Last week I gave a presentation at the NetSquared Conference as a memeber of a panel on tagging and aggregation. The audience was Non-Profits, but the lessons I shared from our experience with BrainJams and Web 2.1 applies equally well to any organization. There are five main takeaways I wanted to get across, which I will share with you in summary here:

1. Tags are the foundation of Web 2.0 as we move from searching to finding. The analogy I use is that “Tags are the shining beacons in a storm of information that guide people to their desired destination [online].”
2. Every event, community and organization should have a well publicized tag - just like every brand/organization has a well publicized URL.
3. You can get exposure into existing communities through related tags, but only if your comments, articles, posts and bookmarks are truly authentic and add real value.
4. Eventually when an audience for a given tag grows very large, something like TagSpaces can be used as a way to target your content for a particular audience segment.
5. Organizations and independent advocates must learn to leverage Paramedia to truly tap into the power of Social Media.

While the panel went over well, this did remind me how much I hate PowerPoint as a presentation medium - especially when you don’t have a good sense of the level of understanding your audience has. The unconference works much better for me personally, though I do understand why there is a need for a more linear format - especially given my proclivity for tangental thinking and expanding the topic of the conversation beyond the original question. Still, I think it went over pretty well and now I have a basic Tagging Presentation I can use as the basis for future conferences.

You can download the PowerPoint to get a better sense of the material - it is available to remix under the Creative Commons Non-Commercial Share Alike License.

Categories: Tags