Understanding Social Marketing

Social bookmarking is a powerful process that you’ve probably used before; you just weren’t aware you were using it. If you’ve ever saved a link and sent it to your friend or family member through e-mail, iphone, or instant messenger, then you’ve been an unwitting participant in social bookmarking. Social bookmarking is the process of tagging a link and saving it or sending over the web; it stands in contrast to private bookmarking that saves links to your web browser.

Social bookmarking has several benefits for everyday Internet users. You not only end up saving your favorite links, and your friends too, but you get to see what other people have tagged and bookmarked. Most social bookmarking sites break down the process of discovering links into topical and sequential categories like recently added, newest, most popular, or categories like shopping, technology, politics, science, sports, or more. Social bookmarking sites, because of their unique combination of user tagging and confirmation, are being hailed as the pinnacle of smart engines.

Social news shares similarities and differences with social bookmarking. Digg, Reddit, and Propeller are examples of news-heavy social bookmarking sites. Breaking headlines from around the world are shouted out, voted upon, and either dismissed or awarded with top rankings. The decisions are in the hands of the aggregate of the people because they decide what links go to the top through voting. It’s very democratic, and that’s especially important to highlight those kinds of democratic features in a democracy such as ours.
Social news sites have the same machinery and functions as most social bookmarking sites, but they tend to focus on specific articles rather than on websites, although Digg often features cool websites or lists of facts, etc. You can even participate in the news discussion by leaving your own comments underneath articles. Join a social news site if you want to become a citizen journalist.

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