3 most-likely traps: too personal, too complicated, too unrelated. If a bit of information is interesting, but you can’t make a simple, strong, direct connection to your article focus, get rid of it. And don’t “wax eloquent.” Get to the point immediately.
4. Model a title with impact AND curiousity value from a “swipe file” of great viral titles. Use strong, concise subheads. Make the article easy to start and easy to continue reading.
5. Carefully craft your first paragraph as a concise statement of every important detail that’s in your article … and then be sure the rest of your article fulfills that promise.
6. StumbleUpon users have a “horse’s mouth” fetish. You can certainly use someone else’s ideas, but make everything uniquely your own, in your own voice. Include bulleted lists, advice, links, and graphics that clarify and support your point.
7. The social bookmarking crowd gets ecstatic over lists (especially resource lists), detailed step-by-step “How-To”s.
8. Think “unique insight.” StumbleUpon users compete with each other to find and share the newest, most valuable guide, discussion, approach, or evaluation - especially if it’s easy-to-use - of whatever their #1 focus is. That’s a tall order, but filling it can give you a big payoff.
9. Start your article with a clear, related, magnetic, eyeball-sucking impact image.
10. Be an active Stumbler. Every day when YOU come on sites that fulfill most or all of these criteria, take a moment to give a StumbleUpon “Thumbs up” and a clear review of what is so valuable to you. You will gain credibility and make social bookmarking friends this way, and you’ll have a head-start toward bringing your own articles to the attention of a wider, friendlier audience.

Here’s a social marketing plan to build your brand on the social bookmarking and social networking websites:

1. Be there or be square. The value of social media is in the relationships. Online relationships are just like offline relationships. If you aren’t there, you have no relationship. If you work at finding friends for 5 days, then go away for 6 weeks and come back, it’s not the same. You can’t just pick up right where you left off. That’s not how “social” works, online or offline.

You have to apply consistent, day-to-day attention, or you’ll just waste your time. And the more consistent you are, the more you remind people of your brand. Your market can potentially find you through every action you do. So be active on the social marketing websites. Every action you take opens the door for people to connect with your website or your blog or you.

2. Speaking of consistent - if you want to use the social media, it’s good to REALLY learn a handful of social bookmarking or social networking sites. Choose the same username for each. This increases your presence, gets you more notice, makes you more … social. If you want to promote your blog, maybe you focus on Technorati, StumbleUpon, and Digg. Start out by targeting 10 minutes a day on each, and do it. Keep a consistent message across all your social marketing profiles, consistent voice, style, topics you cover, avatar, etc. Doing this reinforces both your image and your brand.

3. Support the entire StumbleUpon community … or whichever sites you focus on. If you spend time on a forum, you’ll sometimes hear the guests grouse about the “drive-bys”. Those are the forum visitors who post once about whatever it is they’re promoting and then disappear for months … until they post about the next thing they’re promoting. They add no value to the group. They have no sense of community. They are looked on as scum by the “residents”. It’s tempting to just promote yourself. Millions of people use these sites. But what actually happens is, people take more notice of you when you become a useful social marketing resource. And that entices other social networkers to share your blog and speed up your popularity. If all you ever do is point to yourself, those others won’t participate as much.

4. Ride the “social” wave. If you do the first 3 items on this list, then you will have put yourself in position for #4. When your social marketing appears consistently across several social media and you demonstrate your desire to give people the best results possible when they search your niche, you will build a following.

And, of course, that’s why you joined most of these social marketing sites in the first place.

Matt Ridout at SeoUnique Blog interviewed 5 “power” social marketers to see what makes them different from the rest of us, and to get an idea what the benefits are to someone who spends several hours a day at social bookmarking websites.

