image courtesy of j_a_n

How can organizations best utilize the social bookmarking site Delicious? Though not the largest of the social bookmarking sites (it is 7th of the top 20), it is one of the easiest sites to mine for information. It is deliciously simple (pun intended!) to use, and there are over 180 tools, add-ons, and related resources to help you to take advantage of this platform. I can think of three broad ways organizations can use Delicious: for public/private information-gathering, intra company collaboration, and sharing news with stakeholders. I’m sure there are more! How do you use Delicious?

Information Gathering (public or private)

Use Delicious to gather relevant information: stay on top of the latest industry developments, competitor news, research new possibilities, and monitor tags of your own organization’s name. Use Delicious to search for these items or articles of interest to your organization. Remember, you can determine whether or not each bookmark will be seen publicly, and you decide if you want others to know what you are researching!

1. Follow Users:

Find and follow fellow industry professionals that upload bookmarks.  Select the “add a user to network” option in order to collect all of your favorite users’ bookmarks in one place.  Here is a screen shot of how to add a user to your network:

2. Follow Tags:

You can  “subscribe” to specific tags of interest in Delicious. This action sends all your subscriptions directly to your Delicious home page. Alternatively, you can also create an RSS (really simple syndication) feed to automatically update whenever new articles with the subscribed tag are bookmarked. You can also create an RSS feed of any user’s bookmarks.

As an example, I searched Delicious for all tagged information about the electric car, and subscribe to the RSS feed for all future articles tagged “electric car.”

Intra company Collaboration

Why not use Delicious for sharing information within the company? Create a custom organizational intranet for sharing bookmarks! No copying and sending the URLs by email, no re-posting to your company’s intranet. When everyone in the company is encouraged to share articles, the volume of intra company news sharing increases.

Two options for intra company news sharing:

1. Encourage employees to bookmark and share tags using one company password and user ID, but mark each bookmark as the “do not share!” All employees can log in to see the newest bookmarks, or subscribe to the company’s bookmarks.  Here is a sample screen shot:

2. Create individual employee accounts, and employees tag bookmarks with a set of agreed-upon tag names. To share the information, employees in the company subscribe to each other’s networks, bookmarks, and specifically-named identifying tags (e.g. conversationprogram221).

Sharing News with Stakeholders

Create a news feed on the website of bookmarked news about your organization. This displays a vibrant, crowdsourced “News” section of the website, or a scrolling news widget out of your Delicious bookmarks.  Here are two variations on this idea:

1. Whenever your organization is mentioned in the news, bookmark it to Delicious and tag it with your company’s name. Create an RSS feed for all Delicious tags with your company’s name. Place the RSS feed on the front page of the website or the sidebar of your blog. You could put the RSS feed in the “News” section of your website, but that’s not as fun!

2. Create a public RSS feed to your website of all tags relevant to stakeholders. For example, if your organization’s mission is advocacy for the electric car,  create RSS feeds for the tags “electric car,” “alternative energy automobile,” “automobile efficiency,” and other related tags.

Of course, don’t forget that bookmarks are public by default. This means that you are already sharing information with your stakeholders. Ask them to subscribe to your bookmarks! Tell them that this is the way your organization offers news to other Delicious users. And…don’t forget to mention your Delicious account on the website!

How does your organization use Delicious? Please share your stories with us in the comments section below!

How do you gather and process all the online information that you need to know? Amy Sample Ward opened up her blog reader to the public with her guest post “Want a Peek at My RSS: Here It Is!” on Beth Kanter’s Blog. That post pointed me to some wonderful blogs, but left me wondering about how everyone gathers information online apart from reading blogs.

Today, I’m sharing my information gathering and processing system with you. What I’m hoping is that at the end of this, you’ll write your own post about this topic to spread insights.

I acquire most (3/4) of my information from blogs I subscribe to, and articles that are tweeted. Social media communities (Linkedin discussion groups, Facebook friends or business Pages, and the nonprofit news site Idealist News), online media (New York Times and its blogs), and industry reports give me everything else. I do crowdsource occasionally to supplement.

I spend a not-insignificant amount of time reading news on blogs and twitter. I spend at least an hour a day reading blogs. Currently, I subscribe to 44 blogs. I read them using Google Reader. After looking at Amy Sample Ward’s Netvibes reader, I’ll be switching to Netvibes.   I divide the blogs into “must reads” (Jeremy Owyang, Beth Kanter, Mashable, Inside Facebook, Network for Good, NTEN), others that add value, and the ones that are outside of my immediate world but offer interesting perspectives (Online Journalism Blog, Museum 2.0, eJewishPhilanthropy, NYT’s Gadgetwise blog).

Twitter drives a lot of my reading. Twitter is, in fact, my supplementary RSS feed. I spend at least an hour a day on Twitter, and jump on and off throughout the day as I have time. I use TweetDeck to organize and read tweets easily.  I have divided my TweetDeck Twitter client into columns that make sense of who I’m following (nonprofit organizations, nonprofit professionals, new media, Israelis, friends/family, and a changing current search column).

I join Linkedin Discussion Groups based not only on who I want to meet, but what I want to learn. I belong to Social Media Mafia, Nonprofit Professionals Forum, Chronicle of Philanthropy, Web 2.0 for Nonprofit Organizations, Nonprofit Technology Network, and a few others. I ” fan” certain Facebook pages primarily for information gathering. I am a fan of Hubspot, Web Analytics an Hour A Day, Customers That Click, PitchEngine, Tech Soup, and Facebook Marketing Solutions, among others.

Finally, I utilize crowdsourcing on Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, and Linkedin if I want information about a specific topic. I don’t always get everything that I need by crowdsourcing, but it gives me a good start and direction.

I can’t possibly remember everything that I want to remember, and consider the social bookmarking site Delicious to be my personal recording secretary. I bookmark and tag whatever I think I’ll want to remember. I also utilize Friendfeed in much the same way – it’s a record of my social media activities (status updates, links, tweets, etc) – and it is searchable. Ideally, I’ve tagged important articles. But if I forget, and I tweeted about it, then I can search my Friendfeed by keyword.

I’m sure there are great ways to gather and process information, which I haven’t yet considered. I’d love to learn from you. I hope that this post will inspire a series of posts about this topic. I am very curious how other people gather and process information in today’s online, ever-social world. It’s a jungle out there, and we have to manage it somehow. But maybe we don’t have to do it alone.

How do you gather and process the online information you need?