We are streamlining our bookmark services. As part of this effort Yahoo! will be shutting down MyWeb on March 18, 2009 and moving users to Yahoo! Bookmarks. Your MyWeb bookmarks are already available to you on Yahoo! Bookmarks. You can begin using this new service now or continue using MyWeb until the shutdown date.

Yahoo made the announcement a few days ago along with three options for moving your bookmarks to other locations. Obviously, one is through Yahoo Bookmarks as mentioned above. Your bookmarks are already available there.

You can also use Delicious, the popular Yahoo-owned social bookmarking site. You can move your bookmarks there via a simple three-step process:

1. Export your bookmarks
2.Register for a Delicious Account
3. Upload the XML file using the "manual import" option.

Or, you can simply export your bookmarks using Yahoo’s export tools, which will provide an archive of them that is easily readable by third-party services and browsers.

Some people think the move to shut down MyWeb makes perfect sense since Yahoo already has two more bookmarking services. Still, others prefer MyWeb, and will be disappointed to see it go. The service never left beta.

• Unofficialseoblog
• Coverage by other SEM communities
• Images

Below is an alphabetical index of our coverage:

• A Marketer’s Guide to Social Bookmarking & Tagging
• Effectively Leveraging Social networking
• Evangelist – The Marketer’s Role in SMM
  
• Extra! Extra! The Social News Sites
  
• Keynote Q&A: Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us & Garrett Camp of StumbleUpon
• Linkbait – Chumming for Traffic on Social Media Sites
• Micro Communities
• Social Media Marketing Essentials
• Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers & Answer Sharing

Coverage by other SEM communities:

• Affiliate Tip
• Aim Clear Blog
• Alt Search Engines
• Bruce Clay
• Search Engine Land
• SEO Round Table
• Search Engine Journal
• Search Marketing Gurus
• Square Oak
• Tamar.com
• Tannerhobin.com
• Top Rank Blog
• WebProNews

Images:

• Top Rank Blog

• Dennis Goedegebuure


• Hilarious pictures of Mr. Moderator

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Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers: Guillaume Bouchard, CEO, NVI

Michael Gray, President, Atlas Web Service

Neil Patel, CTO, Advantage Consulting Services

Danny introduces Guillaume Bouchard the CEO of NVI Solutions who is the first speaker of this session.

About Social bookmarking, Guillaume says it is when Internet users can store, organize, search and share bookmarks. Thanks to "nofollow" links, there is lesser less link juice. Popular social bookmarking sites are Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon and Furl.

On the other hand, bookmarking sites also use tags. This is a collaborative practice through which you can identify content in a certain way. These help in:

• Indexing your site better on search engines.
• Receiving a high number of organic incoming links.
• Creates a strong presence within social communities.
• Promotes brand awareness.
• boosts traffic from alternate sources.
• impacts traditional media.

How To tag Effectively

• Find out how people are tagging the sites you want to remember later.
• If you are clueless and doubtful, choose the tag that is most popular and relevant in the tag clouds.
• Avoid separating tags with commas.
• Set a list of standards by which you want to exchange with others.

Manual Tagging

• It should have been online for more than 10 years(hyperlinks, anchor text, keywords).
• Design your own set of tags to represent your content.
• Incorporate images, boost high participation rates by letting users personalize and make. their own tags that they associate to the given image.
• These should also be submitted to del.icio.us, stumble, and flickr.

Automatic Tagging

• Automatically, through an algorithm it extracts tags from the content
• This can incorporate different user’s users tags
• This does not grow or expand due to human creativity.
• This is all about the user experience.
• A great example is FaceBook.




• However, automatic tagging is considered more "blackhat".

Abuse & Content Degradation

• Content visibility is often created through the intentional misuse of tags
• As social bookmarking and tagging sites become more mainstream, the added incentive for manipulation will result in decreasingly reliable content unless their algorithms get a lot smarter
• Leading social marketing sites use tagging

Technorati

• A search engine for blogs that works on a tag based system. Popular blogs get ranked on the basis of unique links.
• Start a blog for your client, write several blog posts with high -profile tas, and claim it through Technorati
• If you receive a high amount of pings in a short period of time, it means you will feature in the popular section of the site for searches, blogs, videos, movies and news.

Flickr

• Submit photos that make sense to the industry that you are trying to reach.
• Select the correct tags from the list of popular tags
• If you want your images to appear in Technorati, tag them appropriately and make them public.
• Use the photostream on your blog
• Make other users link and comment on your images with the same tags that you initially selected.
• Make friends and share pictures.

