The accountants' guide to social bookmarking tools

Derek Kelly explains how business can make their mark and manage their brand online by using social bookmarking tools.

Social bookmarking is a flexible tool for businesses that’s simple to use and cheap, and opens the door to collaboration. It’s especially useful if you want to know what is grabbing people’s attention online and more importantly what words they use to describe you or your business. People are beginning to turn to the web increasingly to share information, views and interests. Once businesses get to grips with using social bookmarking tools as a way to share information and collaborate on projects, they can move a step further by using them to monitor their brand, company and industry, and act accordingly.

Out with the old, in with the new
Social bookmarking is a way for web users to publicly store online material, such as articles, blogs and videos. Traditionally, if you wanted to store a webpage for future reference, you’d probably add it to your web browser’s Favourites folder. This is can work fine to start with, but what happens after a few months, or even years, of online surfing? Not only can the sheer number of favourite pages swamp you, making it difficult to find the site you’re looking for, it can also slow down the speed of your browser.

Social bookmarking tools such as Del.ici.ous, Reddit, or Digg not only allow users to store and file away online resources in an organised manner, they can also share information with others, see what other people are looking at, find out how people perceive certain topics, publicise news about themselves and collaborate on joint projects – all potentially invaluable activities for any business.

Many heads are better than one
Before you get going, you need to sign up to a social bookmarking account and thankfully, the majority of these are free. It is then very straightforward to begin bookmarking pages - just read the instructions carefully. For example, if you’ve read an interesting article about the prime minister’s response to the recession, you may tag it as ‘Gordon Brown’, ‘prime minister’, ‘credit crunch’, ‘glum’, ‘Downing Street’, and so forth and so forth.

By sharing and tagging online resources, others on your network can see what you’re reading and flagging up and have a browse themselves to see if it’s of particular relevance or interest to them.  Compared to sending out mass emails, this can save a massive amount of time and can be very effective when used between remote workers or for organisations where there are a large number of employees. The tool can also be adapted to assist people working on the same projects. Research that has been conducted individually can be tagged into a shared file so that everyone on the team can access it, wherever they may be working from, which saves any duplication of effort.

Reputation management
What makes social bookmarking particularly interesting for businesses is the opportunity to find out what people think about them. By logging onto a social bookmarking site, you can search for your company name, sector, or even competitor.

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