You’ve heard of social bookmarking, surely.  But if you are like many business owners just getting their feet wet blogging, you may not understand how simple, powerful and dangerous it can be for your business.

Now, I don’t mean to alarm you, social bookmarking can indeed be powerful, but that power brings moral responsibility.  Gaming the system is seen as spam and can be disastrous for your business.

Don’t bookmark:

A post that was written by you
Very occassionally I will tag and bookmark something I have written, but out of dozens of posts per day, I will tag maybe one per week.  So, as a guideline, I would not bookmark my own work more than once every 30-60 posts.

Only posts positive towards your company
Bookmarking enthusiasts bookmark a page because they think it adds to the pool and because it’s interesting to them.  Try not to merely bookmark just because your PR representative told you that you should.

If you want to be able to take part in sites like Digg, Del.icio.us and ShoutWire, be sure to bookmark a wide variety of link types.  If you only promote yourself, it will be noticed.  It will be called out.  Your company will suffer.

On the other hand, if you do it well, you can really benefit from the process of social bookmarking.