Znetlady: Modern Media

Tagging for CEOs Post Available en Français

Christophe Ducamp has translated Tagging: Into the Mind of the CEO into French.  Find it here.  Once again, thank you, Christophe!

Tagging: Into the Mind of the CEO

Blogging is often offered up as a tactic CEOs should employ to humanize the seemingly too distant CEO or as a way to communicate regularly and effectively to internal audiences.

But blogging is hard - and besides, really getting inside your own head to communicate “who you are” is impossible for anyone. After all, when we sit down to write a blog post, it’s almost always reactionary - we write what is immediate, burning at the moment, on our radar right then, or what we believe the troops need to hear about a specific issue.  It is rarely with the discipline to communicate consistent visioning or mentoring or even the passion we have for what we do everyday.   And, even if you were that disciplined, it would take a long time of reading your blog for a clear window to develop into what drives you and your decisions or your leadership.   

Enter tagging.  CEOs should be tagging. It is the most powerful way to communicate what makes you tick or what is important to you as a CEO.

It provides insight into why you make the decisions you do and what flavors your leadership.  Tagging adds up all those vital little “bits” that make up your personal “CEO-ness” - like a mind scan but without all the high-tech equipment.  It is something no other medium can do quite as effectively - or as simply.

Tagging can help CEOs meet the eternal challenges of leading.  What if you tagged things like:

• Books you are reading
• Book that have inspired you
• Articles that you find yourself wishing everyone would read
• Web sites that worry you
• Web sites that inform you
• Web sites that “get it”
• Competitors whom you have your eye on
• News pieces that point to current or emerging market pressures
• Articles that mention your company
• Interviews you do
• Industry reports that you think will impact your products or services
• Blog posts that say something you wish you had in a way you wish you could
• Your RSS feeds or email subscriptions
• Jokes that are funny because they seem to comment on something as you see it in your organization
• Case studies that you wish were yours
• Things that illustrate industry or consumer trends you think the company should pay attention to

Now, by simply being able to scan through your tags, you are giving everyone in your organization a window into not just who you are, but the things that drive you, your decisions and your vision.  How much more impactful is this than your once a year or quarterly address; or your blog posts that are, by their nature, excruciatingly narrow? 

Tagging gives your entire organization an evocative view of both you and the challenges you see that face their industry, their company and their jobs.   It is a bird’s eye view they can get no other way.  It’s even better than winning a “day with the CEO” because it evolves over time - just like you and your challenges and your organization.

Here's how to get your own CEO tag cloud started:

1)  Choose a social bookmarking site that allows private tags and register for an account (most are free).  I like Blogmarks.net, but del.icio.us and Blinklist.com are also great choices.  (You can also do this with public tags, if you don't mind the entire world seeing them.)

2)  Take a second to drag the bookmarklet provided by your bookingmarking site to your browser toolbar - it makes for one fast click while you are viewing something you want to tag.  You’ll find the bookmarklet in your account settings/tools of your chosen bookmark service.

3)  When browsing something you want to tag, click your bookmarklet in your toolbar and simply type in your tag words in the appropriate place in the bookmarking form (they usually pop up in a small separate window).  Use any words or concepts as a tag.  Words that make sense to you or your organizational culture - it might be “competitors,” “must-read,” “trends,” - you get to choose.  Use several tags, as content you bookmark often fits into more than one “category.”

4)  Give everyone in your organization access to this “private” account and url so they can view your tags. 

5)  Encourage everyone to subscribe via RSS - or by email - to your entire tag list; or just to the tag they might specifically want to watch.   Feedblitz is a nice service that turns any RSS feed into an email for those not yet using RSS on a regular basis.

If you are brave, you can even suggest employees tag items with your name that they think you should see.  Check in on that tag periodically, or better yet, subscribe to your name tag via RSS to keep the information flowing both ways.

You just might find tagging gives you an evocative view of yourself.

Tagging en Français

Christophe Ducamp over at elanceur has taken the time and effort to translate my three “Tagging:  What is it Good For?”  posts into French.  You can find them here, here and here.  A huge “thank you” to Christophe!  I’ve no doubt this was a lot of work.  His blog is one of the partner blogs at Blogging Planet.  He is also the co-founder of the first French wikicommuniy, CraoWiki.