YouTube

• Mashups area hit here.
• In YouTube content has more importance than the tags used.
• Use Digg, StumbleUpon and other social marketing sites to promote your video.
• Ask friends to comment on your videos.
• Pass on your video to friends.

FaceBook

• Make attractive and interesting corporate profiles.
• Brainstorm on widgets and use the application that is exclusive to your industry.
• Offer a good enough reason to join your community.
• These groups needs a moderator.
• Invite people in your company.

Next up was Michael Gray, President of Atlas Web Service who gave the audience a comprehensive tour of del.icio.us. Michael compared tags to old-fashioned Internet Explorer and Mozilla FireFox bookmarking albeit with more flexibility and community features. A really great thing of del.icio.us is its feature that lets it subscribe to tags. Michael says tags are like labels, but one must keep a check of the commas. Different groups of people will have a different perspective of your pages, giving your pages more "tags".

Obviously, you want to be in the ‘popular’ page. As this can bring in as much traffic as Digg. The benefit of del.icio.us is that it has a wider demographic reach and has less to do with techie things. Like Digg, you too can do a ‘shoutout’ in del.icio.us, this is not as powerful but is pretty effective. del.icio.us does not apply the ‘noFollow’ tag, so you wouldn’t be receiving any link love. However, there will be incoming traffic. A word of caution : Separate words should have a ‘+’ as tag delimiter and not space.

How to Expand Your Exposure

Find the type of posts that people are bookmarking for your subject. Tailor-design your content to fit popular tags. Your page should integrate bookmarking widgets and buttons, good titles, careful timing and advised tagging. Remember that del.icio.us updates its popular page every 4 hours. Time your bookmarking efforts in such a way that you can take advantage of update timeframes. Make your friends influence the suggested tags. Lastly, do not create multiple sock puppet accounts, they will get discontinued.

Last speaker of the session is Neil Patel, the CTO of Advantage Consulting Services who is here to discuss StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon has over 3 million users and brings in over 12,000 visitors per day. And the best part? The traffic lasts long. This is great for branding. The demographic of users show more men and lesser females. However, users are aged 45 and above. Meaning, they have more money to spend.

First, you got to install the toolbar in order to use it. There is a feature of an "I like" or "I don’t like" thumbs up or down icon. The more thumbs up you get, the higher the incoming traffic.

Second,Create an account, make friends and send stories to them. At StumbleUpon, titles don’t carry much weightage as here the pages are being served. However, keywords are required for StumbleUpon. Review carries equal importance as topic or tags. Sending stories to your friens is not considered spamming as it is a StumbleUpon service.

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First up was Guillaumue Bouchard, CEO, NVI. 

He said the benefits of social bookmarking are that it creates a presence in communities and can influence traditional media.

On tagging pick a tag that is relevant to your site and do not use commas.

Using a broad tag does not help your site. Manual tagging works well with sites that have videos and pictures

Michael Gray, President, Atlas Web Service said that del.icio.us is a great bookmarking tool to share with other people and that you are able to track tags.

To use del.icio.us to bring traffic find posts that people are bookmarking and find the tags people are using.

You can expand your exposure by identifying tags that are popular and then tailor your content to fit those tags.

Neil Patel, CTO, Advantage Consulting Services said that you can use StumbleUpon to bring traffic to your site.

You must install the toolbar or you cannot leverage the site. Submit something from your site that you like and use your friends to create traffic.

WebProNews Video anchor Kara Ratliff contributed to this report.

Time To Unify Web Metrics?

Recently, venture capitalists have been measuring engagement by noting not just unique visitors, but also pageviews per visitor per visit and average visits per visitor. Even this, though, in a dawning age of widgeteering, may cease to be an accurate measure.

EBizMBA has ranked 30 social bookmarking sites using a quintet of factors: inbound links, monthly visitors according to Compete, monthly visitors according to Quantcast, Alexa ranking, and Page Rank.

If you’re persnickety, you’ll question a few things right away: the ability to game links; the large variation between Quantcast and Compete numbers (Digg has somewhere between 7 million and 22 million monthly visitors); the gnawing remembrance that Alexa is far from accurate; an uncertainty if the stated Page Rank is the actual Page Rank Google uses for its algorithm.

All those concerns aside (no metric is perfect after all, and eBizMBA notes that the data is useful for "gauging relative audience size"), the list is still interesting and it is in an order you might expect, with a couple of surprises.

The top 10 are:

1.    Digg.com
2.    Netscape.com
3.    Technorati.com
4.    del.icio.us
5.    Fark.com
6.    StumbleUpon.com
7.    MyBlogLog.com
8.    reddit.com
9.    kaboodle.com
10.    Slashdot.com

It would be interesting to see a more overall view that added pageviews per visitor, average visits per visitor, session time per visitor, and some sort of widget measurement. Perhaps someone can give us an overall score based on the combination of those metrics.

