Centerpieces

With dozens of social bookmarking sites available, which (if any) should news organizations use? More important, what (if anything) could these tools contribute? First, let's look at which sites some news organizations use.

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This is the second part in a series on social bookmarking. Read the first article, which describes a few of the main social bookmarking sites. * A list of social bookmarking sites

The Washington Post allows users to "save, share, and recommend" articles to six social bookmarking sites: del.icio.us, Digg, reddit, Google, Yahoo! and Facebook. The Post offers information about the social bookmarking sites that it uses with a brief description of each.

I checked 40 news sites in all to see which social bookmarking sites they make available to readers.


So, what can this practice accomplish?

Marketing Advantages:

This past October, Jeff Jarvis, of the Buzz Machine, wrote about one reason news organizations should consider using social bookmarking. He says encouraging users to distribute your content for you is an alternative to a traditional marketing plan.

He points to the success YouTube as a similar application:


Bookmarking sites can help journalists propagate content throughout online communities. Tools like AddThis or Shareomatic allow users to submit links through a customized widget to one site or to many sites at once.

Tools like AddThis also help gauge which social bookmarking sites are most popular. AddThis has tracked where people are sending links to and compiled that information. Pandia, a site dedicated to searching on the Web, has created a list of the top five social bookmarking sites as well as what to look for when choosing a bookmarking site on your site.

A Source of Story Ideas:

Want to know what your audience is reading about? Since social bookmarking sites are a collection of stories that users cared enough about to share with others, the content of such sites can tell you a lot.

Do you think links submitted to social bookmarking sites are news? Join this discussion in the Facebook group Journalists and Facebook.

The Risks of Social Bookmarking:

In science writer David Bradley's blog Significant Figures, he provides 10 reasons bloggers should avoid social bookmarking. Among his concerns is the energy dedicated to this practice. He said instead of sending content to social bookmarking sites, organizations should focus resources on producing compelling original content to build loyal traffic. (Ironically, the Web site has a link to Shareomatic at the bottom of the post.)

A common criticism of social bookmarking: Once a user finds a story on Digg or Furl, he or she often won't come back to the source site.

Darren Rowse, whose Web site ProBlogger aims to help bloggers make money, doesn't agree. He pitches 10 ideas on how to get users to come back to your site after they have found your content on a bookmarking site.

He also has some tips on how to build a "Digg culture" that can have a long-term effect. For example, he says you can increase traffic by driving new users to opt-in content like newsletter subscriptions and RSS (a feed to your site's headlines).

Since news organizations can't control what people submit, users could possibly send inaccurate content with typos, or even completely take the story out of context. Here's a discussion about some other concerns with social bookmarking.

Web sites usually appreciate unexpected spikes in traffic. But if your server isn't prepared, it can cause the site to go down. One link submitted to Digg tells you "how to know if your site will survive getting Dugg?"

What's Next?

Social bookmarking is a fragment of the much larger social networking/Web 2.0 world. Many news sites are just beginning to gain faith in these features, while developers create new applications with even more functionality each day.

Web designer Ben Hung sees these separate components eventually melding to form a more integrated Web experience based on each user's connections, bookmarks and content from blogs.

There is a glimmer of this integration already. Social bookmarking sites direct users to a variety of Web resources in one place. And for even more "social context," some sites like Mugshot, Pownce (created by Digg creator Kevin Rose) and OpenID provide a one-stop login to users' existing social networks — helping users create a single entry point to their Web world.

Providing users the means to add content to social bookmarking communities can potentially drive thousands of users to a news site. But getting content to bookmarking sites is only half the battle. Getting user to pay attention once its there is more important. Here are some tips on how to do that, including the use of catchy headlines, strong introductory paragraphs and interacting with readers.

Are social bookmarkers journalists? No. But they are volunteers who help to create a Web version of the Nielsen ratings. Constantly — and at no cost.