CardMarketing 2.0

There’s a good chance you’ve seen them by now. Slowly, but very surely, they’ve started appearing on more and more mainstream websites, including, in December, the New York Times and, a week or so ago, Business Wire. They’re not always easy to spot – they’re often at the bottom of the page – but increasingly, and in ever-increasing numbers, they are there.

These tiny little icons are essentially news-, knowledge- or, come to think of it, pretty much anything-sharing tools that link to user-generated social bookmarking, content and news sites. They include del.icio.us, Shadows, StumbleUpon, reddit, Digg and newsvine.

They allow people to ‘bookmark’, or archive, a web page they find interesting or relevant by applying ‘tags’, or keywords, to it. For example, a person bookmarking this article might use tags like ‘bookmarking’, ‘Web 2.0’ or ‘card marketing’. (You can, in fact, bookmark a site without these icons, but for most people the icons make it easier to save and share the content they come across.)

The bookmarked page is then stored online, not only for that person’s own reference at some point in the future but generally – and this is the interesting bit from a card marketing perspective – to be shared with the public as a whole. In fact, when someone bookmarks a page, they are essentially recommending it to everybody else on the planet.

You need to check these sites out in person to see their different features but the basic thrust is that if a person bookmarks a page on your site that contains some fascinating, innovative or useful new content – a new card with a market-leading rate, or a quirky marketing campaign – then millions of other people can access that content via the social bookmarking or news site it has been flagged up on. This not only significantly increases the link popularity of your site, but is a powerful way to virally market your product and brand.

But there is, as always, a catch. Or rather a challenge. The challenge to is to create content that would make someone want to ‘StumbleUpon’, ‘Digg’ or ‘post your site to del.icio.us’ in the first place. There’s no point having a dozen icons running alongside content that’s bone dry and, for the vast majority of people, utterly irrelevant. That can even work against you.

In a Web 2.0 world, content is king so create it, and make sure it’s creative, informative, cutting-edge, market-leading and, above all, cool. “If your story rocks and receives enough Diggs,” declares Digg, “it is promoted to the front page for the millions of visitors to see.” The challenge, then, is to make your content, your cards, rock.

Of course, social bookmarking isn’t the be-all-and-end-all for boosting brand awareness and acquisition rates. For starters, there are demographic issues to bear in mind. If you’re in Asia, for instance, then Digg has its limitations. Recent research reveals that 61% of the Digg community is based in the US, Los Angeles has the biggest number of Digg users – 1.29% – and 78% of Digg users speak American English. But as social bookmarking grows, and new social bookmarking sites crop up in all corners of the world, who knows?

Despite still being in its salad days, the potential of social bookmarking is vast. It has even been suggested that social bookmarking sites will one day challenge the major search engines, as they enable people to navigate the internet on the back of human recommendations rather than abstract algorithms. If this is the case, the onus is on card marketers to come up with a social media strategy that encompasses social bookmarking — and soon.