We decided to put a post up for each of our blog authors allowing them to share the resources they use the most with the rest of the world and then put these lists in the traditional blog roll area. Each list will be complete with descriptions of why the author finds each resource worthy of attention. Here is my list of top social media marketing resources:

Top Social Media Marketing Resources: (I will update and grow this page constantly)

Activerain – social networking profiles and blog for Realtors and vendors
Most people do not notice that you do not need to be a Realtor to join, you can be a vendor like me, and the profiles and blogs are not bad for Search Engine Placement link-building campaigns.

Alexa – Traffic and Website Statistics and Archived Information and Reviews
An Amazon.com company, we use it to get quick information about any website according to everyone who has the Alexa toolbar – which collects a wealth of information and statistics. They also archive old websites, and provide links to reviews on amazon.com.

Associated Content – Associated Content is a buyer and seller, syndicator of user-generated, user-filtered content
One of the most successful and well traveled sites on the web, this site is a must for branding and link building: your clout and pagerank build as an author – you can even get paid for content, although that is not what I use it for.

Delicious – social bookmarking, link-sharing
You install a toolbar that allows you to keep a set of favorites online where you can access them from any computer, and share them with the world, if you like, as an online resource. Excellent for traffic building and link-popularity, I recommend that you add and use the toolbar.

Digg.com – social bookmarking popularity-driven site:
This site is great for traffic-building for your articles and blogs, and also for link-popularity for your main site and blog: users submit, describe, review, and rank each others preferences. It is also great for getting real-time feedback on what people actually like and do not like about what you and/or others who write stuff that you read may have to say.

Feedburner – a feed aggregator that allows you to monitor various statistics about your feeds,
make them available in every format to your visitors, even sell advertising fed into the feed.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool – find out what words are searched for, and how much competition there is to rank for those words
To use it intelligently, you must understand the concept of pack mentality: we track trends in key industries like real estate and get to where the market is going first; many Realtors search daily for the same things, but they are not always each others target market – so be careful how you interpret the results from such tools.

Google Analytics Account – track everything through Google:
Again, it is essential that you understand that maketing is not just about what is happening right now, but also about what is changing, and what is about to happen; that being said, these are the most reliable numbers about your website, who visits it, what page they enter on, what page they exit on, and a wealth of other information.

Linkedin – most well-known business-to-business social networking site
Linkedin was originally for job and employment placement services – it is a very full-featured business-to-business networking site.

Mybloglog.com – Blog syndication, networking, tracking, resources, and communities
Everyone with a blog should be here, and I highly recommend some of their tools, like the one that lets you see who has read this lately at the right of this page! I visit and network with them!

Myspace.com – the most well known social media site
If you thought is was just for kids, think again: the average age is over forty, and a profile here can be used for link-popularity and business networking, not just dating and file sharing!

Onlywire.com – multiple social bookmarks with one click!
It will take you a while to do this, but it wil then allow you to bookmark files in several places building traffic in one click!

Stumbleupon – another social bookmarking site very useful for traffic building:

Technorati.com – a blog, news and file sharing aggregator
Another must for bloggers: you can tag your posts and make them available to millions by keyword search

Yahoo360 – Yahoos little known stab at social media profiles – pretty usefull and feature rich
One of the most underused, unknown resources: Yahoo360 offers a feature rich social media site for free, complete with RSS feed importation and other nice features, very use-friendly.

Zoodango – Seattle-based business networking Social Media Site
Like linkedin.com, you build a profile used for business-to-business networking

We routinely submit our clients to over 3000 different places, and build many profiles in our link-building campaigns, and the list is constantly growing: I will add to this list of the best social media resources regularly: maybe you should bookmark it!

Google Trends shows historical search trends and Google’s experimental history search will show published pages based on associated reference time. Google News also allows you to search by timeframe.

Services such as the Yahoo! Buzz Index show what is hot right now. Social bookmarking sites, social news sites, and meme trackers show what stories are hot right now, and were hot in the recent past.

When you want to gain access to the media, use the above sources to research what they thought was important in the past. Either look at your exact field, or look to a more mature market to predict what issues will become important in your market. You are basically going to target an idea to create what some people term as link bait. Link baiting background available here.

Once you get an idea, spend whatever is necessary to create a piece of content (text, video, whatever) that is the best piece of content on that topic. It can be history of x, don’t get scammed by y, or z do it yourself tips. Heavily integrate that content into your site’s internal link structure, and make no attempt to directly profit from it…simply make it easy to link at or want to reference. Consider this content as a cheap marketing cost.

