How to Use Delicious for Content Ideas

Do you have a Delicious account? What on earth is Delicious?

Delicious is an apt name for a social bookmarking service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source.

It puts emphasis on the power of the community, and it can help you discover new content, save it for reference later, and share it with your colleagues.

It comes in handy for two main purposes:

1.) Bookmarking and tagging content you find useful

2.) Browsing content others have found useful and tagged

You can write notes about why you liked that content when you bookmark it as a short hand for later. Both activities can get you on your way for great content ideas that map to your content strategy.

Bookmarking and tagging content

As you develop your blog's and micromedia content calendar, it may be helpful to use Delicious as a tool to bookmark content you find interesting, instructive, and helpful. Pick a series of tags that reflect your focus, and select articles and posts about the topics you'd want to write about.

You can even start your posts right there by writing a brief comment to the tagged URL. If you syndicate your bookmarks to a feed, for example FriendFeed, you could also observe or ask for reactions from your network about that topic and comment. Of course, this presupposes that you participate in discussions there for people to respond.

I bookmark big stories that inform my thinking on trends. That's how I use Delicious. You could open separate accounts per line of business, or product line, and have different subject matter experts keep tabs on what's being written by bookmarking on each one.

Other ideas on bookmarking and tagging:

• become a go-to resource for industry information on a specific topic -- the more defined, the better. For example, start an account on cloud computing, accounting software, captive insurance, email marketing, etc. 

• build a platform around a specific issue in your market -- look to define the problem better. For example, bookmark stories on upcoming legislation on privacy, new EPA regulations, open source coding integrity, etc.

• comment on stories written about the business you're in -- think about defining and communicating your company's position on it. For example, a major story was posted about SaaS companies and you were not featured, make a note of what you would have said as a quote in the comment to that URL.

These bookmarks will be useful as you write blog posts and tweet about topics as well.

Browsing content tagged by others

Say you're interested in finding out what other people who read content online are interested in -- either for research purposes, or to see what's trending on a particular tag, for example popular software, you'll be able to do that on Delicious.

And as you develop the content strategy process for your blog, you'll be able to gain insights from content already tagged by others.

Many successful bloggers make it a habit to scour their blog syndication readers to find out what other people are writing about and adapt it for their audience. In some cases even making the topic wildly popular in their own style.

There are hardly any new ideas out there -- yet you can find many new executions.

***

In some cases, Delicious can be a way to blog without an official blog. And you can integrate it with major product launches in you PR program as a way to track the stories written about you.

Delicious had 1.7MM unique visitors in May, compared to 5.7MM on StumbleUpon [Compete.com data]. However, it has more traffic than Technorati, which holds fairly steady at 1.1+MM [Compete.com) and used to or had the potential to be the reference site for blogs.

I found Delicious useful for content bookmarking and tagging. Have you explored the site for content ideas? Do you use it at all?

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Comments

[Elizabeth Sosnow]

Hi Valeria:

I love Delicious and agree with your thoughts above.

As a PR professional, I've also found it to be a useful tool for researching new story or sector ideas for clients. Since it allows you to see which article have been bookmarked the most, it's quick way to get on top of a new topic -- and the reporters and outlets that cover it.

Happy Tuesday!

[Steve Garfield]

Hey Valeria,
It's so easy to save things to Delicious. Use use a bookmarklet called "Bookmark on Delicious." When I click that, delicious opens up for me, filled in with the title and URL of the web page that I want to share.

You can get a bookmarklet for your browser over here:

http://delicious.com/help/tools

Sometimes I add a description, and always add tags. One tag I use a lot is "Get Seen", to collect video news for my book.

Here are those items:

http://delicious.com/stevegarfield/getseen

I also take the RSS feed for those posts and embed it on my book's Facebook page.

http://facebook.com/getseen

You'll see that on the left hand side.
--Steve

Chris Brogan sent me ;-)

[Austin]

Absolutely, I use Delicious to find stuff that others have already verified as good content. Nice way to find Web Design tips, and sites not necessarily ranked on Google for the words you search.

[Ian Huckabee]

Some good ideas here. Delicious is the best and easiest social bookmarking site that I use. Their links are nofollow, so the SEO benefits are low, but I love the idea of embedding on a Facebook page.

[Steve Garfield]

Update:

Embedding the RSS in Facebook is a little tricky.

