Should You Squidoo?

When you think of social marketing and web 2.0, the web sites that jump to mind are Wikipidia, MySpace, Digg, Delicious and Teconorati. Underneath these five leaders are a huge variety of 2.0 web sites, each vying to become the next big web success. One of those sites is Squidoo, the brainchild of Seth Godin launched late last year.

Now Squidoo does not technically fulfill all the requirements of a social medium like [insert a few requirements of a social medium]. Its goal is become a resource for others instead of a meeting place, and content is not user or group edited.

So what is Squidoo? Squidoo allows users to create “lenses” that are similar to a MySpace portfolio. Unlike MySpace or even a blog, the primary focus on a Squidoo lens is for that page to become an authoritative reference on a topic. Or as the Squidoo blog explains, a lens is:

“It’s a guide (like about.com) and a reference (like wikipedia.com). It’s a place for personal expression (like typepad.com) and an open platform for real people (like del.ico.us).”

Creating a lens on Squidoo is extremely easy. That makes it a perfect vehicle for companies that want to put their toes in the social media (SMO) waters, but don’t want to commit a lot of time and resources yet. For example, if you are in the B2B market you could set up a page that is a resource for your industry. Squidoo has modules that allow lens owners to automatically pull content from Blogs, Del.icio.us! and Technorati. This dynamically generated content means that the resource will always appear fresh to the user (resulting in repeat visitors) without putting a resource strain on a company.

I would not expect Squidoo to drive a lot of traffic to your web site. However, it will give you visibility on a growing social media site, allow you to venture into the social media world, and provide a link to your web site from a trusted source!