What is social bookmarking and what has it to do with PR

Social bookmarking sites generally organise their content using tags. Social bookmarking sites are an increasingly popular way to locate, classify, rank, and share Internet resources through the practice of tagging and inferences drawn from grouping and analysis of tags

In a social bookmarking system, users store lists of Internet resources, which they find useful. Often, these lists are publicly accessible, and other people with similar interests can view the links by category, tags, or even randomly. Some social bookmarking systems allow for privacy on a per-bookmark basis.

This system has several advantages over traditional automated resource location and classification software, such as search engine spiders. All tag-based classification of Internet resources (such as web sites) is done by human beings, who understand the content of the resource.

Additionally, as people bookmark resources that they find useful, resources that are of more use are bookmarked by more users. They are percived to be more valuable by users.

The two dominant social bookmarketing services are del.icio.us and StumbleUpon.

There is a lot more information at Read/Write Web but some key take aways are:

Current number of people using del.icio.us at 500,000
Blogmarks has a total of 514,205 posts, estimated users 5,000 which is 100 bookmarks per user.

Why is this important for PR?

Read/Write Web give some interesting insights comparing two significant brands (go2web20.net and CNN). Just look at the numbers of users to get some idea of the influence of social bookmarking:

Site	Links to go2web20.net	Estimated users based on go2web20.net	Links to cnn.com	Estimated users based on cnn.com
BlinkList	40	14,800	568	38,200
Blogmarks	5	1,800	56	3,700
del.icio.us	1,354	500,000 (baseline)	7,429	500,000 (baseline)
Diigo	21	7,750	32	2,150
Furl	53	19,600	200	13,500
Ma.gnolia	9	3,300	51	3,400
Shadows	1	370	21	1,400
Simpy	9	3,300	312	21,000
Stumble Upon		1,271,345 (public)		1,271,345 (public)

If your organisation, its values, properties, products or services get highly ranked in say del.icio.us, more people find it and people know what sort of community likes your organisation. It is a trust, reputation and referal advantage all in one.

To get some idea of how brands can become viral Have a look at this one for tesco then look at MySpace. So you can get the idea. Someone puts their bookmarks in Del.icio.us and they are adopted by other people and often by hundreds of people.

Of course, you might consider where you should be here.