As any social media expert will tell you, part of “Future Business” is improving the dialogue that you have with your customers. There are a great many tools that have been and continue to be developed which allow businesses to get a sense of how people feel about their products.
But, one crowd sourcing idea that I have not seen mentioned is the technique of monitoring Delicious tags. If you are not familiar with Delicious or other social bookmarking apps, this post is not going to make much sense to you. If you are already familiar, read on.
So, here’s how you can use del.icio.us to understand your customers:
- Sign-in to Delicious and select the Look up a URL feature in the top right
- Type in the URL of your website’s home page
- Right there you can learn a lot. How are people tagging your business? What comments are they making? Positive? Negative?
- Now, select one of the tags that seems to be used a lot or that is particularly appropriate for your business. What other sites are listed under that tag? How many times have you been tagged that vs. other sites? Are your competitors there? Are there any sites that you were not aware of in your space?
- You can continue this for other tags that people are using
- You can also try other popular URL’s within your site that you think people might bookmark (eg. login page).
Hopefully this review will give you some insight into the people that are using your site. Remember that the sample may skewed in a few ways
- People using delicious might be more technology capable than your average customer
- The people that take the time to bookmark are probably more positive about your business than your average customer. After all, bookmarking means they want to remember to come back.
Keep these items in mind and learn about your customers. If you have other interesting ways to use delicious, please feel free to share them as comments.
Future Business 