Community Marketing Gets The Buzz

When it comes to technology and the Internet, buzzwords fly faster than a swarm of bees around a field of flowers; but when it comes to community, publishers need to listen to what it can offer them. Where has community marketing helped your site? How have blogs, tags, or forums helped drive traffic to your site? Tag us with more details at Muhammad Ali was staying somewhere at the same hotel, Jason Lee Miller kept his nose to the virtual grindstone and attended the SES Chicago session on SEM Via Communities, Wikipedia & Tagging. Wikipedia, the community-edited online encyclopedia, poses concerns for businesses. Companies need to be aware of their presence in Wikipedia, and act to correct negative information. Wikipedia can be one place where a company can create an entry describing itself, but should take care not to turn what should be an informative entry into a promotional pitch. On the topic of Aaron Wall, and We Build Pages CEO Jim Boykin, discussed how tags help a web page, blog posts, photo, or other online content gain social value. Tags are simply category names. When people search for community postings like blogs, tags let searchers more easily discover posts on the topics they want to find. Sites like del.icio.us, Technorati, and My Yahoo have integrated tags heavily into the way they work. Publishers must take care not to abuse tagging by placing them on items that have nothing to do with the tag just to get traffic. Doing so will get a site some very negative publicity. David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.