Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Using Delicious in Public Relations

Learn About Social Media from Your Desk

In this set of lessons, I introduced readers to Delicious and talked about the value of using it to share your bookmarks. But what I find fascinating is how many ways there are to use Delicious in your public relations work.

One thing is to come up with a special tag for a particular topic, and then you and others can start building a set of bookmarks related to your topic. The advantage is that your searches will filter out items you are not looking for. For example, the folks who have been coming up with the social media release formats are using the tag: hRelease. I don’t know how they came up with that particular tag, but they’ve been using it, along with any other relevant tags.

You also can set up an account for a client or your organization and tag related items. For example, let’s say you are about to have some major announcement to media. You could create a “purpose-built” Delicious page that already has a set of bookmarks for web pages and related news stories on your topic. Include a link in your news release. Todd Defren of SHIFT Communications wrote more about this in his blog post, “Tagging: ‘Crowdsourcing’ vs. ‘Purpose-Built.’”

But why limit this to when you have big news announcements. You could do the same for topics that you deal with consistently. By creating a Delicious account for such a topic and tagging new items regularly to keep it updated, you are helping journalists in their research, but the information can seem more credible because it’s not always created by you. More on this too by the insightful Todd Defren in his post, “Daily Servings of del.icio.us Delights.”

Of course, you can use Delicious to help you keep track of trends in your industry or to see how your issue is being covered prior to your big announcement – along with your other media and web monitoring tools.

Some excellent tips are available on the Information Age Education blog post, “5 Things You Need to Know Before Using Del.icio.us, a Social Bookmark.”

For those who are feeling brave and a little geeky, Web Worker Daily provides some useful suggestions at “8 Tips for Better del.icio.us Bookmarking.”

If you haven’t started using Delicious, give it a shot. This is one social media tool that is really easy to jump into.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Some insightful points here. i particularly agree that there is a lot of potential in using Delicious as a data gathering platform to help build strong media contacts. Many times, I have been asked for suporting research to accompany a news release and I have had to Google various research stats and articles that I have come across in the past.

Social bookmarking allows you to conjure up information by using the power of tagging.

Rax

Anonymous said...

Christie:

del.icio.us really is turning into a key tool for me. It's a great way to bookmark and tag all of the interesting stories and posts I'm reading online, and then retrieve them later on. But also, I'm able to share those links with others in my network and see what they're reading.

I've actually just devoted a podcast episode to getting the most out of del.icio.us:
http://www.newcommroad.com/2007/07/28/ncr-035-learning-about-delicious/

ktmblogger said...

del.icio.us is thumbs up for me, I've been using it and fimd it more ease.Not fearful if my bookmarks get lost if My PC crashes.
___________
Pratul
Social Bookmarking

Anonymous said...

del.icio.us at least is a good backup of your personal info, contacts, bookmarks and stuff that you consider important.

Anonymous said...

This is one of the best types of contribution. By creating a Delicious account for such a topic and tagging new items regularly to keep it updated, you are helping journalists in their research Trade Show Booth Rentals

Anonymous said...

There are so many bookmarking /social websites out there on the internet. I Delicious was one the first out there and definitely one of the better bookmarking sites. However, people abuse the purpose of bookmarks and tag every poor article or website on the interet