Nate Riggs: Social Business Strategies; communication, social web strategies, & passion in Columbus, Ohio.

It’s been my goal for the past two years for at least a portion of my career to be professional speaking.  With that turf comes the need for constant research.

I’ve found a need to get good at things like boolean searching, basic image cropping, video editing and, most definitely, building presentations using Keynote (for Mac).

The other side of becoming a professional speaker is in how you organize all your content and research information, especially if you are in the business of delivering customized presentations.

As I’ve become more in-tune with researching various topics, social bookmarking has become a mainstay extension of my brain.

First Tools
When I first started on the path towards professional speaking, I was still working on a PC (I know, how sinful).  I developed my own organizational system, using Microsoft OneNote - which is actually a pretty slick program that comes the high-end packages of Microsoft Office.  OneNote boasts some great features, like being able to mark up articles visually, attach annotations and rich media, and organize through one heck of a folder system.

The issue was that OneNote lived locally on my laptop’s hard drive.  When I left my gig at People To My Site and switched to my own MacBook Pro, transferring all of those saved articles was a major pain.  About halfway through, I gave up.

Bookmarking On the Web
Most of you have heard of sites like Digg and Delicious.  For the past two years, I’ve used Delicious as a private, online bookmarking system.  Take notice that I didn’t say “social bookmarking system.”  While Delicious does provide a social element in their system, using it has just never really appealed to me.  I’m busy connecting across multiple networks that aren’t focused on saving industry and trend information.

One of the drawbacks I’ve found with Delicious comes to light when I attempt to go back and review the articles I’ve saved.  Frankly, it’s clunky.

Where OneNote provides a beautiful set of features for outlining the most relevant information within each article, Delicious is limited to a mere tagging system.  Eventually, I found that I wasn’t really saving any time in my research, so I stopped.

5 Reasons Why I Use Diigo For Social Bookmarking
A few months back while scanning my reader, I came across an article (there’s no link because I can’t remember the specific article) that had a link to a social bookmarking service called Diigo.  Naturally curious and in the market for a change, I checked it out.

Since then, Diigo has changed everything about the way I save information on the web with one of the most robust feature sets I’ve seen in social bookmarking.

• Easier Tag Organization – One of the best features of social bookmarking sites is the ability users have to organize their content via tagging.  Diigo takes this feature to the next level by making it very easy to keep track of and organize the tags you use.  From one screen – laid out in columns – I can add, delete and modify my tags.  The page also displays the number of articles I have bookmarked for each tag, letting me know if there are tags that are underused and expendable.
• Excellent Browser Tool Bars – Again, most social bookmarking applications have implemented a toolbar or browser plugin that lets users bookmark articles with one click.  The difference in Diigo’s toolbar (I use the toolbar for Mozilla Firefox) is that it brings in additional features for marking up and annotating the articles you save.  You can also directly share the article in a variety of different ways right from the toolbar, which becomes particularly useful for team collaboration.
• Full Featured Highlighting & Annotations – Highlighting and annotating are, by far, my favorite features that Diigo has to offer.  These alone have saved me so much time in that I can now read each article once, pull out the relevant snippets I need for a presentation or client discussion and make a few notes.  When i revisit the article, everything is visible directly on the original web page for me to quickly comb through.  This feature has literally saved me hours of time.
• Automated Email Outlines – Once you’ve used the highlighting and annotations features, and outlined the information you need, Diigo takes the convenience one step further.  A few seconds after you’ve bookmarked your articles, you will receive an email with links to the articles, headlines and any highlighted text or notes you’ve added.  In a sense, Diigo automatically produces personalized Cliff’s Notes for the content you save.
• Functional Social Bookmarking Groups – You might think of Groups on Diigo as compared to groups and subgroups on LinkedIn.  They are astonishingly similar in how they work.  What I like about Diigo groups is that in combination with the browser toolbar and highlight features, you can add content to groups for discussion in a fraction of the time it takes on LinkedIn.  The number of users on Diigo is still small in comparison to larger social networks, so as group owners, there is a bit of an advantage to getting things started on this platform.

A lot of you ask me what I read online and off, so I’ve started my own Social Business Strategies Group on Diigo to make answers to those questions much easier to find.  I read and share a lot.  It’s a duty that comes with the job description of a corporate communications consultant who helps organizations make sense of social media tools.

If you’d like to stay on top of the outposts I find helpful, add in your own content or simply get some pointers on how you might adopt Diigo as one of your personal tools, join the SBS Diigo Group HERE.  I’m happy to try and help answer whatever questions you have.

Do you use social bookmarking already?  Any thoughts on Diigo?  Will you join the SBS Diigo Group?

nateriggs

I advise mid-sized & large organizations on how to adopt and use social media to market through organizational culture and better serve their clients. I'm also a blended family dad who enjoys music, photography and distance racing. When I'm not writing here, you can find me writing over at the Content Marketing Institute. Like what you've read so far? Then why not subscribe HERE?

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