2007 is the year of the Social Community! The growth of existing social communities such as StumbleUpon.com and the emergence of all sorts of new and targeted social networks will certainly have an impact on how we market on the web moving forward!

I have recently invested more time leveraging popular social communities to drive traffic and have been pleased with the results. I am still learning and testing out ideas, but with the right set of stratgies, a business can certainly find effective ways to drive high volumes of "FREE" traffic to their sites.

I came across this very helpful guide for leveraging the potential of the Stumble Upon network for your ebusiness. For those that have not used Stumble Upon, this social network provides a cool little tool bar where you can tag sites while surfing the net that meet your particular interests. Other SU users searching for similar things will be able to view your tagged or recommended sites. It is important to note the certain types of sites do better than others on SU (Ie. Video, Humour,  Web 2.0 etc…)

It is evident that Social Media movement holds great promise as an effective, low-cost viral marketing strategies for many businesses that invest the time to learn some of the success strategies out there. Check out the Stumble Upon Guide here - a good read!

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I would like to piggyback on my previous post and expand a bit more on Social Search and in particular Social Bookmarking.  While Social Bookmarking sites like del.icio.us are not exactly “new kids on the block”, their prominance and popularity has grown in leaps and bounds over the past year or so. The power of del.icio.us to provide meaningful and targeted user-driven content definitely turned some heads with Yahoo purchasing the 9 person company last December for a reported $30million.

Social Bookmarking sites have significant implications for the way we communicate and interact with our customers and prospective customers. Many websites, blogs, ezines and such are implementing del.icio.us and other social bookmarking tags on their sites in order to create instant backlinks for SEO purposes as well as connect with this rapidly emerging community of web users.

Today, I came across this great social bookmarking article that provides a nice overview of the most popular and useful social bookmarking services and tools available. Although I am quite familiar with social bookmarking, this article provided a nice overview of the distinguishing features and benefits for the main players in this industry. The article is a good read - enjoy! 

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