Design/Tech Stuff :: Social Networking 101 with Bookmarks

by Fashionmista aka That IT Girl, Spammy Scammers, and Katie James

Social Networking is huge. It's huge in concept and it's huge in people who use it. What is  "social networking," and isn't networking social anyway? Yes. "Social Networking" as a term that in this day in age means to have a presence beyond your website on other websites that are built specifically to bring people together to share resources, tips, thoughts, whatever. Not too long ago, it was said that having a website was as necessary as having a business card. Still true. Now you need more. There are so many websites in the world, and so many ways to promote them, both free and paid, that your website needs to become larger than itself and work for you when you're sleeping.

Social Networking can be done for free in many ways. "For free" means that your fingers are doing the flying across the keyboard and clicking the mouse, so it's actually your own time that you're spending. And with anything, especially online, manners are very, very important. You could be a huge company, or you could be a little person with a website, and get slammed by online egomaniacs, or highly praised as offering something special and unique. The benefit of social networking, if done organically and with sincerity (although that can sometimes backfire), could mean that you are getting new eyeballs onto your website, onto your logo, reading about your brand, trusting you as a source of great pieces of information, etc.

This article is going to focus on one form of social networking: bookmarking. "Social bookmarking" has taken the old habit of bookmarking something in your own private browser (Internet Explorer, AOL, Firefox, etc.) and moved it to a shared environment. People have created websites that you can go to, freely create an account, and start bookmarking your favorite pages that you find on the web. These can be news articles, pictures, products, videos, and anything else that gets invented to live on the Internet.

Some such websites are StumbleUpon.com, Digg.com, del.icio.us, and many, many more. These started out, and remain, a place for people to simply keep track of their websites online, so that they could be accessed from any computer. But now, everyone can and wants to see what everyone is bookmarking, and read, sort of, a specialized newspaper. For this post, we are going to talk about StumbleUpon.com and Stylehive.com.

StumbleUpon.com

Years ago, I created an account at StumbleUpon.com to keep track of articles that had to do with "graphic design" or "seo" or "marketing" or "designer" or anything I wanted to find later that had to do with a topic. Then an online friend turned me onto "photo stumbling," which means I could right click on an image, and because I had an account with StumbleUpon.com and had downloaded it to my browser, a little tool appeared in my list of tools called "Photo Stumble This!"

Suddenly my page of links at StumbleUpon was not only useful to me, but others found it useful too, and now it was pretty because I was photo stumbling photos and products. And then I looked one day at my account, and saw that I had some "Fans" who had pressed a button saying that they liked me. If I liked them back, we could be "Mutual Friends" and then I could see what they were stumbling and learn all about their stuff.

Here's what my Stumleupon page looks like. The latest link is a "photo stumble," so a tan image is showing up there with links and my review of it. To the right are people who have visited my page recently:

The other night, I Stumbled my own article on how to create a Flickr widget/badge thing. But I don't only Stumble my own things. That would be not benefit greater good because there are lots more articles out there. I tend to Stumble articles on tech news, fashion news, designer news, and of course photos whenever I can. So, to keep and build credibility, I stick with the idea on which Stumbleupon was created, which is to share pages, and share as many pages as I have time for - other people's pages, with my own pages mixed in.

Tip: I find that usually when I "photo stumble" a picture at night, that picture can generate about 100-200 hits to the site that I did it to. As proof, go to my burp cloths Etsy page and look to the right to see how many views it got - about 250. That happened in one day. Now visit my photo envelope things, which I did not photo stumble, and see how they got about 20 visits so far. I posted both of these products on the same day.

Stylehive.com

I first learned about Stylehive through a Google Alert I set up for katie-james.com. A girl had "hived" my chocolate brown checkbook covers. Nice of her. Well, later on, I got a sale for a jewelry bag. Sometimes people say where they heard about Katie James when they place their order (thanks to my shopping cart, ZenCart), and this girl did. Stylehive.com. So, a free post that I did nothing to create, for a $24 checkbook cover, landed me a $52 sale of a jewelry pouch. I was so grateful, that I contacted the Stylehive person who hived me (she had a blog linked from her Stylehive page, and I tracked her down), and I offered to send her the brown checkbook cover she liked so much, and she accepted my offer.

Common Sense Networking

What is crucial to all of this is honesty. Which as I mentioned, though, can backfire. So "organic" might be a better word. Serendipitous. Create your own luck sort of thing. But for the most part, if you are going to do something publicly online, like thanking someone, or giving props to a blog by leaving a comment, you'll probably be fine and spreading awareness about your web presence if your profile is linked to your website or blog. However, if you drop a resource that just happens to be yours on a blog comment, be very careful. Bloggers, and now people with these social networking accounts - basically anyone with a voice online - will pick up if you are solely marketing without meaning it. Look at this article (which is stumbled on the LWL Stumbleupon page), which brings to light the touchy subject of "thanking" Stumblers when they stumble one of your web pages. So, you just want to tread carefully.

I did thank a blogger for including my jewelry pouch in her Christmas top 10 list last year (I should have checked my records first though, because she had just bought it!). The preferred method of doing this was to privately email her, but her email wasn't listed anywhere. I thanked her on her blog via a comment, which was all about her pregnancy (and is now about her newborn). Very discreetly, and sincerely, I offered to send her my burp cloth to see if she liked it. Keep it, toss it, whatever. She did blog about it and sent a ton of traffic.

This post has been long enough! There will be more on this type of marketing, but I think this can get you started. There are different ways to use these tools, which is really up to your imagination. And this post title is not unique. Here's a Google search on "social networking 101" to get you more info.

Comments

[Carla Lynne Hall]

Katie,

Great stuff here, as always.

Thanks!
Carla

[Katie]

Thanks, Carla!