Syndicate
Another Reason I Love del.icio.us
I love del.icio.us. Partly because I found out it was a truly spectacular way to consolidate, organize and find new recipes. A few clicks on my cloud and I can find that whole grain and protein rich meal that I can prepare in 15 minutes or less. Also, who knew before del.icio.us that there were over 1,400 ways to prepare quinoa?
On the professional side, one of the ways we use del.icio.us for our clients is to consolidate relevant news articles from our RSS feed readers, manual searches and other bookmarking sites; tag them with search terms; and provide notes about why we think the information is valuable. Like my recipes, I thought this was a truly spectacular service. I thought our clients would shower us with praise and gratitude for saving so much of their time and arming them with such powerful information. Actually, they barely glance at it.
I was disappointed, but I couldn’t give up my del.icio.us habit. As it turns out, I was recently writing a white paper for one of our clients. For me, the thing that takes the biggest chunk of time is not the writing, it’s the external research to complement and validate our client’s internal knowledge. Unforeseen by me, my daily 10-15 minutes of bookmarking created a complete gold mine when it came time to churn out compelling sales material. Sure, I had the paid research from Gartner, Forrester, IDC, etc. But what del.icio.us provided me was the ability to find the needles in the haystack - those golden nuggets of information that can make a great white paper a truly spectacular one. At my fingertips, I suddenly had references to facts, figures and stats that are hard to come by. I found compelling and quirky quotes. I had a plethora of real world examples. I had links to free research I didn’t know was available. I even had a couple or really terrific sound bites to leverage. The best part – I got to watch our client bicker over which one of them was going to get the authoring credit.
Yeah, I love del.icio.us. Anything that’s free and makes me – and ultimately my clients - look this good is a winner.
