Yahoo! Buzz And The Supposed Death Of Social Media

I love it when people talk out of their backside when it comes to Socail Media. It's often the case that because people don't understand something that they call it a fad and it "just won't last".

Well whilst researching new social bookmarking services for a E-PR client of mine I came across a post by Heather Hopkins at Hitwise.

This post was about the new Yahoo! Buzz variant of social bookmarking.

One of her comments was:

Visits to News Aggregators are growing. US visits to Digg were up 89% year on year in February. US visits to Stumble Upon were up 4-fold and to Reddit (the #3 News Aggregator), up 7 fold.

But when you read another part of her post:

The thing that's interesting about these social news websites is that they are really about celebrity gossip, gaming news and video sharing. (I'm not saying that Lindsay Lohan's wardrobe choice isn't news, but...). I am basing this conclusion on clickstream data for these websites.

... you may wonder why I'm still looking at Social bookmarking for my investment finance client?

Well the first reason I can understand people disagreeing with me on. It's better to be trying this generic stuff on niche clients just for your own sanity to see if it works. If you follow the crowd in thinking it'll be irrelevant then you're only ever going to be as successful as the mainstream.

The second is that with digg and the suchlike, you'll get a "vote" score. With this if you can obtain the traffic from the variety of sources then if the content is any good then the score goes up.

If people aren't inclinded to comment there is no actual way that others will see that the blog is awash with like-minded people and will feel less inclinded to contribute. People like to feel part of a group, it'd be no fun for them to talk to themself or the blog owner.

So, I use social bookmarking tools as a beating heart of a blog - not necessarily as a traffic driving tool!

But with Digg, Stumbleupon and Reddit being seen as a bit "geeky" - would Yahoo! Buzz offer an oportunity to get into the target market? Well I'll only know if I try it!

You can find out more about Yahoo! Buzz here.