October 13, 2009 - By Simon Bennett

By Simon Bennett–It’s rare for me to write an article on the website as I tend to sit in the background doing what I do best, which is taking care of, and producing technical solutions and tools for all of our website users and visitors to use.

However, it hasn’t gone un-noticed that some of the most powerful and useful tools at our disposal are not being used to anywhere near their full potential, which is a crying shame given the effect that they could have if used properly or at all.

The Internet is a medium that we have at our disposal, it is where we can flourish. It is the one single platform we have that (as yet) cannot be edited, corrupted or controlled. So we had damn well better start to make the most of it whilst we still can. It has served us well thus far.

If you look at the bottom of each and every article our web editors work so hard to produce you will see the following;

These are “Social Bookmarking” tools.

The most important and most beneficial tools we have at our disposal are Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Digg-it.

Each and every reader has the option and ability to share or send the article they have just read to each and every one of these other social networks.

For example, I have around 350 friends / contacts on Facebook alone. Once I have read this article I can click the Facebook Icon below and deliver this page to 350 friends in a single mouse click. How long would it take you to deliver a printed leaflet of this page to 350 letter-boxes?

Better still, if one of my 350 friends then shared this page with his 350 friends and he then shared it with 350 of his friends… you get the picture!

These are very powerful tools, please, please start to make the most of them. If you are not Internet savvy, at least make the effort to try and become Internet savvy. It’s that or die. We are in a political battle for our survival and we need people that are fearless and people that do not comprehend the words “I can’t”.

Look again;

The image above is from an article today that has been viewed 40,000+ times and it only has 25 diggs, 5 tweets and 1 – YES – JUST ONE – Facebook share! One in 40,000 making the effort! We are British, we are used to going the extra mile, it’s now or never, Let’s start going the extra mile.

If we are to make progress on the web, we ALL need to go the extra mile and do our bit. Please, take the time to register on these social networks and network our message!