RSS and Social Media Bookmarking Jessica Gibbs and Colleen Mullins

Social Bookmarking  Does anybody in the class use social bookmarking sites?  If so, do you use them for social purposes or for individual use?

Definition  Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to organize, store, manage and search for bookmarks of resources online. (Wikipedia, 2011)  A sub-category to Social Media that allows you to share, organize and manage your bookmarks, or favorite websites, with other users that use the same social bookmarking tool, such as Delicious, Stumbleupon and Digg. (Internet Intelligence Works, 2011)

History  Bookmarking sites has been around for as long as browsers let you classify sites as “favorites”  Messy  Hard to find content

History Continued  Social Bookmarking sites date back to 1996 with a website called itLists.com. This was the first time that bookmarks could be shared.  Other Social Bookmarking sites sprung up including Backflip, Quiver, and Clip2, however almost all these sites failed during the dot com bubble burst.  In 2003 del.icio.us was created, using a system of tags to organize and share different bookmarks.  Soon after many bookmarking sites with different features, including comments and ratings of bookmarks, began to be created.

Social Aspect  What makes social bookmarking…social? 

Top Social Bookmarking Sites  Digg  Delicious  StumbleUpon  Reedit  Tweet meme  Fark  Diggo  Slashdot  Friendfeed  Clipmarks  Newsvine  Hacker news  Blinklist  Faves

Delicious  Founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003  Owned by AVOS Systems  Users can tag individual bookmarks  Users can view bookmarks added by others  Easy to use

Digg  Started in 2004 as an experiment  Allows users to either “digg” or “bury” articles posted on the site.  Can follow people, or different industries (ie. Sports, technology)  Can discuss, blog, comment on articles  Digg Dialog  Has problem with spammers groups

StumbleUpon  Stumble Upon is a discovery engine that finds and recommends web content to its users. Its features allow users to discover and rate Web pages, photos, and videos that are personalized to their tastes and interests using peer-sourcing and social-networking principles. (Wikipedia, 2011)social-networking

StumbleUpon Continued  Founded in 2001  Users rate sites by giving a thumbs up or thumbs down  Catered to your interests  Has more than 15 million users and has reached 25 billion stumbles  h4XFMo&feature=player_embedded#! h4XFMo&feature=player_embedded#

How used in PR  Used to drive readers to your site  Place bookmarks on social bookmarking sites, and content goes viral through reader recommendations and ratings  Increase Search Engine Optimization  Create Purpose Built Pages

Sharing Capabilities

Best Practices in PR  Use social bookmarking to help find a niche audience.  Not about quantity of articles, but quality  Search competitors or other information on topic  Have CEO or high up personnel comment/tag/post on industry news  Consider your tags carefully

Social Bookmarking and SEO 

Let’s Create one!   Create new account  Put PR_SocialMedia in Network  Subscribe to PR_SocialMedia required

What is RSS?  Really Simple Syndication  Technology used by web users around the world to keep track of your favorite sites, news headlines, or podcasts  RSS provides you with a method of getting relevant and up to date information sent to you to read in your own time. It saves you time and helps you to get the information you want quickly after it was published. (Sally Falkow)  RSS was created in March 1999, 12 years old

RSS

Why Use RSS?  Suppose you have 50 sites and blogs that you like to visit regularly. Going to visit each website and blog everyday could take you hours. With RSS, you can “subscribe” to a website or blog, and get “fed” all the new headlines from all of these 50 sites and blogs in one list, and see what’s going on in minutes instead of hours. (Stephanie Quilao)  RSS is the best way to stay current, providing up to the minute updates  RSS allows users to filter down content that is relevant to your interests

How to Use RSS  In order to read sites via RSS, you must set yourself up with an RSS Feed Reader  When you are at your desired blog where you wish to subscribe to feeds, you will see a feed icon that initiates your RSS feed

How to Use RSS  As you subscribe to feeds you’ll see that unread entries from the sites you’re tracking will be marked as bold. As you click on them you’ll see the latest update and can read it right there in the feed reader. You are given the option to click through to the actual site or move onto the next unread item – marking the last one as “read”  If using an RSS reader seems complicated, you have the option subscribing to RSS by using . All updates will be sent to your inbox.

RSS Readers  There are a variety of different RSS readers you can use to subscribe to your favorite blogs. Most are free and are easily accessible from any computer or mobile device.  Some include:  MyYahoo Shrook MyMSN Lektora MyAOL Google Reader * Attensa Bloglines * FeedDemon NewsGator NetVibes PageFlakes * items= easy RSS feed to start with

RSS in Plain English  dded&v=0klgLsSxGsU dded&v=0klgLsSxGsU  Does anybody already use RSS to read your favorite blogs? Which blog? What reader?

Best Practices in PR  When you decide to set up RSS feed for your brand, you’re choosing a direct-to-consumer approach–an effective and straightforward means to reach the public, different from older PR practices the typically go second- hand through the media (the influencer) to distribute news to customers. (Breakenridge)  RSS helps PR specialists disseminate information that bypasses s, e-newsletters, and HTML blasts. RSS makes sure your brand’s audience does not miss out on important information.

Best Practices in PR  RSS is a great tool for companies that are on a budget  RSS helps companies feed their information directly to their audience and drives traffic to your companies site  RSS is a great way that enables you to update, target, and control the frequency of your branding  RSS keeps your brand top of mind. The more interesting, newsworthy, information you make available, the more your audience will immerse themselves in your brand. (Breakenridge)

Best Practices in PR  The job of a PR specialists is to give your company visibility, exposure, prominence and prestige. With RSS, you can target a niche group with your topic specific newsfeed. You can make your company the “news authority” in that niche.  It is important for PR specialists to put press releases into RSS and treat them as news items

Best Practices in PR  Having an RSS feed attached to our news items is a great way for the Alpha-1 Foundation to guarantee that people who are affected by Alpha-1 (Alphas, family, friends of Alphas) receive automatic updates from our website. Once our audience receives their updates, we hope they will push that information out to their networks via , web site, blog, Facebook or Twitter. It also helps us spread the word through our Facebook page, as there's an RSS feed plug in that allows Facebook users to access your website content directly on our Facebook page! Having the content on our Facebook page allows our friends to "like", "share" or "comment" on the news items they see as we post them to our website. - Laura Fleming, Communication Specialist at the Alpha-1 Foundation

RSS VS Bookmarking  With bookmarking, you have to do all of the work  If you are trying to keep up with multiple sites, it can become difficult  If you forget to check your bookmarks, you may be missing out on valuable information  While checking various sites that don’t update often, you often come across the same information

The Future of RSS  RSS is quickly being adopted by new sites everyday, with thousands of sites already using it  RSS helps information become more accessible and easier to find. RSS helps information spread easier and quicker

Subscribe to a RSS Reader   Gmail users

Subscribe to a Class Blog  Step 1: Go to our Class Wiki: /Wiki%20Homehttp://prnewmedia.pbworks.com/w/page/ /Wiki%20Home  Click on the second tab Pages & Files  Click on all pages and find the class directory  Subscribe to one of your classmate’s blogs

Discussion Questions  1.Do you have any ideas on how you think organizations or business could use social bookmarking sites to benefit the company?  2. Do you think it is ethical for organizations to promote articles by having their employees bookmark, digg, or like their post?  3. After hearing about the different ways public relations practitioners use RSS feeds, do you guys think these are helpful to PR or just another added task?