In the early days of social media, social bookmarking was up there with social networking and social news as a primary way of sharing the world with others. Delicious was at the top of the bookmarking world, wildly popular amongst academics and geeks and poised to expand to the rest of the world.

In 2005, Yahoo! bought the site. Under the Yahoo! umbrella, Delicious did exactly nothing to expand and soon fell from grace and relevance. By the end of 2010, most were ready to accept that Delicious would go the way of Propeller and Mixx and fade into legend, a once-mighty site that drew attention from the tech world in its glory days but failed to adapt to the changing needs of a Web 2.0 society.

On April 27th, 2011, fans of the site were met with fairly good news. AVOS, a company led by the co-founders of YouTube Chad Hurley and Steven Chen, had freed acquired Delicious from the clutches hands of Yahoo! and were planning on doing something Yahoo! failed to do. They were going to change the largest social bookmarking site in the world rather than follow the path of inaction that Yahoo! had adopted for Delicious.

There was hope.

While details are limited about exactly what they have planned for the site, September 23rd marks the last chance that anyone has to transfer their Delicious account to their, well, Delicious account. In essence, all bookmarks that have been made on Delicious in the past can become part of the new Delicious as long as people agree to the AVOS terms of service. In reading through it, nothing sticks out as major. It’s just a legal necessity.

Listening to them discuss the future offers hints as to what Delicious will become in the near future.

“Twitter sees something like 200 million tweets a day, but I bet I can’t even read 1,000 a day,” Chen said. “There’s a waterfall of content that you’re missing out on. There are a lot of services trying to solve the information discovery problem, and no one has got it right yet.”

As he notes, there is no shortage of data. Organizing it is the problem, and one that only Google has demonstrated skill in solving. Facebook search is awful. Twitter only goes back so far and is challenging to drill down without setting exact parameters. Bing is doing better (some say better than Google) but they haven’t put it all together properly yet. Can soon-to-be-Delicious solve some of these problems?

By redesigning the site, making the UI more robust and intuitive, and enhancing the software to organize links better, they might just be able to pull it off. They also plan on including personalization measures that will help prioritize links based upon actions and recommendations.

“We want to simplify things visually, mainstream the product and make it easier for people to understand what they’re doing,” Mr. Hurley said.

It will take mainstream adoption similar to what they achieved at YouTube for the site to take off. The roots that Delicious once held strong are rotten – old users have moved on. Diehards want more but will stick around as long as the service is still available. It is in gaining a much larger userbase that Chen and Hurley will be able to make the site successful.

By staying lean, maintaining an office of fewer than 20 people (who are mostly developers and programmers) they should be able to self-fund and maintain mobility. Their biggest challenge will be in reaching the tipping point to where their data is valuable to the general public.

They will need to take Delicious viral. They’ll need people using it to get more people to use it to get more people to use it. It’s a different challenge than what they had at YouTube in the 18 months it took for them to build it up and sell it off to Google. YouTube could generate traffic without them becoming users. For Delicious, users will be the most important aspect.

In the next few months, we will see what they have up their sleeves. On a personal note, I’ve always been fond of the site and wanted it to succeed. I’m skeptical – Yahoo! really did everything they could to kill the site off completely – but hopefully Chen and Hurley will make lightning strike twice for themselves and bring social bookmarking to its next level, whatever that may look like.

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Read more analysis of sites like Delicious on this social media blog.

Regardless of where a business stands, chances are that if the Internet has anything to do with its success, there is a place for social media marketing in the business plan.  New companies, old companies, big companies, small companies — they could all use social media marketing to some extent.  Whether they sell online or even if they don’t sell anything at all, Web 2.0 is a place that can help to make or break a company.

The real questions is this: “What is social media marketing and why do I need it?”

There are several different manifestations that can be considered social media marketing.  Knowing which one is good for your company makes all the difference in the world in determining how to integrate it into a business plan.

Viral Marketing

“I want 100,000 extra visitors to my website this week.”

While this is the most commonly known part of social media marketing, it is often the one that goes in with the highest expectations and the lowest yield in results.  Content of some sort is created — a story, a video, an image, or even a tool — and it is submitted on the top social media sites and promoted through various means.  If successful, the page of the client’s website normally lands on the front page of one of the high traffic driving websites, including:

• Yahoo! Buzz
• Digg
• Reddit
• SlashDot
• Fark
• eBaum’s World
• Delicious
• I-Am-Bored

StumbleUpon is the real wild card in the equation, as the traffic potential is the highest over a longer period of time.  Websites do not have to hit the “front page” of SU to get a tremendous amount of traffic, though it helps in getting huge numbers.

