Tagging – What Is It Good For? – Part 3; Eighteen Ways to Use Tagging in Your Communications and Marketing

So, just what is tagging good for practically?   Hopefully Part 1 and Part 2 laid the groundwork for finally answering this question, discussing how tagging is shifting online searching and is a growing and powerful way to both organize and share web documents.  Now, the next step is putting it to practical use in your communications or marketing.

My last post reviewed specifically how tags work at del.icio.us and Technorati, but those concepts are much the same for all social bookmarking sites and tag search engines.  More and more online services are incorporating tagging. Dating sites like Consumating.com uses tags on dating profiles – you tag your own & others are able to tag your profile.  Evdb.com uses tags for worldwide events and venues. InfoWorld editors tag articles.  Dinnerbuz.com shares favorite restaurants via tags.  43Things.com uses tags for goal setting.  And, Amazon is experimenting with tagging in a concordance feature that shows the 100 most frequently used words (tags) in a book – and by clicking on a tag in the “tag cloud,” Amazon will display the sentences in the book that contain that tag word. 

The point is tagging is for finding and sharing stuff.  It is redefining all types of online search.  And, since search is increasingly important to all of your communications, media relations or marketing efforts, it’s time to start learning about tags, experimenting with them, and incorporating tags into your communications strategies. 

Here’s a start with eighteen practical ways to use tagging. While they will help others find you and streamline how you find important information, you might even find tags help you organize and find your own “stuff.”

• Search on social bookmarking sites for tags related to your organization, brand or industry.  If one exists, subscribe (via RSS) to those tags.  This is an easy way to track what people find valuable in your industry, what people are saying about you – even to spot potential customers, channels or marketing opportunities.  Start at del.icio.us, Blogmarks, Shadows, IceRocket and Technorati.  Also check out Yahoo’s My Web 2.0 (in beta).

• Look closely at the  “related tags” to your most relevant tags.  It’s very likely you will find unexpected perspectives or uses of your brand or content.  Use the insight to develop both tagging and communications strategies. 

• Watch for changes in tag clouds on social bookmarking sites.  See one here.  The size of the tag suggests what’s popular.  Use it to detect trends.  If you look sideways, you might even find some interesting clues for innovations in your markets.

• Tag your existing web content at social bookmarking sites with appropriate tags.  If a tag doesn’t exist, just create one.  Don’t forget to subscribe to it, so you will know what others are tagging with the same tag.  And, do look periodically at how the related “cloud” is developing around your tags.

• If you have a blog, tag your individual blog entries, as well as your entire blog. Check if your blog software supports categories or has other tagging capabilities. IceRocket and Technorati will use your blog category feature to tag your blog entries at those search engines.

• Use a blog as a newsroom and post your press releases and news items – and tag them.  Blogs are an easy way to incorporate tags immediately, as noted above, many popular blog services have category or tagging features that are then used by social bookmarking sites to include in tag searches.

• Use tags to organize your web site’s press releases, articles or media resources.  This is an easy way to guide journalists, analysts, customers, or investors to organizational or topical content that might be overlooked at your web site.  Point them via your web site to the relevant tag link on your chosen social bookmarking site(s) and show them the same content but organized by tags; and don’t be afraid to expand on your own content by adding bookmarks to relevant content on other web sites.

• Ask journalists that cover your industry if they are using tags.   A few are using them as a way to accept pitches as an alternative to email, as are some influential bloggers.  While this practice is not yet widespread, journalists are subscribing via RSS to tags and keywords to research and find story ideas.

• If a favorite journalist is tagging their blog or has a social bookmarking tag, subscribe to it via the RSS feed for that tag.  An easy way to follow what the journalist is interested in, writing about, or following.

• Create a set of “private bookmarks” and advise journalists what your tags are and invite them to subscribe.   When you update your bookmarks or content with tags appropriate to that journalist, they will be notified via RSS.

• Use social bookmarking and tags to create an ongoing “library” for your email (or RSS) newsletter readers. You will be creating a valuable growing resource for your readers – and they can also contribute to the “mind share’ by adding relevant resources.

• Use tags to gather and organize resources for customers, distributors or partners.  These can be public or private tags, but this makes it incredibly easy to organize and share reports, articles, whitepapers, data sheets, industry research, etc. that may be stored all over the web by simply tagging appropriate web pages.  Link to the social tag from your web site, intranet, or extranet.

• Contribute links to existing tags that point to relevant content on your web site or blog.  Do not engage in “tag spam!”

• Use tags on your internal blogs and web-based resources, extending your organization’s “corporate memory.”

• Create special tags for your presentations or training sessions.   We find this especially helpful for our seminar participants.  We gather all the resources discussed. such as web sites, studies, tools, etc. into one easy place for the attendees to reference post-event.  Attendees can also add resources they know of or find later, initiating a community among your attendees. 

• Create a “news aggregation” site relevant to your customers, brand, employees or partners by combining tags and RSS.   Use RSS and tags together to gather, filter and then automatically publish news or content items to a page on your web site, blog or intranet.

• Tag staff and employee profiles on your intranet related to specialized skill-sets or knowledge or experience.  This could be an unexpected boon to training, identifying internal experts, or maximizing internal resources.

• Use tags for your personal bookmarks and research.  Because tags are so much more flexible than browser-based bookmarks, it makes it easy to find relevant resources you might otherwise “lose” in your “Favorites" lists.  You can tag them with more than one tag, allowing you to find content evoked by differing circumstances or needs.  Plus, because they are stored on the web rather than your own computer, you can get to them from anywhere – including mobile devices or someone else’s computer.

There are countless ways to use tagging.  The important thing is just to start using them - your own ideas will soon surface.  I invite you to share your own ideas for using tags here via comments.  I’ll be adding more ideas in other posts - check for them in Categories here; look for the tagging tag!

Comments

[Prentiss Riddle]

Thanks again for mentioning Shadows. I thought I'd note that Shadows goes beyond basic social bookmarking systems by supporting comments and discussion: the Shadows toolbar puts users one click away from a discussion board about any site on the web -- a point of particular interest to anyone trying to track their buzz online.

http://www.shadows.com/