Some of their random thoughts:

• The sites they visit most are Mixx.com and StumbleUpon.com
• Each social bookmarking site has certain content that works better than other content. You have to hang out on the site awhile to figure it out.
• StumbleUpon.com has the most potential benefit for clients, no matter the size. It’s a great variation of personalities and interests; any niche gets good response, so long as you post good content; and you can use StumbleUpon to track what your friends think is important.
• Sphinn.com - social bookmarking for SEO, social marketing and social media. The SEO pros lurk here, so what you post better be good.
• Science & technology topics have a large following on social bookmarking sites, so the right science/tech post has high “viral” bookmarking potential
• The site most mentioned as “least liked” is Reddit.com, because it isn’t designed to be easy to use.

Overall, these power users choose a favorite social bookmarking site because it allows them to feel very “at home”. They find a site with a lot of other participants they respect, and that gives them the chance to build valuable relationships. Which, of course, is what social marketing is all about.

It’s called “social” for a reason. People go to StumbleUpon and other social bookmarking websites to share and learn and help each other and have fun … to be social.

If you use StumbleUpon only to promote a website, the “real” Stumblers will shun you. You are fairly easy to spot, because you skip the social aspect. You give your page “Thumbs Up,” and that is the end of your effort. But becoming part of the social mix is quick and simple: when you Stumble a page, write a review.

It doesn’t have to be lengthy, but it does need to be original. Don’t just copy wording from the page you are stumbling - that’s what most people do, and the SU pros mark you as a rank amateur with nothing to contribute.

Instead, find something really good on that target page - whether it’s your own page or not - some really good insight or technique, valuable to your target market. Write an original comment about that single point. A couple of sentences or a paragraph is fine, but be very definite about the point you make. When you do that, you help others make a decision, and you have become part of the StumbleUpon social bookmarking “in” group. You will attract fans, which is a very good thing for your business.

When you leave a review, you are not just telling other Stumblers about the webpage. You are telling them about YOU, making it much easier for your target market to find you and connect with you.

Now that the cat is out of the bag about Microsoft’s offer to buy out Yahoo!, let’s talk about del.icio.us.

As you know, del.icio.us is the social bookmarking site that is owned by Yahoo! It is the most popular social bookmarking site. Yes, even more popular than Digg. But Digg is much more social and better in terms of social marketing.

For the most part, del.icio.us still looks the way it did in 1999. Not much has changed. You have the capability to add friends to your network, but it’s a little cumbersome to do so. It is very streamlined. No photos and lengthy profiles. It’s mostly just a place to save bookmarks and that’s all its ever really aspired to be. Is it broke?

One might think that being in first place would mean nothing needs to change. But how long will del.icio.us remain the most popular bookmarking site if it doesn’t change? Would Microsoft change it? Yahoo! hasn’t.

I for one think that del.icio.us can be improved. It doesn’t need much. The bookmarking is good enough. But it is a little cumbersome to save bookmarks that you find through others. Perhaps giving users a choice between saving bookmarks and keeping notes on them and simply voting on the bookmarks without saving them would be an improvement. I don’t know what other del.icio.us users would say about that. But I’d like it.

Another thing I’d like to see is a more expansive profile page for del.icio.us users. The ability to upload photos and link to one’s website or blog would be nice. And as long as we’re going that route, why not give users the ability to vote up or down the profiles of other users. By giving people the ability to vote others up or down, del.icio.us can discourage spammers from just bookmarking anything and everything.

Some of the features of del.icio.us are nice, but hidden. You have to really search to figure out how to send a note to another user that you have a bookmark for them. More explicit instructions on some of the features would be nice.

I’m not sure how I feel about Microsoft buying Yahoo! (if it happens), but if it does happen I’d like to see del.icio.us slightly improved.

StumbleUpon is one of the most popular social bookmarking and social networking sites online. There’s a good reason for this. It’s hard to classify SU as social bookmarking or social networking because it incorporates elements of both so well. I particularly like SUs toolbar, which gives users a one-click approach to voting for or against a site. If you like the site you just click the thumbs up icon. Don’t like it? Click the thumbs down button.