There are other forms of viral marketing that can happen without these social media sites.  For example, YouTube videos that become popular can get a ton of views, but normally the video has to be exceptional and may not send much traffic to the client website itself.  Still, the branding can be exceptional.

Benefits of Viral Marketing:

• Branding, branding, branding — Getting name and logo in front of a lot of people is very easy to do through viral marketing.  Whether it registers consciously or not, they will most likely see who you are somewhere in their mind.
• Positive Association — Putting your brand on a page that associates it with something positive can result in good feelings towards your company.  For example, a story about companies planting trees can create interest in the company’s products.
• Links — For driving future traffic and for search engine optimization benefits, having a piece of media going viral will create tons of natural links, normally from relevant websites.
• Bookmarks and Subscribers — There is normally a nice burst of bookmarks and feed subscriptions associated with a viral story.  Even if the initial burst does little in the way of conversions (see below) there is a chance for future conversions through these bookmarks and feeds.

Drawbacks of Viral Marketing:

• Limited conversion of traffic into sales — Social media users are normally quick in, quick out visitors.  While StumbleUpon users are inclined to explore sites that they are interested in after landing on them, the other sites rarely result in more than a single page view per visitor.  Depending on the products for sale, it is possible to have hundreds of thousand of social media views and convert none of them intos sales.
• Servers slowing and crashing — Before hitting the front page of Buzz, Digg, or some of the other sites listed above, it is important to make sure you have a strong hosting plan or tools to help handle the traffic bursts.  Going viral without the ability to handle it is the worst possible scenario.

Search Engine Optimization through Social Media Marketing

Just when it started getting popular a few months ago, the effects started becoming harder to achieve.  For a while, social media has been a tremendous link-building tool that allowed SEOs to get a website or page of the website ranked quickly for competitive keywords.  It seems that the search engines, Google in particular, have started to pull back on the amazing strength they were giving to “spammy” styles of using social media marketing for search engine optimization.

For many companies, this is a great thing.

It seems that submissions are starting to need more votes to achieve results on the search engines.  Where once someone could submit to Digg and a few other social media sites and expect to get ranked for their “headline” within hours, it appears that submissions need more than the initial Digg to get true credibility.

For social media marketing firms that use strong, established accounts to submit their clients’ stuff, this is a great thing.  For marketing firms that have relied on spam or automated submission services, the game is just about up.

Online Reputation Management through Social Media Marketing

If you search Google for “JD Rucker“, you will notice a trend.  Most of the listings are social media profiles associated with the name.  This is an important and often overlooked (or misused) aspect of social media marketing.

Because of the relevance that social media and social bookmarking are given by the search engines, a company can control their image, and more importantly their search engine presence, through these websites.  Getting the profiles and/or submissions ranked is an exceptional tool that can drive negative reviews or competitors off of certain searches.  Sometimes, it’s the customers that are lost before they ever make it to a website that are the hardest for a company to swallow because they don’t even know what they lost and why they lost it.

Spam Social Media Marketing

Bad, bad, bad, bad, and bad.

The majority of services out there use spamming techniques to “market” a website through social media.  The short term benefits can be good, but in the end, they normally hurt both the SMM company’s reputation and that of their client.  Some social media sites have even started banning users and (gulp) their clients’ websites because of an abundance of spam.  Once banned, it’s tough to get back on.

Make sure that there are real users who add real value to these websites before letting anyone submit for you.  Spamming is much easier and can often be done based upon ignorance.  If a social media marketing firm does things the wrong way, it can be permanently damaging to everyone involved.

Conclusions

There are many other good and bad uses and styles of social media marketing.  We did not even cover social networks such as Facebook and MySpace.  Sadly, most who offer this type of service would argue that they are all essentially the same.  In reality, they are not the same and social media marketing is actually multi-faceted and impossible to properly quantify into styles.  Deciding what your goal for your company is and working towards those goals through a professional social media marketing firm is the key to being successful in this segment of the industry.

Read more about social media marketing on this blog.