Connie Rock (@rock_writes)Melissa de Andrade (@MelissdeAndrade)

Social Bookmarking &Social News Tools

AGENDA

Social bookmarking and social news defined

Tools, tools, tools, and what’s an Alexa rank?

Social bookmarking tool demo: Delicious

Pinterest and corporate marketing

Social Bookmarking

Social News

Social Bookmarking is a way for Internet users to organize, store, manage, share, promote, comment and search for links of resources online

Social News is a type of Social Bookmarking that is dedicated to current news or a specific type of news such as sports or entertainment.

Social Bookmarking and News Tools: Cheat Sheet, Part 1: Delicious, Digg, Reddit, Pinterest, Stumbleupon

Site URL Audience demographics

Classification: Distinguishing Features, Claim to Fame

Year Launched

Alexa global/us traffic rank

Pros Cons

Delicious

www.delicious.com Primarily male, 35-44, graduate school education

Online social bookmarking/link sharing: Pioneered tagging/social bookmarking

2003 399/540 Easy to use, attractive layout, good for visually oriented users

Can’t post custom photos for links & stacks

Digg

www.digg.com

Primarily male, 25-34, some college

Social news: Diggs and Buries, a lot of tech focus. Pages that get lots of diggs are displayed on the Home page.

2004 189/No US rank

Wide variety of articles

Not very visually appealing, top users can quickly sink an article they don’t agree with

Reddit

www.reddit.com

Primarily male, 18-24, some college

Social news: Votes up or down, stories get promoted to front page based on popularity

2005 115/50 Easy to use Stories and commentary can be quite offbeat and interesting

Not very visually appealing, top users can quickly sink an article they don’t agree with

Pinterest

www.pinterest. com

Primarily female, 25-34, college

Social image sharing: Users create and label theme-based image collections called boards. Can repin, like, and comment on other pins.

2010 129/26 Visually appealing, voted as one of Time Magazine’s top 50 websites

Open beta status: Need invite to join immediately; open sign-up results in being put on a waitlist

Stumble-upon

www.stumbleupon.com/

Primarily female, 18-24, some college

Discovery/ Recommendation engine

2001 125/82 Especially good for traffic generation

No support for Safari

Social Bookmarking and News Tools: Cheat Sheet, Part 2:Trover, Slashdot, Instapaper, Flipboard

Site URL Audience demographics

Classification: Distinguishing Features, Claim to Fame

Year Launched

Alexa global/us traffic rank

Pros Cons

Trover

www.trover.com

Primarily male, 25 – 44, graduate school

Mobile discovery network: Users can share geotagged images with anyone else on the service.

2011 613,217/ 1196,578

Visually appealing, new Lists feature adds personalization and promotes community

Needs to augment feature set to truly distinguish itself

Slashdot

www.slashdot.org Primarily male, 25-34, some college

“News for nerds”: Social news site focused on technology, with heavy emphasis on Linux and open source issues, user-based moderation of discussions

1997 1,730/ 1,010

Good moderation by community, interesting discussions

Trolling, heavy bias toward Linux (not necessarily a con, unless you’re not a Linux fan )

Instapaper

www.instapaper. com

Primarily male, 25-34, graduate school

Social bookmarking (originally online bookmarking, but added social sharing and browsing in March 2011; users can link accounts to share stories)

2008 4,829/ 3,658

Simplicity, over 140 iPhone an diPad apps supporting sending pages to Instapaper using Developer API

Visually dense, old-school UI. some reviewers have had trouble sending stories to their Kindle

Flipboard

www.flipboard. com

Primarily male, 25-34, graduate school

Social magazine; users “flip” through their social networking feeds and feeds from websites that have partnered with Flipboard

2010 19,960/ 14,617

Visually appealing, combines old-school experience of flipping pages with social sharing features

Limited to Apple iPad and iPhone; can’t read stories when offline without an Instapaper account

The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources, and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis. The main Alexa traffic rank is based on a value derived from these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users). The three-month change is determined by comparing the site's current rank with its rank from three months ago. For example, on July 1, the three-month change would show the difference between the rank based on traffic during the first quarter of the year and the rank based on traffic during the second quarter.

Source: Alexa. About the Alexa Traffic Rankings (2012). Retrieved February 6, 2012, from http://www.alexa.com/help/traffic-learn-more

Your own footer

So what the heck is an Alexa rank,

anyway?

Is a social bookmarking tool

Is a link sharing tool

Lets users create, share, and invite contributors to stacks, “playlists for the web.”

Lets users follow, comment on, contribute to others’ stacks, and save stacks to their favorites

Was re-launched by new owners Avos, run by former founders of YouTube

Household Income

• O-15K 19%

• 50-100K 23%

• 100-150K 26%

• 150K+32%

Quantcast

Attracts ~ ½ million

visitors/month

ComScore

Visitor locales:

India: 24.1%

U.S. 17.4%

Pakistan 4.6%

Alexa

Steve Chen,Avos co-founder

Twitter sees something like 200 million tweets a day, but I bet I can’t even read 1,000 a day… There’s a waterfall of content that you’re

missing out on.There are a lot of services trying to solve the

information discovery problem, and no one has got it right yet.

