Unless you have been under a rock or in North Korea for the last few years you would know that one of the hot new Web 2.o trends is Social Bookmarking.
Effectively, your visitors help do the work of promoting your website on your behalf.
There are many popular Social Bookmarking Services (SBS) like Delicious, Spurl and StumbleUpon to name just a few. These services allow us to “tag” and rate the sites we like. “Tagging” means assigning a keyword or keywords which describe the web page content. These tagged URLs then get added to a network of URLs that other members can also tag, rate and bookmark. If your website has great content this can be a terrific way of bringing new visitors and improving your search engine rankings into the bargain. Effectively, your visitors help do the work of promoting your website on your behalf. And all for free! The only investment is a little of your time to set up member accounts with all the relevant services. Once you have done that, there are some multiple submission tools such as OnlyWire which can help with posting your website content URLs directly from your toolbar.
The image you can see on the right is the “MegaMash Social Bookmark Widget” developed by MashUp Navi , a great tool for allowing your Japanese visitors to bookmark your website on their favorite SBS.
To add the widget to your pages simply copy the following code into your web pages using your HTML editor.
Some of these services would already be familiar to many non-Japanese.
Yahoo Bookmarks, Google Bookmarks, Windows Live Favourites, Technorati, Digg, Faves, Blinklist, Reddit, Furl and Twitter are all represented.
In addition there are a few interesting local services worth paying attention to.
| Name | Alexa Ranking (Japan) | Google Page Rank |
|---|---|---|
| B!Hatena | 22 | 7 |
| Iza | 65 | 5 |
| Choix | 418 | 5 |
| Newsing | 1018 | 6 |
| BuzzUrl | 1806 | 7 |
| CoRich | 2227 | 4 |
| Flog | 3036 | 5 |
There are a few other specifically Japanese SBS not listed in the table because Alexa aggregates their data for the entire URL, not just the bookmarking sub domain. Two of the important ones are Nifty Clip and LiveDoor Clip.
Conclusion
If you want to increase your brand awareness and market penetration in Japan, you should consider leveraging the power of Japanese social bookmarking sites like the ones listed. Currently it is probably fair to say that the phenomenon is still in the early adopter stage. But fringe technologies often become mainstream overnight so there is no point in delaying if you want to stay ahead of your online competitors.
