Excerpt from Sur­vival Guide Chap­ter 7: Shar­ing, not self-promotion, should be top of mind

Here is part 7 of the series I will post over the next few months based on chap­ters from my new book, A Sur­vival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Opti­miza­tion.

The book is meant to be a guide to build­ing an opti­mized foun­da­tion in social Web for begin­ners and advanced users alike.

Chap­ter 7 of the book is about social book­mark­ing and crowd­sourc­ing using news aggre­ga­tors, enabling users to save and share their favorite Web­sites and deter­mine the pop­u­lar­ity of a news story, blog entry, or Web­site through var­i­ous vot­ing and rat­ing systems.

The fol­low­ing excerpts are from A Sur­vival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Opti­miza­tion: Strate­gies, Tac­tics, and Tools for Suc­ceed­ing in the Social Web by Deltina Hay

Copy­right 2009 by Deltina Hay. All rights reserved.

A Social Book­mark­ing Strategy

The first thing to do is get a good feel for a num­ber of social book­mark­ing sites. (In the print edi­tion, there are some pop­u­lar sites listed at the end of this chap­ter and on the resource CD.) Choose a cou­ple that rep­re­sent your inter­ests. If you don’t feel inclined to do the research, I rec­om­mend start­ing with Delicious.com, Tech­no­rati, and Stum­ble­Upon. Using these three sites should give you a broad reach into the world of social book­mark­ing. Before you begin using a book­mark­ing site, it’s impor­tant to become famil­iar with the guide­lines. Some sites are much more strin­gent than oth­ers about book­mark­ing your own sites, or rep­re­sent­ing a busi­ness of any sort. It is best to go for­ward informed rather than risk get­ting a rep­u­ta­tion for ignor­ing the rules, or worse, get­ting banned from a site.

As you develop your social book­mark­ing strat­egy, keep in mind that the Social Web is about inter­act­ing, shar­ing, and collaboration—not self pro­mo­tion. Book­mark, tag, and com­ment on sites that inter­est you, and con­nect with oth­ers who share sim­i­lar inter­ests. You will be amazed at how many peo­ple you ulti­mately reach. There is noth­ing wrong with book­mark­ing your own Web pages or blog posts, as long as the site allows it; just bal­ance those con­tri­bu­tions with others.

I know I sound like a bro­ken record on this point, but fill out your pro­files com­pletely! You don’t want to go through the trou­ble of book­mark­ing a bunch of sites, only to have oth­ers not even know how to find your Web­site if they find your book­marks engag­ing enough to click through to your profile.

Cre­ate a list of your best key terms to use as tags and use them as often as they apply to the sites you book­mark. Use your best tags within the descrip­tions you give each of your book­marked sites as well. Many of the social book­mark­ing sites have devel­oped social net­work­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics as well. If avail­able, you should join groups that are rel­e­vant to your area of exper­tise or inter­est, and sub­scribe to email updates for those groups.

A Crowd­sourc­ing Strategy

Crowd­sourced [see def­i­n­i­tion] news sites are dif­fer­ent from social book­mark­ing sites in that they focus on shar­ing news and infor­ma­tion about sto­ries, Web­sites, and blogs, as opposed to shar­ing book­marks to Web­sites or blogs. As a result, you want to use a dif­fer­ent strat­egy for these sites than you would social book­mark­ing sites.

There are a lot of crowd­sourced news sites out there, so you may want to explore a num­ber of the sites we men­tion at the end of this chap­ter in the book or on the resource CD to get a feel for them. You should be able to choose a few sites that are good fits for your message.

As always, fill out your pro­files com­pletely so that oth­ers can find their way to you easily.

Add some of your more news­wor­thy blog posts, Web pages, or online press releases to each of your cho­sen crowd-sourced news sites. Pay close atten­tion to each site’s sub­mis­sion guide­lines and do not add infor­ma­tion that does not adhere to their guide­lines or is not a good fit for the site. When con­sid­er­ing whether to add some­thing to one of these sites, ask your­self if it is some­thing you would find news­wor­thy and if you would nat­u­rally share it with oth­ers. Just like with social book­mark­ing sites, be sure to off­set your own con­tent by con­tribut­ing other con­tent as well. You will get a nat­ural fol­low­ing of read­ers from these sites if you con­tribute reg­u­larly and engage in the con­ver­sa­tions that hap­pen around top­ics of inter­est. The advan­tage to this strat­egy is that you can hone in on your tar­get audi­ence by seek­ing out and com­ment­ing on top­ics rel­e­vant to your prod­uct, book, or message.

Many of these sites have also added social net­work­ing fea­tures, so explore any addi­tional ways the sites may offer to con­nect, such as groups.

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Beyond strate­gies for social book­mark­ing and crowd­sourc­ing, this chap­ter also includes real world exam­ples of social book­mark­ing and crowd­sourc­ing in action, as well as lists of some pop­u­lar social book­mark­ing and crowd-sourcing sites, such as Tech­no­rati and Stum­ble­Upon, Red­dit and Mixx. The resource CD offers link­able resources and four fil­l­able PDF forms called “Social Book­mark­ing Strat­egy,” “Crowd­sourc­ing Strat­egy,” “Social Book­mark­ing & Crowd­sourc­ing Sub­mis­sion Form,” and “Social Book­mark­ing & Crowd­sourc­ing Track­ing Form.”

Read more about this social media book at the publisher’s site.

As always, Socialmedia.biz read­ers also get a spe­cial price of $16 (ship­ping included — retail $24.95) for this book. Just click the Buy Now button.

Pre­vi­ously in Socialmedia.biz:

• Sur­vival Guide Chap­ter 6: How to adver­tise your busi­ness on Facebook
• Sur­vival Guide Chap­ter 5: Pod­casts, vid­casts and Webcasts
• Sur­vival Guide Chap­ter 4: Build­ing a WordPress-powered website
• Sur­vival Guide Chap­ter 3: RSS feeds & blogs
• Sur­vival Guide Chap­ter 2: Prepar­ing con­tent for the social Web
• Sur­vival Guide Chap­ter 1: Cre­at­ing your social media strategy

Deltina Hay is the prin­ci­pal of Dal­ton Pub­lish­ing and Social Media Power and founder of the new social media Web­site ser­vice Plumb Social. Ms. Hay’s grad­u­ate edu­ca­tion in com­puter sci­ence, applied math­e­mat­ics and psy­chol­ogy led her nat­u­rally to social media con­sult­ing. Her crit­i­cally acclaimed book A Sur­vival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Opti­miza­tion can be found or requested any­where books are sold. Con­tact her or leave a com­ment below.

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