Web Strategy: Using Delicious for Marketing Research

Delicious is Social Bookmarking
Folks mention that Delicious (A Yahoo Property) is great for finding information later that you’ve saved, or information that other folks have seen, like Social Bookmarks. It’s always interesting to see what people tag your website as. Here’s what people have tagged this blog with. The only tag that really surprises me is all the web 2.0 tags as I don’t consider myself a web 2.0 expert. Here’s the delicious tags for Hitachi, or Web Strategy.

A non-hierarchical keyword categorization system is used on del.icio.us where users can tag each of their bookmarks with a number of freely chosen keywords (cf. folksonomy). A combined view of everyone’s bookmarks with a given tag is available; for instance, the URL “http://del.icio.us/tag/wiki” displays all of the most recent links tagged “wiki”. Its collective nature makes it possible to view bookmarks added by similar-minded users. -wikipedia

Use Delicious to understand how folks think of things
You can do your own searches (try your company name or product name) to find out what others think of it. Here’s some of the Delicious features you can View recent entries, popular entries, popular tags

Reverse Engineer your Search Marketing Research
Tie this into your web marketing efforts, the keywords that folks are tagging information with should also extend to your Search Engine Optimization programs such as metatagging your content, or making text match the same keywords. Also consider extending these keywords into the Search Engine Marketing keywords that you’ll be buying. After all, this is how the end user or consumer is thinking about your webpage.

Audience
I’m sure delicious users are only a small segment of the web users, but the fact that they’ve taken time out to tag your content deserves some credit, take the time at least to understand how they’re tagging your content (or your competition)

Additional Resources

• People Over Process: Delicious for Marketing
  
• Scrappy Marketing Solutions: Reverse engineering how folks find information –smart thining here
• Steve Rubel points out you can use Delicious as a communication medium, you can contact people using delicious, wow
• Adobe has an ‘official’ profile, this is smart (Edit: Got Inspired and created my own)
• Flipside: Creating a Meta-Utopia in a Controlled Environment

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 20th, 2006 at 5:30 am and is filed under Search Strategy, Web Marketing, Web Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.