If you find the translation helpful, please take a second to comment on his blog and thank him personally.

   

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!

Tagging: What is it Good For - Part 2

Second in a series of three posts for communications pros that will hopefully explain tagging, using tags in practical applications for marketing communications and their implications in moving to “modern media” communications.

In part one, I described tagging as assigning single words to describe or categorize any web content.  And while somewhat similar to bookmarking a web page on your computer, it is far more powerful.  It is not a systematic or hierarchical categorizing method (like folders) – it is simply using one or more words that make sense to you to categorize content.  And, instead of the entry (URL) being saved on your own machine, it is saved on “social bookmarking” sites or shared photo sites – publicly available sites that anyone can use to tag web content.  That also means anyone can search for content by tags assigned by everyone else – so resources become shared by way of this communal tagging.

Two key sites in which social bookmark tagging comes to life are del.icio.us and Technorati.  Understanding the basics of these two sites means you can start leveraging the new generation of tools for content organization, distribution and search.

Del.icio.us is the site that popularized social bookmarking.  Its looks are barebones, but its straightforward functionality epitomizes the basics of all social bookmarking sites.  Del.icio.us is actually a “bookmark manager.”  It allows you to add sites to your personal collection of links, to assign tags to each one to categorize them in your own personal way, and then to share all those links with others – through tags.

Del.icio.us gives you multiple “views” of tagged bookmarks. Every user has a unique “home page” (del.icio.us/username). This page includes all your own bookmarks, along with a sidebar showing all your tags.  Each of your tags has a “home page” (del.icio.us/username/tag) with links to sites you’ve assigned that tag to, also with a list of related tags.  And, every tag itself has a shared home page, (del.icio.us/tag/communications), on which you will see everyone’s bookmarks (including yours) that have that tag assigned to it, along with a list of related tags linked to each of those individual tag pages.

Certainly being able to access your bookmarks from anywhere is a big advantage.  Being able to tap into resources other people find useful expands everyone’s horizons.  But add RSS to the mix and now you’ve got powerful amplification.  Here’s why:

First, you can subscribe to any tag or any user’s public tags using Really Simple Syndication.  That means when anyone adds a bookmark in del.icio.us with that tag, you are notified via your RSS newsreader.  If you want to follow what a particular del.icio.us user is adding to their tags, you can use RSS to subscribe to their del.icio.us home page or individual tag page.  So, what you can do, so other’s can do with your bookmarks, pages and tags. 

Plus, the new generation of search engines, like Technorati use RSS, tags and sites like del.icio.us to return relevant results to searches.

Technorati follows some 15 million blogs via RSS feeds, but it also incorporates links from tags on del.icio.us and Furl, as well as images tagged on the photo-sharing sites Flickr and Buzznet.  Technorati keyword searches return individual blog entries that contain the desired keyword(s) – but if that keyword happens to be a del.icio.us or Furl tag, Technorati also returns a display of links associated with that tag/keyword along with links to any related tag words. 

Technorati and similar search sites rely on RSS to “find” content. It returns content from what Technorati calls the “world live web” -  often indexing newly updated content within ten minutes.  While blogs are in large part what Technorati indexes because RSS is a part of most blogs, by incorporating RSS into even “regular” web pages, you can turn any web page into a “live” page by tagging it on del.icio.us and encouraging Technorati to index it every time the page is updated.  More on this later.

And, like del.icio.us, Technorati offers RSS subscription to keywords, but also to URLs.  By creating a Technorati “watchlist” and subscribing to it, you will receive updated links every hour via your RSS newsreader, keeping you up-to-date on new blog entries, tag entries and links to a specific URL.

While there are many ways to incorporate these two types of tools into your communications, an obvious application is to start tagging your content pages and blog entries, subscribing to tags related to your areas of interest, and, of course, subscribing to your own blog or website URL through del.icio.us and Technorati to track whose referencing you.

Next, putting it all together with practical uses for tagging in your communications.

Tagging: What is it Good For?

I’ve run into a lot of very smart professional communicators who just don’t yet get tagging.  So, this is a first in a series of three posts that will hopefully explain tagging, using them in practical applications for marketing communications and its implications in moving to “modern media” communications.

