Dot Tom

In celebration of my 500th bookmark on Delicious.com I wanted to offer a Delicious Top 10 Countdown.  With the average user saving 30 bookmarks I’m somewhat of an extreme – Yet for all those who haven’t discovered Delicious, I want to tell you point blank, your missing out on a huge resource that will benefit you personally and professionally.  For kick’s I’ve added my Delicious Tag Cloud to the navigation above if you’re interested in visiting any of my favorite 500.  Here’s my top 10 Countdown:

The Top 10 Reasons Why YOU should use Delicious.com?

Because it’s Owned by Yahoo!  “That’s not a good reason Tom!  What the #@!* are you thinking.”  It’s a simple fact that if you don’t support the competition you’re going to slip into a dictatorship where Google-bots rule the world.  Do you really want that? Your probably one of those guys how goes on Yahoo Answers and replies with a link to Let me Google that for you!  Don’t let the bad man bother you Mr. Yahoo, I still love you and am eternally devoted to Delicious!

Delicious gives you universal access to your bookmarks from any computer so you can remember all the stuff you can’t remember without wasting your own memory.  No it won’t help you to remember to take out the garbage, but it will lead you to the most interesting content on the Internet on the topic of taking out the garbage!

The non-hierarchical classification system allows you to use as many reminders as it takes to help you remember how you classified your precious link in the first place.  Now I just hope I can remember the tag I used, no worries, I’m bound to remember one of the 20 tags I used… see you really can use 20.

If you don’t trust your own judgment about what’s worth bookmarking you can use Delicious.com to research what others are bookmarking so you can follow the crowd.  Hmmm, “follow the crowd”, “take a note, Tom”, he said rhetorically to himself, “this could be a terrific aggregator of popular opinion, wow and imagine the SEO benefits – This is a really great tool isn’t it”?

With over 5 million users and 150 million bookmarks you aren’t alone in your inability to remember everything that’s available on the Internet off the top of your head.  So you should feel as I do, completely normal in your senility!

“You get what you pay for?”  Well, in this case you get way-more because it’s totally FREE to use.  But that doesn’t mean it didn’t come at a price.  Let’s assume that you invested 10 minutes of your time to qualify something as a worthwhile bookmark to save and share.  Let’s assume your time is worth an average of $25/hr.  That means that I’ve personally invested approximately $2000 in Delicious, for ME and YOU!  With over 150 million bookmarks, people have created a focused Internet resource worth more then $600 million.  When was the last time someone invested that kind of cash for your benefit?

All the links are publicly viewable but you can make links private if you want to!  Ok, ok, I know where your mind is drifting, don’t go there!  Honestly some things are best left private – Do you really want to see my Gastroenterologists’ web site?

Regardless of whether you use Firefox, IE or any other browser for that matter, you can have your bookmark resources at your fingertip with Delicious browser toolbar applications.  NO! This doesn’t cost anything either, but thanks for reminding us all about how cheap you are!

I use to travel a lot on business and you know how it seems that virtually every flight you take these days is delayed, so while I may only fly now a few times a year, I’ll be damned if I’m ever going to sit one second longer in an airport then I have to.  Delicious is just the ticket to quick reference on those obscure but useful resources in situations like that!  Now what was that tag I used for the Flight Tracker site, oh yah, flight_tracker…   What’s more you can access their beta Mobile site from your phone or PDA.

And the #1 reason why you should use Delicious.com is to clear your head of all the minutia filling it so that you can relax, enjoy life and perhaps use all those extra brain cells to be more creative and innovative in your life.  You can rest assured that your treasure of great links is safely ensconced at Delicious.com.

Yesterday was “#FollowFriday” on Twitter.  It’s a great chance to tell others about the most interesting people you follow on Twitter, the practice is growing in popularity.  I took the opportunity to visit a number of new and interesting people and came across @UtahNewsGuy, Leo Dirr.  @UtahNewsGuy doesn’t have a huge following on Twitter, although his following is huge compared to my own, but it’s clear that he’s one bright guy who thinks like a marketer!  When I saw a Tweet referencing a blog article by @UtahNewsGuy, Anatomy of a Successful Tweet, I couldn’t resist.  In simple language Mr. Dirr offers a very interesting strategy and analysis of a tweet he did which points to an article he wrote on the future of newspapers.

It’s clear from the blog post that the web site where his original article was first posted experienced an increase in traffic specifically from Twitter.  Any analytics package will capture general source stats.  Nevertheless, as a marketing guy I can’t help wanting to measure a little more precisely.  People use TinyURL.com all the time to embed a brief URL into twitter posts.  What’s really cool about TinyURL.com is that since you’re abbreviating the URL it doesn’t matter how long the original URL is, so adding tracking codes to the URL is a simple and powerful way of getting precise information on the impact of a Twitter post.

