Hello to everyone reading this right now, My name is Dean Karasinski. This is my first official/inaugural Pepperjam Blog post. I am very excited to have the opportunity to write for Pepperjam and hope to have some fun with it.

In this first edition I would like to address something that is becoming more and more popular on the internet, the phenomenon known as social bookmarking. In the “olden days” of the internet you would bookmark all of your favorite sites either for your own entertainment or to share with your friends at a later date. Often times these bookmarks went to waste, meaning that you never got around to what you initially intended to do with them, which is to show them off to your friends to see who could find better “stuff”.

Book marking is a whole different ballgame on web 2.0; you could essentially say that it has gone multiplayer or MMO. Sites like Digg, del.icio.us, Listable and Furl have a huge user base and the content changes on a daily basis thanks to everyone contributing their bookmarks all the time. The up and comer, that I personally enjoy the most, Stumble Upon is by far the most amusing. It essentially works like channel surfing for your computer and is a plug in for that hip browser Firefox. First you download and sign up for Stumble Upon then select from a list of topics that interest you. After that, finding an interesting site is done with the click of a button on the toolbar. When you are taken to a site you can then press the thumbs up or down button depending on whether you like or dislike the content you are shown. If you like the it, Stumble Upon will fetch sites for you with similar content and from according to the categories you chose earlier.

While this is great for entertainment purposes it also poses an interesting question; can social book marking be used as an advertising tool? My initial answer to the question would be no since it is primarily based on user submissions. The users tend to weed out or disapprove sites that aren’t of interest to them or that they perceive as spam/advertisements etc. If done right however, social bookmarking sites can be a powerful advertising tool. The trick is to have the right kind of content. The reason people are using social bookmarking is to find new things on the internet, not the same old, boring, template driven, rehashed sites. For instance, on M&M’s site, for Halloween they have put up a puzzle with 50 hidden horror movies. The trick is though it is a visual puzzle based on clues within the picture. (Check it out to see what I am talking about).

The bottom line is that social bookmarking is very popular right now and finding the next cool thing is something that a lot of people are driven to do. This is a huge opportunity for advertisers to capitalize on some of their ideas that might be outside of the box, have content driven towards a smaller or niche demographic or they simply have no other place to put it. It can be a very powerful tool for advertisers to add to their already huge list of places to advertise on the internet.

On that note let’s see some places that I have found using Stumble Upon:
ZunaFish

Light Emitting Shirts

Disney and Dali

This entry was posted on Friday, September 22nd, 2006 at 5:17 pm and is filed under internet marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.