There are some downsides to StumbleUpon though. For instance, if you are the first person to vote on a site and you don’t like it then you can’t add it to the SU community. SU won’t let you. That’s a bummer. But I’ve recently discovered another weakness of the system, although my observation at this point is merely a hypothesis.

If you bookmark an entire blog - that is, the home page - then go back later and try to thumbs up a specific blog post, SU won’t let you. Click on the thumbs up button and you’ll get a gray thumb and no response. I believe this is because you’ve already shown that you like the entire site, therefore saying that you like a particular post is redundant. At least that’s the way SU sees it. For this reason, I recommend only voting for individual blog posts.

I wonder if anyone else has had this experience with StumbleUpon and if so, what did you do about it.

Flip through the headlines of your favorite social bookmarking website. Be it Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, or wherever, I think you’ll notice one common strain. The stories with the most attention have attention-grabbing headlines.

It’s been a newspaper principle for a long time. If you want readers to read your stories then you should write headlines that grab their attention. Then we all went online. It didn’t change. You want people to read? Reach out and grab them.

That principle is as true for social marketing at it ever was for anything else. Headlines - good headlines - make people read. They get the click. And that’s the first step to earning trust. You may write a dynamite article or blog post, but if no one reads it because you failed to get their attention with the headline then all the brilliance in the world won’t matter. Headlines. That’s where it’s at. And don’t you forget it.

One overlooked aspect of SEO that many small businesses overlook is social bookmarking. I highly recommend that every business engage in social bookmarking, not just for the social aspect of marketing but for the SEO benefits.

Just what are those benefits exactly?

I’ve noticed that when I bookmark blog posts that I’ve made, those blog posts will rise higher in the search rankings, stay longer in the search engine SERPs, and attract more traffic for my blog. The reason is simple. Each bookmark is an inbound link for your blog post or website. They likely also increase your PageRank, but that as yet is unproven.

Besides the SEO benefits, social bookmarking is a traffic tool. You can actually get a lot of great traffic from social bookmarking. Depending on the value of your content, its nature, and the various characteristics of the bookmarking sites you are using, that traffic can be good traffic or bad. It’s as important to choose the right social bookmarking tool for your blog as it is to engage in bookmarking. Take the time to learn the characters of each of the bookmarking sites and the kind of content that does well there.

The first Open Web Awards hosted by Mashable was a success. The awards night was a bit late since the winners were already announced last December 21, 2007. But still, it was a success and I’m hoping this won’t just be a first.

The conference was held yesterday January 10 at sunny San Francisco, California at the Palace Hotel. The whole Social Media and Web 2.0 community has finally got to recognizing the best of the best. A total of 250,000 votes were cast. Next year, I am certain it’ll be bigger— more nominations, more finalists, and hopefully more sponsors so the prizes will be bigger.

Here are the winners of Mashable’s first ever Open Web Awards.

1. PEOPLE’S CHOICE
Mainstream and Large Social Networks
Netlog

Applications and Widgets
WidgetBucks

Social News and Social Bookmarking
digg

Social Search
facebook

Sports and Fitness
SPORTME

Photo Sharing
VOIS

Video Sharing
Kaltura

Start Pages
iGoogle

Places and Events
myspace.com

Music
PANDORA

Social Shopping
ZliO

Mobile
Google Mobile

Niche and Miscellaneous Social Networks
cafemom

3. JUDGE’S CHOICE
Mainstream and Large Social Networks
facebook

Applications and Widgets
Flock

Social News and Social Bookmarking
digg

Social Search
Mahalo

Sports and Fitness
ESPN

Photo Sharing
flickr

Video Sharing
YouTube

Start Pages
netvibe

Places and Events
Meetup

Music
last.fm

Social Shopping
woot!

Mobile
twitter

Niche and Miscellaneous Social Networks
FilmCrave

Websites like facebook and digg are lucky to have been awarded twice. I agree more with the Judge’s Choice than with the People’s Choice though.

Congratulations to the winners! Here’s to a more successful and social Web 2.0 and Social Media in 2008!