3rd February 2010
The delicious icon is made up of the four key colours of HTML.
Delicious, or del.icio.us as it used to be known before it was revamped when it was bought by Yahoo! in 2005, is a social bookmarking site. Now, there will probably be 10% of you nodding your head saying, “yes, I know that already thanks,” But the vast majority are still getting to grips with social bookmarking (certainly compared with the numbers embracing social networks). The fact is that not only are social bookmarking and folksonomy tools the most useful things you’ll ever use during a day’s browsing, they also have a wealth of opportunities for brands looking to tap into the communications potential of the web.
What is Delicious anyway?
So, first of all, let’s run through what Delicious actually is. The amazing guys at Common Craft have created an entertaining and jargon-free video guide here, but in basic terms, social bookmarking tools like Delicious do exactly what they say on the tin. Just like you bookmark pages on your browser, social bookmarks allow you to save links to pages, which are stored to your account once you’ve registered. The obvious benefit of this is that you can access them anywhere – from work, from home, from an internet café in Mumbai etc etc, rather than them being stored on your browser on one machine. However, it was also Delicious and its ilk that actually drove the adoption of tagging bookmarks, meaning organising and navigating through your bookmarks is easy, regardless of how many you have. Every time you save a bookmark you add keywords or ‘tags’ that define why that page is interesting to you. This means if you’re looking for a website about needles in a haystack, simply click on the tag ‘needle’ and the tag ‘haystack’ and you’ll find what you’re looking for (even if it was hidden amongst thousands of other bookmarks).
Why are Social Bookmarks so special?
The key to the benefits of Delicious, however, lies in the word ’social’. Just as I can rifle through my own bookmarks using tags to find information relevant to what I’m looking for, I can also search through the bookmarks of those people in my network. For instance, if I’m a teacher compiling a lesson plan about WWII, I’m not just restricted to looking back at the pages I tagged as relevant to WWII, I can search those of my colleagues and contemporaries. It’s a knowledge sharing tool.
How can a brand use Delicious?
All of the above explains how Delicious is useful for any user on a day-to-day basis. However, there are a number of obvious (and not so obvious) ways to use Delicious from a brand perspective. These are: organisation, optimisation, community and insight (not necessarily in that order).
Organisation: If you’re a brand with a lot of content online that just doesn’t get used, then Delicious could be a huge asset for you. Adobe, for instance, has an amazing spectrum of tutorials for its software – and it uses Delicious very effectively to both organise that content and make it easily accessible for its users. Check out delicious.com/adobe to see what I mean.
- Adobe uses Delicious to organise its thousands of online tutorials
Optimisation: If you want people to share your content, you should provide the Delicious icon on all of your news and dynamic content. As a dedicated Delicious user, I won’t pretend it makes the process much easier (I have the Delicious FireFox extension) but it does give me a quick reminder to bookmark something. There are also loads of SEO benefits to having content that is bookmarked on Delicious and other sites.
Community: It’s essential for brands to develop a relationship with its loyal customers, and social networks offer a fantastic opportunity to forge and maintain these relationships. Delicious is no different. If you’re looking to share links – perhaps you’re promoting a fashion brand and want to share sites of designers or fashion tips – then Delicious is a perfect place to keep them. Twitter integration also means you can automatically tweet whenever you save a bookmark.
Insight: Now here’s the really clever bit. If you navigate to http://www.delicious.com/url you can enter any URL and see who has bookmarked it, and what tags they used. This provides an amazing source of information not only on user experience (users often add notes to specific searches) but also on how users define your brand. Tiffany’s famously changed their SEO policy around the fact that people had tagged their home page on Delicious under ’shopping’ rather than ‘luxury’ and ‘diamonds’ which were the keywords they framed their SEO strategy around. Delicious tags don’t tell you how you want your brand to be defined, they tell you how your brand (and its website) is actually defined by its users. Used wisely, this is priceless information.
So there you have it – Delicious in a nutshell. There’s obviously much more to say that can’t fit in a single blog post so feel free to leave questions in the comments and we’ll do what we can to answer them.
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