Simon Houghton

If you missed it read the first part of this post here - Social Networking and how its changing the internet - Part 1

Social networking is easy and it is fun. It is a way that you can enhance your online business and have a lot of fun in the process. You can meet some of your very best potential customers on social networking sites. You can make friends and influence people as well.

It has long been a well established fact that more business is actually conducted in social settings than in offices.

More deals are made on golf courses than in board rooms in the real world and more sales are made through the use of social networking sites on the Internet than through all of the paid-for advertising combined.

People HATE commercials but they don’t mind hearing their friends recommend a product or service. Not only do they not mind…they even go to a lot of trouble to seek out that information.

In addition to being a great way to advertise a business social networking sites are also a great research tool and one that should never be overlooked. Rather than having to conduct a lot of expensive and time-consuming surveys for example, you can simply look through a social networking site and find out exactly what people are thinking about.
You can find out what their problems are and what measures they are taking to solve those problems. You can find out what their interests are and how they go about pursuing those interests.

By using social networking sites as research tools, you can likely get more and better information in a single hour and for free than you could get by spending hours on sending out surveys and trying to decipher the results.

One very interesting social networking site is called 43 things. That is the name of the site. On this social networking site people list their goals and then other people with similar goals discuss how to best achieve those goals.

Some goals that have been listed are ‘learn a foreign language, be a good parent, improve my memory, get in shape, lose weight, be a better gardener and the list just goes on and on.

As a research tool it would be hard to beat 43 things to find out what people are interested in and concerned about.

Web 2.0 is great! It is driven by those who actually USE the internet and not by people who are sitting behind desks at large companies and who are out of touch with the real world.

Social networking is simply a group of like-minded people exchanging information that is of mutual interest. That is all it is and all it has ever been.

It is important that when you are using social networking sites that you remember this and conduct yourself accordingly.

If you join a site and start just posting blatant advertisements, you are not going to be doing social networking.

You are simply doing advertising…which people hate. If you establish yourself as part of a group, then you are social networking and you will find that those who are members of your online social circle are the best help you can find anywhere.

Social networking is valuable in and of itself but it can be made doubly valuable by using social networking in conjunction with social bookmarking.

Join a social networking website. Find a group of people who are interested in the topic of your website but don’t start out advertising that.

Make posts to your own blog on the social networking sites as well as to the blogs of others. Add those links to your social bookmarking account. Be certain that you use the appropriate key words in those tags otherwise they are worthless.

Altogether this is an excellent marketing strategy. It is a way to market your website and your products or services and have a lot of fun at the same time. You will meet people that you really do like and even admire and respect.

Friendships are not made for the purpose of profiting from them but they usually are profitable.

If you missed it read the first part of this post here - Social Networking and how its changing the internet - Part 1

Tags: Social bookmarking, Social networking

Social networking isn’t a new phenomenon. It wasn’t invented in the twenty-first century. Every Elks Lodge, Lions Club, Chamber of Commerce, Church, Sewing Circle, Book Club, etc. that ever existed afforded an opportunity for social networking. Some social networking groups are secretive.

They have passwords and secret signals that help one member identify another member. Others may be more open but they are aware of who is and who is not a member in good standing of the social networking group.

The members of any social networking group identify with and help other members of their group. They provide information to one another that is mutually beneficial.

They tell each other when something of interest or something of concern in happening that is interest to or a threat to their particular social network and the members collectively pursue the interest or ward off the threat.

These social networking groups can be either very close knit or very loosely organized or even have no apparent organizational structure at all. The organization is of a great deal less importance to the members than the benefits that each gains from it.

Many times social networking groups are work related.

For example: you have very likely heard of the way that law enforcement personnel stick together and ‘watch each other’s backs’ so to speak.

This social networking group is often referred to as ‘the long blue line’.

Another work related social networking group is long distance truck drivers. By using their CB radios, they stay in contact with one another and warn each other of road hazards. If one of them has a problem, others go to his or her aid.

No, social networking was not invented in the twenty-first century and it didn’t come into being with the advent of the personal computer.

It has been around probably since the beginning of time in some form or another but the advent of the personal computer certainly put a new spin on social networking. Web 2.0 has really kicked social networking up several notiches.

No longer is social networking limited to people who work at the same jobs or who live in the same communities. Social networking is now world wide and easily accessible to everyone who has access to a computer and an internet connection.

It all started with the advent of instant messaging technology but it has grown far beyond that limited ability. With instant messaging it was necessary to let others see your email address and so you lost much of your anonymity.

