Social Bookmarking Software

The idea behind social bookmarking software is an easy one: when you write a blog post or post a link to a site, it will automatically re-send your post to other sites and therefore make your site more visible. But does it actually work?

The game used to be trying to drive traffic to your site by seeding keywords and phrases that were likely to be entered into Google by users. This would bring more people to your site, and then you'd theoretically get more ad revenue, and everyone would get rich. It was the Great Web Dream.

However, the reality was that people began putting popular phrases, such as "sex," into sites that had nothing to do with those topics. The result was that Google and other search engines became much tougher to get listed by – the algorithm by which Google figures site rankings is a very closely guarded secret.

With the boom in social networking, the new way for your site to gain traffic is for it to be listed in some of the most popular bookmarking sites. Bookmarking software simply takes your site and submits it, in your name, to many other sites filled with other interesting links, and the idea is that your association with these sites will increase traffic back to your original post (and that will bring you more ad revenue, etc).

One example of this kind of software is the unfortunately named Scuttlr. Designed to work with the social bookmarking site Scuttle, it claims to be "designed to submit your domains to 1000's of Scuttle sites with ease." The idea is that since Google indexes many Scuttle sites, if your website is listed on them, it will increase the ranking.

Of course, not all the people who have Scuttle sites want them used for publicizing any old site – so many of them have "do not follow" code on their sites, which keeps the sites on them from being re-listed by Google. No worries, Scuttlr will automatically detect whether a Scuttle site is marked "follow" or "do not follow" and only submit your link to the sites where it will do the most good – for you, anyway.

The problem with Scuttlr and other forms of automated social bookmarking is that it takes the "social" part out of it. In other words, there is not a human mind that is actually recommending your site, it's just an automated program. In many ways, this makes this kind of automation a new form of spam.

There is no denying that social bookmarking takes time, and is sometimes tedious. However, it is also eminently necessary in today's connected web. "Gaining the awareness, the attention, and ultimately the trust of a community online is a challenge many people are working to accomplish," writes Chris Brogan, social media expert and co-author of Trust Agents. He lists his personal favorite social bookmark tool as simply Del.icio.us. He also mentions others such as Seesmic, Stumbleupon and Digg in his description of a "Simple Presence Framework."

There are some sites such as OnlyWire that do provide both the ease of submitting to multiple sites with the personal nature of the web that keeps things "honest." Once you set up an OnlyWire account, you are expected to either pay a fee or show an ad on your site, in return for which you are able to re-post to Digg, Facebook, Plaxo, Stumbleupon and many others using your own account.

However, in the end, social bookmark automation is unnecessary. Heidi Miller, another social media specialist and consultant, is on the cutting edge of social media and says, "I do all of that by hand, and have never used social bookmarking software!" Her blog, TalkItUp, explains that the real way to gain social networking success comes through no magic software, but through being authentic and bringing your own value to the conversation. In other words, social should be the tips of your fingers, not some lines of code.

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