Regardless of the analytics package you use on your blog or web site you can tag a URL with tracking codes that will allow you to see exactly the traction your getting on that specific post.  Suppose for instance that @UtahNewsGuy’s publisher was using Google Analytics to measure results.  He could take the existing URL and add the following string: “?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=online&utm_campaign=newspaper_survival”.  This is captured in Google Analytics identify the Source, Medium and Campaign Name with accurate stats on the user sessions generated by that URL.  By take the combined string of the original URL and the tracking component and it would look like this:

http://www.utahstories.com/utah_newspapers_decline.htm?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=online&utm_campaign=newspaper_survival

By plugging this string into TinyURL.com I get:

http://tinyurl.com/cs53oh

As long as UtahStories.com is using Google Analytics (which they are) @UtahNewsGuy doesn’t need any technical assistance to add this string when he does his Twitter post.  All he needs to do is ask the analyst at his publisher to update him on the results captured in Google Analytics.  In fact by my creating this Tiny URL and you clicking on it, you’ll be automatically compiling UtahStories.com traffic data in their Google Analytics Reporting Suite.  Just remember that each analytics suite is a little different in convention but the principles remain the same.

I’ll post a tweet about this using @UtahNewsGuy’s technique with Google Analytics Tags myself and let you know what happens!  Visit me at @TomStockwell.

Recently I had a great conversation with Lisa a senior e-commerce marketer.  Lisa observed that she hadn’t seen enough evidence that social media was relevant to her organization.  She raised some very legitimate concerns including the negative business impacts of customer criticisms; identifying resources to manage it once launched and how to tie sales back to e-commerce.
As our conversation continued I reminder her that her own site had launched product reviews last year – We all tend to forget the less sexy types of social media.  Lisa went on to share about a very interesting relationship with an important thought-leader in her industry that regularly mentions Lisa’s web site in his public speaking engagements and on his blog.  Later I visiting this guy’s blog and found dozens of links and references to Lisa’s web site.  Lisa wasn’t paying for this exposure except by making herself available to answer questions and sharing promotions as they occurred.  Of course that’s social media too, and very measurable.

Lisa mentioned that one of her competitors launched a “community” but she wasn’t terribly impressed.  In her view the community lacked innovation and leadership and failed to drive concrete business objectives.  Having a look at the competitor I found that while there were a lot of features, an active community with interesting content it seemed disjointed with more monologues then dialogue.  There didn’t seem to be that much direct interaction between the host and it’s visitors and while there were plenty of text links and banners leading to the corresponding e-commerce site none of the links were tagged for analytics reporting.  It’s little wonder Lisa was not impressed.

Lisa was also anonymously participating in industry related blogs and engaging in some other Twitter activities with industry leaders.  In spite of the unofficial nature of Lisa’s strategy, her organization seems to be benefiting, if only modestly from her social media activities.  What’s more Lisa doesn’t have to jump into the responsibility of managing a community or hire more staff to continue to make important and beneficial strides in her social media activity.  As Lisa  engages cautiously she just needs to continue to avoid three common mistakes…

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Posthumous portrait of Christopher Columbus by Ridolfo Ghirlandaio.

When Christopher Columbus made his maiden voyage in search of a western route to the East Indies there were many similarities between that venture and the pioneers of social media in organizations today.  It’s an unprecedented request; potentially requiring significant funding & resources; a business case with research and data must be developed; and the project must deliver an attractive and measurable ROI!

It took Columbus more then two years to persuade Queen Isabella’s committee.  Central to his case was his estimation of the circumference of the earth and the argument that he could get to the east faster by going west.  There was also the promise of a huge ROI making Spain competitive in the Indies spice trade.

Once approved, Columbus set sail with the blessings of senior management.  Unfortunately Columbus drastically underestimated the earth’s circumference and assumed there was only ocean between Spain and the Indies.  He landed in the Bahamas. He also misinterpreted this data believing he had landed on the East Asian Mainland.  Nevertheless this voyage is remembered for many crucial discoveries and his subsequent travels benefited from improved metrics.

In the world of Web 2.0 the evolution of social media is well beyond any “Pre-Columbian Era”.  We stand on the shoulders of explorers that have gone ahead of us paving the way with ever more user-friendly and commercialized solutions.  The state of social media simply awaits inspired ideas, informed intuition, and strategic vision applied to unique industry needs to be the catalyst for further exploration and innovation.  In the future, today’s tools may seem as antiquated as a Model-T but unlike the advent of commercial auto industry, the roads are already paved for social media.

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