In today’s Web 2.0 world, social networking and complete anonymity are both possible.

The online dating sites are a very good example of this compatibility. People can register and pay for memberships on online dating sites and conduct an entire relationship for many months without either party knowing the other party’s real name, ISP email address or the name of the city in which they live.

All communication is conducted on the online dating website itself thus affording both social networking and anonymity.

There are Web 2.0 websites that are dedicated to nothing BUT social networking. One of the better known ones among the younger set is MySpace but there are at least a hundred different social networking sites on the internet and probably a lot more that that.

Web 2.0 social networking sites are divided in many different ways.

There are social networking sites that are dedicated to specific ethnicities; BlackPlanet.com is for African Americans, Babbello is for Australian teenagers, FaceBox is for European young adults, Gronco.net is for Poland, iWiW is for Hungary, Migente.com is for Latinos, Mixi is for Japan are just a few examples.

Social networking sites are also divided sometimes by interests. For example you can find such social networking sites as CarDomain for car enthusiasts, Flickr for photo sharing, Gaia for gamers, Gopets for virtual pets, Joga Bonita for football or soccer, or Last.fm for music.

These are only a very few example. There are a great many more.

Most social networking sites, however, are not dedicated to a specific group. They are general membership sites and the members themselves divide themselves into appropriate groups according to interests and compatibility.

Almost all of the social networking sites are free to join. There are just a few that have membership fees. The site owners make their money from advertisers rather than from users. A few sites are only open to those who have been invited to join by other members.

Most of these social networking sites provide you with your own blog when you join the site. You can make posts to your blog and you can invite others to post to your blog. The trick here is to also use the social bookmarking sites and upload links to your blog posts into them with the appropriate tags containing key words.

The blogs on social networking sites are in addition to and not a replacement for blogs on your own website if you are an internet marketer and the social bookmarking sites should be used to upload links to both blogs.

Tags: Social Networking

Is There a Down Side to Social Bookmarking?

If there is an up-side, you can bet there is always a down-side for anything and everything and social bookmarking is not the exception to that rule.

The very fact that social bookmarking is user driven is one of the potential down sides of it. Users are not professionals. Users are just people and the ability to use social bookmarking sites for fun as well as for profit does not require a great deal of technical knowledge.

As a matter of fact, it requires almost none. And because users are ‘amateurs’ (for lack of a better word), key words used in tags are not consistent. The information is sometimes scattered and key words that seem logical to amateurs don’t necessarily lead to related topics.

Yet another potential down-side and one that is happening more and more frequently is that users are abusing the system. Since it is a user driven system it is more susceptible to abuse and misuse.

There are spammers out there that are bookmarking the same site multiple times.

The idea, of course, is that the more times the link appears the better the search engine spiders like it and the more apt the link is to be clicked on and the more apt it is that the site will be visited.

More visitors always equal more sales of products and services.

What is The Bottom Line of Social Bookmarking?

The bottom line is that social bookmarking is here and it is here to stay. People are using social bookmarking sites to make social connections as well as to form communities.

From the internet marketing point of view, social bookmarking is a tool that can be used to increase search engine optimization, the number of website visitors and ultimately increase sales but there is also the possibility of the system being abused.

Like everything else…the more social bookmarking is abused, the less effective it will become.

Internet marketers are learning that they can have a lot of fun by using sites like MySpace, FaceBook and Friendster and social bookmarking sites and make a lot of money in the process. It’s what is known as a win/win situation and one that internet marketers are flocking to in droves.

Tags: Bookmarking, Social Bookmarking

There are several ways in which social bookmarking is having an affect on internet marketing. It would be hard to determine just which effect is having the greatest impact.

The ability to create tags using key words which social bookmarking sites allow is very attractive to internet marketers.

It didn’t take the internet marketing community long to figure out that these links and the backlinks that are created when the links are added to other favorites lists cause search engine spiders to visit websites and that PageRank can be dramatically increased along with the number of visitors to a website.

The more visitors, as any internet marketer worth his salt knows, means more sales of products and services.

So social bookmarking sites provide free advertisement, increase the number of visitors to a website and are a great search engine optimization tool to boot.

Another asset that internet marketers quickly became aware of that social bookmarking sites provide is that they are great research tools in and of themselves.

For example: a website owner might find that a ‘sailing’ tag is also associated with a ‘boat repair’ tag. That information can open doors for business expansion.

Tags: Internet Marketing, Social Bookmarking