BlogCatalog Makes Viral Marketing Easier
BlogCatalog has announced that it will be introducing a new social marketing tool. They’re calling it the Social Dashboard. The idea is to aggregate users’ social networking and social bookmarking accounts.
I just logged into my account and was hit with the Dashboard face, which is pretty blank right now. But it looks like a good tool. Right away, I see the social aspects of it:
The first thing I see is the big red BlogCatlog box in the upper left corner of my browser. Then, below that is the Dashboard header and a little red Beta next to it. Good clue!
Below the two sentence introduction to the Dashboard there are five tabs labeled News Feed, Discussions, Groups, Broadcasts, and Neighborhoods. Below that are two links: “Try adding some friends” and “updating your subscriptions.”
I haven’t been very active on BlogCatalog, but I may start being more active now. It looks like it could actually be a more effective tool for bloggers than Facebook, which is a bit more social than anything else. At least with BlogCatalog you can choose your friends based on whether or not their blog is in the same industry as yours. Facebook is a little more difficult as you have to select your friends based on a collection of interests or geographical location. Neither of those are really very helpful for business bloggers.
What I like about BlogCatalog is you can consolidate your friends and interests from various social sites like:
- Flickr
- MySpace
- StumbleUpon
- Del.icio.us
- Digg
- Technorati
- MyBlogLog
Personally, I think the list is incomplete. There are other social sites out there could be rolled into BlogCatalog for greater effectiveness, but I do like that MyBlogLog, Flickr, Technorati, and StumbleUpon are included in the list. I think Facebook is more helpful than MySpace, and YouTube would be a nice addition.
Anyways, it does look like a useful application and I’m looking forward to playing around with it. Gotta go now. I’ve got a lot of BlogCatalog friends to make.
February 20th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
[…] BlogCatalog recently added a Social Dashboard to its functionality. It isn’t direct marketing, but you can promote your articles through BlogCatalog just by submitting them to your favorite article directory then Digging them. In fact, you can run every activity you perform through Digg, StumbleUpon, and Delicious through BlogCatalog so if you bookmark your articles at any one of those three social bookmarking sites then your friends on BlogCatalog will see that activity. It’s just another way of promoting your articles and keeping them viral. […]
February 20th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
Thanks for the feedback, not only does our dashboard seem to be effedtive its down right fun! Maybe i misread your post but we do have facebook and youtube integrated into our services. If you know of any other relevant sites that provide an API or open user feeds we would be happy to add it to our list as well. Thanks for using BlogCatalog!
daniel / blogcatalog.com
February 21st, 2008 at 1:59 pm
Sorry, Daniel. I did see YouTube after I made this post. I didn’t see Facebook. I’ll have to go back and look. One site I like that I think you could incorporate is GoodReads. Great site for readers of books.