What can you do with

Delicious?

Import bookmarksto use as portfolio

Bookmark social

profiles

Curate content

with stacks

Follow stacks

Track backlinks

Sharelinks

Create actiontags

Set up a company

account to share content

links

Is a visual social network

Is a social bookmarking tool

Is a virtual pinboard that allows users to “pin” images they find on the web.

Images are “re-pinned”, shared and “liked”

Pinterest Drives More Referral Traffic Than

Google Plus, YouTube and LinkedIn Combined

3.6% of referral traffic in January (it was .17% in July)

Shareaholic

11 million visits a week in December 2011

40 times the number of 6 months before Experian Hitwise

User base:3.3 million

Unique visitors increased by 429% from Sep to Dec 2011

Compete

Phyllis Cheung, LuxeFinds.com

I don’t think that every business can benefit from Pinterest’s

traffic. Pinterest is a very visual website – if your business is visual, I would definitely say

to go for it

Example text

3Pins are repinned roughly 50-75 thousand times a week

Example text

2Best moment: gained up to 10,000 followers a day

First Outcomes

1 Clicks through Pinterest started almost immediately

CASE STUDY LuxeFinds.com

Luxury lifestyle search engine for women uses for:

Brand acceptance: pinners constantly

pin their logo

Low bounce rate: picks of

300 page views in one session

RESULTS

SMS1 Million

page views per month after

3 months• Brand exposure after business rebrand and expansion

CEO Phyllis Cheung typically spends about 2-3 hours pinning per day and try to find around a hundred images to pin.

CASE STUDY

Aggregate content and tools that empower your supporters to spread the wordThey have a blog and a Facebook — but Pinterest gives them the opportunity to collect all of those resources in one central location where supporters can easily find and re-share them.

Keep the story aliveAs new pins are added to a board, they appear in followers’ streams, generating likes, comments and re-pins, and keeping followers engaged.

Connect with people and build the communityPeople find content because it’s re-shared by their friends, or by searching on Pinterest around keywords or browsing content channels. Images have a deep ability to inspire action and engage.

Jennifer StaussWindrum, founder

It's a powerful storytelling tool and a good way for non-profits to get their messages out while getting people to talk about their cause

WTF for Lung Cancer

• Develop a line of sock monkeys called SMAC! (Sock Monkeys Against Cancer). They pinned various attributes of the sock monkeys they wanted to design and interacted with others to create them all virtually.

• Build a visual community through the founder Jennifer Strauss Windrum’s “Faces of Lung Cancer” board that shows how the disease affects people of a variety of ages and backgrounds.

Non-profit "WTF (Where's the Funding) for Lung Cancer?" uses for:

PINTEREST FOR NON-PROFITS

Collaboration and product developmentBoards are perfect for collaborate on a prototype or generate helpful tips from users.

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WHY WOULD A BRAND USE PINTEREST?

Give the Brand a Face

Imagery will display how the business is different

and what it stands for

Track Trends

See in what users are interested

Augment SEO strategies

Use the description section to write keyword filled text about the business; name boards that include the business name or

the city where it is located

Sell a Lifestyle, Not Products

Show people using the brand and how their lives are better

because of it

Promote the Brand Image Content

Visual brands may be the ones to mostly benefit from a visual

social network

Pinterest As a Business-to-Business

Marketing Tool

Create a partnership, get on another company’s radar, find a common inspiration to launch a

new campaign together

Monitor the Brand

Search for mentions and images of the brand or its products; also see what’s being pinned related

to competitors

CREATIVE WAYS TO USE PINTEREST FOR MARKETING

Create a User-Generated

Pinboard

Allow other users to contribute their own pins to your hosted pinboards

Great opportunity to involve fans and

customers in your marketing

Use It Like a Focus Group

Look at the pinners who follow your brand — see what they’re pinning and who else they’re following. They’re sharing a lot of information about their interests, passions, dreams and sense of humor

Use this information to your advantage to glean insights about

your target consumers

Crowdsource

Ask fans to pin pictures of themselves with their favorite product of yours and tag you, and then you can easily repin those photos onto a VIP board

Show potential customers that your current users really

like using your product

HOW TO USE PINTEREST?

HOW TO PROMOTE A BRAND’S PRESENCE IN PINTEREST

Launch the Pinterest presence with some kind of promotion such as a contest

Write a blog post

Add the Pinterest follow

button to the website

Follow users that would want to

follow your brand back

Promote your brand’s presence on Pinterest through your other social networks by encouraging followers/

fans on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and Twitter to follow

your pins