U Click Pick: del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is one of my
favorite Web services. I use del.icio.us both personally and professionally,
and I’ll share some ideas on how it can be useful for public relations.

If you are not familiar with
del.icio.us, it’s a social bookmarking tool that allows you to “tag” and
categorize Web content (e.g., Web pages, photos, videos, music). I like to explain
social bookmarking and the concept of tagging as the library card catalog for
the Internet. Years ago (yes, I’m in my 20’s, but even I remember this), when
you went to the library and wanted to look for books pertaining to a particular
keyword, you could look it up using the card catalog. Like books, categorizing
by keyword or “tags” is a great way to organize content online for easy
retrieval later. The social aspect comes in because anyone can tag any type of
Web content with any descriptor. It’s that collaborative approach that makes
the seemingly impossible task of organizing the Internet possible and
comprehensive. This approach is referred to as folksonomy, a community effort
in categorizing Web content from the bottom up.

By using a service such as
del.icio.us, you can tag the Web content you find interesting and would like to
save for later (creating your own filing system that you can share with
others). Or, you can view others’ tags for simple searching of the Internet’s
card catalog.

Del.icio.us has some very practical uses for public
relations:

Tracking media clippings. If you are tracking media coverage online (and you
should be with Google Alerts), you can tag any articles, blogs or podcasts that
mention your organization or industry. You also can file the content using more
specific tags (e.g., tags for certain divisions of your organization, products
and services or special projects and interests).

Paperless filing of an endless resource.  How many
times have you come across an article online and printed it out thinking it
will be useful for an upcoming presentation or project? When it came time to
use the article, could you even find it? By categorizing all of the content you
find interesting online, you can save the paper mess and keep everything
organized all in one place. And don’t worry, del.icio.us will let you tag
content and mark it private if you do not wish to share it.

Sharing good finds with colleagues. You may be thinking, “How is this different that
bookmarking items in my Web browser?” By tagging the content online, you can
easily share it with others. You can also access it on the road from any
computer. Allowing others to view your del.icio.us bookmarks is a much easier
and efficient way to share information than sending out a link via e-mail.  We all know too well how quickly things get
lost in our overfilled e-mail inboxes.

Avoiding reinventing the wheel. If you are looking for information on a particular
topic, check out what other people have already bookmarked on the topic. It can
be much more efficient to find meaningful content this way than aimlessly
searching keywords on Google. Why do all the searching yourself when it’s
likely that someone else has already done the legwork?