I’ve saved the best for last in this short series on the social bookmarking site del.icio.us. We’ve talked about adding relevant tags to each bookmark, and about adding commentary for yourself and others in the notes section, and even about pulling RSS feeds from your del.icio.us bookmarks to your web site.
Now, what if in addition to bookmarking relevant industry information for your audience, you also bookmarked your own press releases and blog articles related to them? And what if you added a specific tag to any bookmark that you could tie into a press release to promote your business?
Let’s have an example. A hair salon in Neenah, Wisconsin offers the latest hairstyles and serves the community through a variety of regular outreach projects. The salon owners place a huge priority on continuing education for their stylists and they subscribe to professional forums to stay up on the latest trends. Their regular customers love them. Of course, the owners would like to find more regular customers. They already have a great web site, send out a monthly newsletter, and have had some success with publicity efforts. How can social bookmarking on del.icio.us boost this salon’s PR efforts?
- The salon’s web site could be bookmarked and tagged with their primary keywords and local terms (Neenah, Menasha, Fox Valley, etc.).
- Each press release could be bookmarked and tagged “salonpr” or something similar along with other appropriate keywords.
- They could capitalize on the industry information and trends that they’re already tracking by bookmarking these articles and tagging each with the name of the source and “trends” or something similar. Add commentary in the notes section of the “add bookmark” window.
- When it comes time to write the next press release, they would review salon bookmarks on del.icio.us., decide what tags to include, right-click on the RSS button underneath the page’s results, select “copy link location” and paste the link into the body or boilerplate of the press release. Don’t misunderstand. This doesn’t replace the copy in your press release. It adds value to your story by providing more information that a reporter doesn’t have to hunt for, while offering your insight and opinion on industry trends.
This is just the beginning of a PR 2.0. SHIFT Communications pioneered the idea, sharing it on their PR Squared blog. In fact they’ve taken it several steps further and have designed a template for a social media press release and a social media newsroom. These incorporate not only a thoughtful del.icio.us bookmarking strategy, but also links to online social media profiles, such as LinkedIn and Facebook, and a Flickr photo stream.
How can you apply this idea to your company’s PR efforts?
Photo credit: puptoes74
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