Details here:
http://www.hyperarts.com/blog/import-rss-feeds-facebook-static-fbml-tabs-pages/

Right now I'm testing the Social RSS method to post new delicious posts to my wall. We'll see how it goes.

If you are posting RSS to your Facebook page, how are you doing it?

Thanks,
--Steve

[Joel Bush]

I recommend Pukka if you use more than one Delicious account via Mac:
http://codesorcery.net/pukka

Fwiw, I have collected stuff of interest to Internet content creators here:
http://delicious.com/undependent

[Tamara Gruber]

Glad to see more creative ways to use Delicious. I think this tool is under-rated. I recently wrote a post on ways I use Delicious at http://www.redgiantconsulting.com/2010/06/30/5-ways-to-use-delicious-com-in-your-business/.

[Scott Gould]

Hey Valeria

I'm right with you. I use delicious for the above stuff, as well as tagging things for me own use at later points, like for books, frameworks, etc.

I do have a small community who check my delicious daily for cool stuff. This is far easier when using the iPad - saves right into delcious from Google Reader.

Scott

[Bryan Person]

HUGE fan of Delicious, and have been a regular user of it for the last several years. I also use it to keep track of trends, and refer back to these items when I'm putting together a blog post or a presentation.

I also have a specific tag called "Commented" that I use for posts I've commented on. It's helpful for clicking back to those posts that don't auto-notify me that someone has responded to my comment.

@Scott: I use an iPad app called NewsRack for my feeds (it syncs with my Google Reader account), and there's an option to share items from there to my Delicious account, too. How do you find Google Reader on the iPad?

[sir jorge]

it still seems complicated

[Lisa Stockwell]

I've used it for quite awhile as my only bookmarking tool, since it allows me to keep notes or copy the most salient quotes from the pieces I save and know at a glance why I saved them. Thanks for providing more tips on how to make it useful.

[Connie Reece]

I <3 Delicious -- have used it for about four years. I just subscribed to your Delicious bookmarks, by the way. I haven't used that feature of Delicious as much lately, but it's a great way to see what thought leaders in a particular field are reading and find important. In workshops I've described using Delicious as "getting the smartest people in the world to do your research--for free."

[Valeri Maltoni]

@Elizabeth - happy Tuesday to you. Indeed, the PR use of Delicious and other social media tools warrants a post on its own, which I may write in the next couple of weeks. Glad this is a useful topic. I have tons of creative ideas about tools. I tend to hold back because without a strategy, tools can be frustrating and a time suck.

@Steve - love it. Yes, authors who are online savvy can really amplify their presence and make it easy for others to find their content. Good tips. And thank you for coming back to share the extra link for the Facebook page embed.

@Ian - to me when companies and people do things exclusively for self interest, like SEO juice, they end up building bad karma for themselves and their brands. Do they think people are selectively stupid and don't see that? We're all quite savvy online by now. On the other hand, the bar is still so low that a company and individual with the right intention and willingness to share good content and be helpful does gain share of conversation and attention.

@Joel - thank you for sharing resources with us. It's very interesting to see how others use these tools.

@Tamara - ditto, excellent sharing and I'm sure we'll all get great ideas from each other. I learn so much about people from seeing what their interests are.

@Scott - I'm so glad to discover I'm not the only one using some of these tools to think about frameworks and trends. iPad... one day. I'm still on my first generation iPhone ;)

@Bryan - great idea about tagging commented on posts. Wish I had thought of that! Good thing you shared it with us.

@Lisa - sometimes we jump into the next tool without utilizing the current one fully. Glad everyone is sharing their tips on this post.

@Connie - love it. Yes, the most underestimated use of man of these tools is to understand better what people are working on, seeing the evolution in their interests and topics, etc. Glad you're teaching that.

[Ricardo Bueno]

I love delicious. I use it to save articles that I found useful around the topics that are of interest to me and my readership base. When someone asks me a question about a particular topic, I tweet them a link (or email them) to an article on my own blog I might have written but also reference additional resources by sending them to the tag on my delicious account for the topic in question.

I think it's underutilized by many (at least in my opinion). But anyway, I agree that it's a completely effective resource.

[Eric Pratum]

David over a Heroic Destiny had a pretty good post about using Delicious to track comments: http://bit.ly/c3wyKC ...similar to Bryan's strategy above.

This has changed the way that I handle outreach and engagement both personally and for clients.