Are you tagged?  If you aren’t sure go to Flickr and type your company name or product category (such as “cameraphone”) into the search box – or just click on one of the words you see in various sizes of blue.  Chances are Flickr will display several to hundreds of photos as a result of your search. I’m guessing you’ve been tagged.

Tagging is assigning “keywords” to content, such as the photos on Flickr, bookmarks on del.icio.us, or blog posts for Technorati.  Maybe you’re somewhat familiar with tags as in “meta tag” keywords embedded in web page code to help some search engines categorize your site. But, we’re not talking here about your father’s tags.  No, these tags are thoroughly modern tags, created by everyone, for everyone turning photos, web pages or blog posts into shared mindspace (hang with me, this isn’t going to get metaphysical).

Tagging may seem chaotic on the surface, however tagging is an incredibly powerful media tool.  It is as much a media channel as it a social experience of the content that exists within the medium. 

Now, don’t be put off if tagging hasn’t seemed terribly intuitive to you.  It is actually quite simple. And you already do it for yourself when you bookmark a page in your web browser.

To help get your mind around how it works in the larger world, Gastrocast is a great example of putting tags (and modern media) into action.   ChefNeal has a great blog as well as a delightful podcast show, Gastrocast. To say it is about cooking seems anemic, as it is full of rich sounds, texture and culinary illumination. 

To help us listeners be better cooks, ChefNeal uses Flickr (a photo-sharing web site) to post photos of recipe stages, ingredient photos as well as images of tools or techniques to accompany his podcasts.  He tags each set of photos that correspond to each of his Gastrocast podcasts with his chosen keywords. For example, for his Gastrocast #14, ChefNeal assigned the tags ‘grilling,” “gastrocast,” “podchef” and “summer cooking” to his Flickr photos for that show. For purposes of his podcast, he links listeners via his blog to the specific photo set for that show, as well as the podcast audio file.  So, the full Gastrocast podcast experience becomes a “when I want it” audio broadcast and a shared (public) Flickr photo set/slideshow. 

ChefNeal isn’t the only person who uses the “grilling,” or “podchef” tag on Flickr, however.  By searching on the tags “grilling” or “podchef” you can also see everyone’s photos who have assigned those tags to their own photos, as well as any ChefNeal may have assigned to photos from other Gastrocast shows.

Tagging, at its core, is a super-simple keyword filing system.

Where it gets messy is that there is nothing that says what tags (keywords) are “available.”  There are no pre-assigned categories or hierarchies like you find in Yahoo, for example.  You assign the tags (keywords) simply by what makes sense to you – and so does everyone else. Just like you do when (if) you categorize your very own bookmarks in folders in your web browser. What’s different here is you can access documents based both on how you (with your personal tags) “filed” it, as well as how everyone else tagged (“filed”/described/categorized) that same document. 

Better yet, because others may have tagged very different documents with the same or similar tags as yours, tagging leads you to documents or resources you may have never been aware of. In essence, by tagging everyone is contributing to a shared set of resources filed under that tag.

In Flickr the documents are photos; in del.icio.us the documents are bookmarked web pages and in Technorati the tags are tied to blog posts.

So what? big deal; a simplified, shared document description methodology….  That is what it appears to be on the surface, but here’s where you have to make the leap out of “old media” thinking into modern media thinking. 

What results from tagging is a shared categorization system that reflects how individuals describe documents, rather than a highly structured location system, like the Dewey decimal system, for example.  It defies “standardization,” doing something that a standardized filing system (or search engine) can’t.  It creates an evocative “view” of a document; one based on how it fits into people’s own lives, work or consciousness.

Tagging moves us away from a single “expert” determination of the context or categories a document “fits” into.  It totally removes control over the context of documents or even physical objects (e.g., Flickr photos). While you may think of your press release in the context of  “Corporate/News Room/New Product Press Release,” someone else may think of that document as “New Gadget I Gotta Have” or “Who Are They Kidding?”

The point is, documents you create do not exist in your context but in the context of every viewer and all the viewers.  A document is the sum of its tags.

Think again about that last sentence.

Next we’ll look at how to use tagging in del.icio.us and Technorati and how it fits with your communications efforts.