Screen Shot 2013 07 12 at 8.45.25 AM The 8th Discipline of Social Media; Tagging & ReFinding Your Links

All the new rage, this #hashtag stuff now on Facebook. But "tagging" has been around for a long time. We used to call it Social Bookmarking, and there were several big players. Today Delicious is one of the few remaining services, along with Google Bookmarks.

Tagging your own links provides one of the best ways I know of creating organized structures for disorganized content. Or putting a framework and recall system around all of your links. Long gone are the days where "bookmark this page" is enough. And while #hashtags are also, important for recall and discovery, your own private tagging system might be even more important, in the long run. And learning to use and research on delicious is part of my critical path to social media execution.

+++ this post has been refreshed from 2011, enjoy your Summer +++

If you don't use delicious.com perhaps now is the time to get started. Owned by Yahoo, delicious is the best way I know of to leave a bread crumb of your research for others to follow. It's also a killer crowd-sourced index of the web on any topic you can type it. Individuals have tagged and commented on these links on a subject that you are interested in. Hand-curated links. Good stuff comes to the top quickly on Delicious.

Screen shot 2011 06 30 at 7.15.49 AM The 8th Discipline of Social Media; Tagging & ReFinding Your Links

Here's why Delicious is so critical to your social media success.

  • Refinding that crucial information is as important as discovering it the first time.
  • Sharing your links with others is better than a single Tweet or LIKE of the information.
  • Social bookmarking builds a crowd-sourced index on any topic you are interested in, it's like a curated index of the web
  • Organizing your mind on the web will change your experience
  • Sure you can always Google it again, but how much time did it take you to find that specific comment last time, tag it and forget it and it's always there when you need it, or when you need to share it.

I have screen-grabbed a few searches I did this morning on delicious. The first one is for "healthcare" and you can see the most popular terms on the left upper corner and the overall "bookmarked" volume on the right. You can see things have been spiking in 09 on this topic. Easy to imagine why.

Screen shot 2009 12 16 at 12.15.41 PM The 8th Discipline of Social Media; Tagging & ReFinding Your Links
delicious tag search: healthcare

The second term I delicious-ed. (As opposed to Googled.) Was "pharma."

Screen shot 2009 12 16 at 12.17.35 PM The 8th Discipline of Social Media; Tagging & ReFinding Your Links
delicious search: pharma

In this example I have excluded my own delicious bookmarks. Notice the Google-placed adds on the right hand side. So Google is getting some love on this process too.

http://delicious.com (do a search on anything you are looking for)

A couple other interesting ways to explore content on delicious is to use their trending tabs. Here is the "Fresh Bookmarks" tab:

Screen shot 2009 12 16 at 12.39.29 PM The 8th Discipline of Social Media; Tagging & ReFinding Your Links
delicious tabs: fresh bookmarks

And the "popular bookmarks" tab:

Screen shot 2009 12 16 at 12.39.14 PM The 8th Discipline of Social Media; Tagging & ReFinding Your Links
delicious tabs: popular bookmarks

And the "explore tags" tabs:

Screen shot 2009 12 16 at 12.38.22 PM The 8th Discipline of Social Media; Tagging & ReFinding Your Links
delicious tabs: explore tags

Start tagging your web experience with Delicious. Or perhaps you want to look at SPARKS on the new Google+. Either way you need to find and refind information on the web. Do it in a way that provides more social connections for all of us.

@jmacofearth (also seen on Google+: jmacofearth)
permalink: http://uber.la/2013/07/delicious/

You can download the eBook here: The Disciplines of Social Media

The Disciplines of Social Media:

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