Social Bookmarking Button Madness

Yeah, I was tempted by those icons. I kept thinking maybe I was missing the boat and should have them on my site. But really, digg and del.icio.us (and so on) users are primarily the tech-savvy early adopter crowd. I don’t think they need any help posting content to those sites. They’ll do it if they feel like it, helpful button or no.

They are on your RSS feed

Josh beat me to it: As I read your post via your RSS feed, there was some irony in the “add to del.icio.us” tag at its bottom.

Chris, did you switch coffee brands? Seriously, I agree. The buttons just take up too much space and I have NEVER used one (then again, I’m not a big bookmark social networking fan).

[...] It’s an interesting concept.  During my testing - the service was down.  As I check it now - it’s up and running.  I notice that Chris now has a post bemoaning the abundance (overuse?) of social bookmark buttons.  Oh well - the story of my life - about the time I get up to speed on what the heck it means - everyone else does too - and its un-cool. [...]

[...] Chris Pirillo has an interesting rant on how social bookmarking buttons for sites like del.iciou.us and digg are popping up on sites all over the web - many that he feels have false expectations. [...]

Bullseye!

[...] Lees verder »  Chris Pirillo - Social Bookmarking Button Madness Saturday, August 26, 2006 8:03:43 PM   postCount(’1126′); | postCountTB(’1126′); [...]

These buttons are annoying more than anything else, serving to show the world just how unpopular your content really is…

Amen!

That is exactly what I think when I see those buttons. If people liked your content, they’d obviously be digging or “deliciousing” you already.

Agreed. The whole practice smacks of desperation…truly avid Diggers, Reddit-users (Reditors?), and Farkers will decide whether or not to write about your post…

Then again, studies have shown that putting images of credit card logos on shopping sites leads to more purchase completion…so who knows? Maybe folks can use a gentle reminder now and then…

This buttons have worked for me in the past. In fact I can say with certainty that without them I would have never received the level of traffic I do now. That said, setting up an icon farm at the bottom of each post to create links for every type of social bookmarking service is just stupid — when I see this I don’t even read the article. The only ones that truly generate traffic (in my experience) are Digg and delicious. Everything else feeds off of these two anyway.

[...] I decided to get rid of the social bookmarking links that were included on my old design. Why? I sort of think it’s cheesy. I don’t believe it brought any real value to the site. I was thinking that the use of social bookmarking on some blogs was getting a bit extreme. I then read a post by Chris Pirillo, and realizing I wasn’t alone, decided to get rid of “bookmark this post” links. [...]

[...] Social Bookmarking Button Madness Now I’m starting to get nervous I added the link to del.ico.us at the end of posts. (tags: social bookmark design bookmarklets plugins) [...]

[...] I agree with Chris Pirillo that social bookmarking buttons have gotten out of hand. I’ve not added any to RCG because it seemed like it took up valuable real estate and I’m not sure it provided a valuable service to our readers. The only one I’ve considered adding is del.icio.us, but considering most del.icio.us users have a button installed on their browser (they tend to be a tech-savvy bunch), I’ve never bothered. Adding a button for a site like digg (let alone sites like reddit) seems pointless for a real estate blog since I’ve never seen one real estate article promoted by those communities. (In other words, why would I give them an ad (i.e. their logo) on every one of my posts if they are never going to send me traffic?) [...]

source not the social bookmarking website itself (in this case it was Plugim) As for a reference, here’s some article that might give you an idea about social bookmarking button, and the main reason why social bookmarking button is useless :-) Social Bookmarking Button Madness by Chris Pirillo It’s the content not the icons by 37Signals As for my own opinion about this, well .. i’ve already wrote about it .. but that’s just my own opinion ;-) .. but i’m actually amazed on how those guys can actually promote their

[...] Of the articles I came across that were against the use of social media bookmarklets the earliest complaints were from Chris Pirillo’s post Social Bookmarking Button Madness. These buttons are annoying more than anything else, serving to show the world just how unpopular your content really is - and I believe that there’s no direct correlation between the number of social bookmarking buttons you place on your page(s) has any direct impact on the number of times those page(s) have been stored in the respective services. [...]

[...] Of the articles I came across that were against the use of social media bookmarklets the earliest complaints were from Chris Pirillo’s post Social Bookmarking Button Madness. [...]

[...] Anyway, they’re late to the enlightenment. People like Chris Pirillo and 37 Signals realized Digg buttons jumped the shark long ago. [...]

Don’t forget that the social bookmark links also break HTML validity most of the time, require javascript, and leak pagerank. I truly doubt that they are worth all that trouble.

Nice pots, Can anyone post large image sizes button codes?

Actually I’m just thinking to add this feature on my blog. But looking at your thoughts, I think I will consider it again. I also never use the tag button given, they are more like source of annoyances.

Maybe they are useful, IF not too much.

I agree they are a waste of space the way people use them AND they direct traffic away from your site when people follow them. People miss the whole point of social bookmarking sites like Digg and Sphinn from a marketing perspective. The goal is to get lots of people top vote for one story, not to create the same story loits of times. These guys explain it better -

http://www.demonzmedia.com/DemonzBlog/?p=8

Basically if you don’t have all of your visitors voting for the story and THEN (and this is very important) returning to your site, you are unintentionally driving visitors away from your site and making sure your stories are getting buried within whatever social network people may be using. It’s the same old flawed logic as the ‘Bookmark this Page’ link from many old web pages - if people use social bookmarks they don’t need to be reminded that they’re there.

I DO NOT KNOW HOW TO USE THIS. hehe