I first joined Technorati in 2005, and after a Pubcon conference in 2006, I got Digg and del.icio.us accounts. Since then, I’ve submitted a few articles here and there at Digg and de.licio.us, but beyond that, I’ve admittedly been a pretty slow adopter to the world of social networking.
There are social bookmarking sites that are great for building inbound links, and there are news and article sites that help generate traffic, and they all have communities that are growing all the time.
For me to ignore these Web 2.0 in my effort to drive traffic and links for clients would practically be malpractice, and I think I have a pretty good handle on things now. It’s been quite an educational few days, let me tell ya!
Even though all the pundits have been saying that Web 2.0 is the way of the future, and social media is where everything is happening now, I’ve had other priorities, and I’ve assumed that it was just not that important compared to search engine traffic.
A couple of months ago I joined Facebook, after a friend of mine put his wedding pictures up there, and ended up poking around in their for a while, finding it to be pretty good.
I’ve been using Mybloglog quite a bit, and making sure to comment here and there on people’s profiles that stop by my own blog.
At Danny Sullivan’s Advanced SMX in Seattle last month, I talked to one person after another that was singing the praises of various social networks, social bookmarking, this widget, that widget, and whatever might be coming next.
I even talked to someone who had literally dozens of different logins for many of these services, and paid employees to generate “buzz” for certain clients in certain industries. While that may go against the spirit of these services, there is no denying that the increased traffic leads to increased sales, and ultimately increase profit for the customer.
This summer, the board of SEMpdx.org was discussing ways to promote an upcoming networking event at Paddys bar downtown. After joining the Portland group of the Facebook, Todd Mintz noticed that there were over 33,000 members in the Portland Facebook group.
That number to me is staggering! I would’ve thought there may be only a few hundred, or even a thousand, but 33,000 members in Portland? Clearly, there’s a ship sailing away here, and I’m not on it!
After that, I spent about an hour joining every one of these social bookmarking groups:
Backflip, Bibsonomy, Blinklist, Blue Dot, de.lirio.us, Diigo, Furl, Jots, Linkroll , Looklater,
Ma.gnolia, Markaboo, Rawsugar, Shadows, Simpy, Spurl , and Wink
Then I made sure that I was a member at most of the other important sites, (some of which I had actually joined quite a while ago but forgot about altogether)
More that I’ve joined are:
Netscape , Newsvine , Plime , Reddit , Stumble Upon , Shoutwire , Tailrank, Squidoo and
PlugIMM .
It sounds like a lot of time, but joining the services took me a total of maybe 90 minutes altogether. What took a lot of time, and continues to, is the endless poking around, and reading of others’ material.
I’m trying to do this with a totally “white hat” mentality, and you really have to, because these sites police themselves, and if they find that you are engaging in shameless self-promotion, and do not participate in their community, and vote on the sites of others, they will bounce you out of the system.
Happy tagging…
Joining the Social Networks - To learn more about this author, visit Scott Hendison's Website.
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