Using Delicious to Understand Your Users

Last night at the office I was showing a friend one of the ShoeMoney System videos about How to Use, Dominate, and Profit From Social Media. In that video one of the things I cover is Delicious. I have never really seen anyone write about how marketers can use Delicious to better understand their users/customers. If you are not familiar with Delicious it's a simple hosted bookmark solution. Users can bookmark pages and then "tag" them so they can remember them later. Since it's hosted users can always have access to their bookmarks no matter what computer they are on. Over 600 shoemoney.com pages are bookmarked on delicious. If you want to see what pages are bookmarked on your website just use the site:www.yoursite.com command on delicious. For example site:www.shoemoney.com gives me this: Delicious screenshot

As you can see 988 people bookmarked the root of the site at http://www.shoemoney.com. Clicking on the number takes you to a page with a lot more insight on how these people are tagging your page. (see the red arrow above). delicious screenshot

You can also see on the left hand side of the page what each and every user tagged www.shoemoney.com as, and on the left hand side we can see an aggregate:

Now this is just an example for the root domain of the site... but since it's the root domain of the site it is kind of an overall analysis of what people feel shoemoney.com is about. Lets check out what they think. Of the 988 people who bookmarked the site:

361 have tagged it as Blog
294 tagged it as SEO
278 tagged it as Marketing
186 tagged it as Advertising

Then there is a pretty big long tail of items like affiliate, tips, google, sem, finance, entrepreneur advice, ppc, internet marketing. There also is a lot of crossover... nobody labeled it just as Blog. Blog was accompanied by SEO, Marketing, or Advertising. So what does this tell us? Well it's like we just polled a decent segment of our user base completely unsolicited and they told us that they feel shoemoney.com is a Blog about SEO, Marketing, & Advertising. Not quite how I would describe the site to someone but that is really interesting to see eh? Not exactly earth shattering news... except to maybe some SEO's who better recognize! Here is something interesting. As I dig through some of the bookmarks there is an ton of people who bookmarked my advertising page. Why? Well looking at delicious many people did not really bookmark it because they wanted to advertise with us but rather as a example of an advertising page done correctly.... and mostly because they probably are going to duplicate it. You can check it out here. Some of the comments are awesome and enlightening :

An excellent sample advertising blog page ("Why advertise here?")

Note to self... this guy makes 30k a month plus off his blog... copy his ass.

I could dig through this stuff forever... cool information about what my readers find interesting and what they find interesting about it. There are a ton of other uses with Delicious. I also use it to generate keywords for our niche sites in PPC campaigns. Seth Godin recently spoke at my New York City Elite Retreat event and during his talk he said, "If someone spotted you wearing your brands t-shirt and came up to you and said I recognize that. Its about X - What is it you would want them to say?" "What story is your brand telling?" I feel that delicious is one of the few tools that can truly tell you the story visitors are telling themselves about your website. So go look yours up now and make sure you are telling the right story!