The first time I usually mention Delicious as a tool to a client or prospect, they look at me a little funny. And, with good reason. Delicious isn’t exactly Facebook when it comes to critical mass and social tools people use regularly online. In fact, it’s far from it. But, in certain situations (especially B2B organizations), Delicious can be an incredibly effective tool for building thought leadership, inspiring ideas and getting smart as a team.

What do I mean? Here are five quick ways your organization can use Delicious to achieve your goals:

* Share interesting posts with your customers to build thought leadership. The obvious use and the way most organizations use Delicious as an external tool. Just look how the CME Group uses Delicious to share interesting posts with key stakeholders impacted by their exchanges. By sharing these links and stories with their audiences, they’re demonstrating that, as an organization, they are plugged in to the world around them and committed to sharing information to make their key audiences smarter and better consumers of information.

* Share posts/articles internally with co-workers. Not as widely employed, but an effective method to share articles within an organization. Think about it. If you had employees or leaders spread across different audience (or employees who traveled frequently), you could ask them to share and tag articles on Delicious as a way for you all to get smarter–and to stay one step ahead of your competitors. But, more than just a way to get smarter, these posts and articles could inspire blog posts of your own, newsletter articles, white papers and other unique content you can use to demonstrate thought leadership in the market.

* Use the Inbox as a way to build community and start relationships. One often-unused Delicious strategy involves using the inbox functionality as a way to build and grow relationships with other thought leaders, customers and potential customers. Using the inbox you can send private bookmarks to other Delicious users. Think of it as another way to share an interesting post with a colleague, partner or customer (much like you probably do with email now–”thought you might find this post interesting…”). However, using Delicious (unlike email), will allow that post to be archived forever–or, as long as the person you’re sending the link to is a Delicious user. Interesting way to build trust with other Delicious users.

* Use Delicious as a search engine to source blog ideas. Delicious is an unheralded tool to search for interesting posts around keywords/topics, too. Granted, it’s not the best search tool out there, but it will enable you to find articles and posts that many others found interesting–big value in that.

* Review bookmarks of thought leaders for posts to share. For most, a source of content for sharing on Twitter or Facebook is an RSS reader (i.e., Google Reader, Feedly, etc.)–all the blogs you follow and watch on a daily basis. But, what if you used Delicious in a similar fashion to complement that strategy? What if you followed and “networked” with industry thought leaders who you knew used Delicious and shared the links/posts they were tagging on a regular basis (and credited them in the tweet). Nice way to unearth new content–and a good community-building approach to boot.