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.

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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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