Ask a few friends what they think of your content’s title. Ensure it sounds authoritative and/or buzz-worthy (one or both, depending on your target market and story idea). Promote your article to friends, email a few popular bloggers who might like the story, and if you know someone with powerful social media accounts ping them too.

Ensure your site appears credible.

If you are in a new field or have a trusted domain doing all the above might be enough to garner top rankings. If you have a new site in an old field there still is hope, but you may need to create video content that you can post on sites like YouTube or venture into PPC ads.

If you buy PPC ads use my keyword list generator or a similar tool to generate a list of various permutations of the targeted phrase. Create an ad campaign with ad groups and ad copy for each relevant keyword basket.

I did this for an affiliate site that is less than a year old, and bid 50 cents a click on AdWords. I was the only advertiser for most of the targeted keywords, got a 25% ctr for high volume search terms at 8 cents a click.

Some members of the media also contacted us wanting face time for television and national radio exposure. As the site ages and gets more exposure we will get a lot more of that.

One could use the same idea to target key bloggers by using AdSense’s site targeting function on their blogs.

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Here are a few common and basic social media news and bookmarking mistakes to watch out for:

1. Submitting press releases to social news sites. This is social media suicide, but there are marketers and PR practitioners out there endorsing the submission of press releases to social news as if it’s the same thing as submitting press releases to news search engines. It’s not the same thing at all.

This kind of content gets the most play at social news communities when it is coverage of an announcement, not the news release. Rather than submitting a press release to Digg, Netscape, Reddit, etc, focus on getting a popular blogger to write about your news. Once that happens, then draw attention to that bloggers’ coverage of your news via social news and bookmark sites.

When your company gets picked up in online media, you should be using using web based bookmark service as a clipping service anyway.

2. Add every social bookmarking icon you can think of to the bottom of your blog posts, just to be thorough. Bzzzt, wrong answer. Adding too many bookmark icons will only confuse or annoy the visitor giving the impression that the blog is desperate. Find out what social news and bookmark communities your content best resonates with and only list those services as options. 1-4 at most. Either that, or hide the other bookmark options in a foldout or dropdown.

3. Submit your own content. If you’re going to actively submit and vote on content within social news and bookmarking communities, pick a nice, generic moniker. That does not mean submitting your own content under an ambigous handle, it means social communities tend to dislike branded or commercial sounding user names. Participate in the community and create value, just not using your brand name.

4. Relying on a network of people to vote on stories. It’s amazingly easy to detect voting patterns with social news sites. Both Digg and Netscape offer functionality to invite others to read stories, but be smart about how often you do this and with who. Only invite those people you think would really be interested in the content, not just people who will give you a vote without question. People who are interested will also leave the best comments, which can generate even more interest.

5. Related to above: “Howdy Doody” comments. When people make overly positive comments, I call them “Howdy Doody” comments. You’ve seen them, “Gosh, this is really the best darn article ever!”. It’s a flag that your story is BS, even if it isn’t. Don’t try and fake the language of the more active community members either. ie, on Digg, “This sucks, you’re an evil SEO spammer!”. If you don’t agree with something, it’s a great opportunity to show your smarts, but do so succinctly. If the article doesn’t stand out, then don’t bother.

These are all pretty basic, yet they persist. what kinds of blunders do you see as a participant of social news and bookmarking sites? How about as a marketer?

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Top 10 Social Bookmarking Sites

1. Digg.com

2. Netscape.com

3. Del.icio.us

4. StumbleUpon.com

5. Reddit.com

6. Slashdot.org

7. BlinkList.com

8. Furl.net

9. Newsvine.com

10. ShoutWire.com

For a detailed analysis checkout the complete post.

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The latest news from Schacter discussed a new feature that he’d wanted for years – tag descriptions:

(W)hen I was working as an IT administrator for a non-profit agency, I was scrambling to find a free or low-cost tracking system I could use to manage their IT issues in a sane fashion. I went into research mode and bookmarked a lot of sites under my “issuetracking” tag. Now, looking back, I wish I could comment a little on that tag about what I found and what I ultimately decided to do… but how? Enter our latest feature: tag descriptions.

For any of your tags, you can now add a public title and description to appear at the top of the page. It may just be to remind yourself of what it is or to tell others more about it. To get started, just visit one of your tags and click “create description” (at the top).

Before leaping into your user profile to try this out, keep in mind that tag descriptions are always public. Users can title the tag description and provide a 1,000 character definition for it. After all, when you tag something as Cthulhu, just because you know where it will lead doesn’t mean that everyone else will.