Hello

Just wondered what the current thoughts  are on page bookmarks as a viable viral marketing activity? We have recently redeveloped our website to include a substanial amount of free to air content. Wondered if these bookmark icons really do improve traffic or if they have passed their sell by date as a useful marketing tool?

We did a short experiment with Delicious on some pages but was hard to monitor effects on traffic. Also have noticed little bookmarking icons have proliferated so any thoughts on whether pursuing this line of marketing activity is worth the reward would be appreciated?

thanks

Robert

hi, Rob, how are you?

Here's what I think...

Test it:

1. Test it for a few weeks
2. Change the way you display the bookmarking tools & see if it makes any difference
   
3. Change the specific bookmark options you display & see if it makes any difference
4. Ask your visitors (if you send out a monthly email newsletter you could just include a really simple poll explaining that you've added them & what they are, + two 'keep em', 'dump em' option buttons)

If people like them & use them, keep them. If nobody uses it, remove it & test again further down the road.

Whatever anyone says in response to your question - these tools are very subjective to your content & your audience. It's worth just spending a couple of hours testing them.

Gut feeling extras:

• It's not worth it for 'commodity' information (basic product pages, etc), but is worth it if you have any interesting/unusual products, or if you have any blog/news sections.
• It's not worth including everything: digg, facebook, stumbleupon, del.icio.us is probably enough.
  

Is it worth it overall?

You ask if it's worth it: There's next to zero effort involved in setting it up. Once it's set up, it runs itself. It's easy to monitor (just look at how many diggs you get, how many users have added you to del.icio.us, how much traffic you got from stumbleupon).

If you do hit the digg homepage, it's worth it: tens of thousands of visits, hundreds of extra inbound links. I often get big spikes in traffic & new subscribers from stumbleupon on one site. Those particular subscribers are great: they're good advocates &, as they're usually heavy members of the social tools, they can vote you up & send traffic again-and-again.

I hope that helps!

daniel

ps. I like your bookshop site - 'Tiles of the Unexpected' sounds really good