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.

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One of the greatest things about tags is how we can use them expressly for sharing information with others. When we add tags to our blog posts, or tag a given Web page within a social bookmarking service like Delicious, we are not only helping ourselves refind that information later, we are engaging in conversation with other people who have an interest in the same tags and topics. The community that forms around a tag for conversation can have an ongoing topical focus as with Web2.0 or it can be focused on an organization as with the non-profit I started called BrainJams or focused on a specific product like the iPod.

Tags are also very powerfully used for promoting an event and for starting conversations around the event. Promoting the event is done by tagging the blog posts and Web pages about an event so that people within the existing topical communities can be made aware of it. If they have an interest, they may also tag it, or they may Digg it or even better, they may blog about it and the word of mouth momentum begins organically. The best way to hold the conversation together around an event is by having a single tag that everyone uses when talking about the event, so communicating that tag to participants is a very important part of the event planning.

The tag we are using for this event is BeyondBlogging.

In addition to using the event tag to focus what people are saying about the event, it is most helpful to use the tag for identifying what event participants (aka attendees) wish to discuss at the event. So let’s try an experiment with each other. If you already have an account on Delicious, you are all set - if you don’t, would you please consider registering for one. After that, I recommend that you follow their instructions for adding the ‘post to Delicious’ buttons/links to your browser as they suggest. Once this is done, you are ready to roll and contribute to our conversation for Beyond Blogging 2006.

Next time you are reading something informative online that might be appropriate for us to discuss at the event, you can click the Post to Delicious button you just installed on your browser and add the tag BeyondBlogging (no spaces) and other tags you feel are appropriate. As you do so, everyone (such as myself and the panelists) who is following that tag will get to benefit from your efforts to filter the best content into our discussion. Together, we can build quite a library of resources for the Beyond Blogging 2006 discussion. We will also share a common understanding of the issues by having read the same Web pages, which can do wonders for advancing the discussion at the event.

As you can imagine, there are many ways tags can be used to foster collaboration and to promote ideas into a conversation, but there are also more direct and personal uses of tags. With Delicious for instance, you can actually tag a given page for an individual user. So if you are working with someone who has a Delicious account (like me) and you want to share something with them, you can tag it for:username and it will show up in a special ‘inbox’ where the person can view it. So if there is something you want to share with me to read or consider writing about, tag it for:chrisheuer and I will see it. This works extremely well for getting the attention of a specific person or perhaps for making sure that the people working on a project with you are all on the same page.

While there are many other uses for tags (such as TagSpaces like BeyondBlogging:Tags) and many other contexts in which event tags are important (such as within a photo sharing community like Flickr), I believe this post together with the Tag You’re It post from yesterday covers the basics. Tags are really the fundamental building blocks of social media, so I would really like to hear back from you on this topic. If you have any questions or want to clarify what I have written here, let’s start a conversation using the comments feature on this site. This conversation, and this event, will only be as useful to you as the amount of participation you put into it. This is your golden opportunity to prepare for the future of Communications today - don’t miss it!

One other note about Del.icio.us. You may be wondering what’s up with those dots? Quite simply, most of the good domain names are taken, so a couple of years ago, people started getting creative with their naming. Delicious saw an opportunity with the .us domain and the took it. Personally, I don’t bother with the dots in between when I reference the site since they were able to buy the delicious.com domain once they received venture funding. It had gotten so bad in the fall of 2005 that the dots in the name schema ‘jumped the shark’ and Supr.c.ilio.us launched as the Web 2.0 Snarks to spoof all of the Super Silly things that were going on. (I still can’t get to the site by just entering the name directly, and that is kind of the point)

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No, we are not going to be talking about one of my favorite childhood games, though I am sure I could relive quite a few good memories about “Freeze Tag” and countless other varieties. Tags are seemingly ‘it’ these days. For a while in late 2005, it seemed that every startup taking funding out here in Silicon Valley had something to do with tags, or at least there business plan said they did.

As we dive into the conversation for Beyond Blogging 2006, we thought it important to spend a few days making sure we are all on the same page in regards to some of the basic concepts we will be discussing and building upon. For me personally, tags are perhaps one of the most important aspects of this thing many call Web 2.0 and the most important facet of social media. So what are tags anyways and how do we make use of them?

Simply put, tags are very nearly identical to keywords or phrases, but they are used in a much more powerful way. OK, that is a good start, but from here it gets more complicated if you let it - so rather than getting too deep in the philosophical discussions or the vagaries of explaining their potential impact, lets focus on some practical applications of tags for communications professionals. In this regard, there are two important uses of tags, tagging of web pages within social bookmarking services like Delicious and tagging of blog posts by the blog author.

Social Bookmarking: Tags as a means of organizing and finding

You may notice that we include a link at the end of every post called “Add to Delicious”. For those of you unfamiliar, Delicious is a Web site where you can save Web pages for later retrieval. Rather than saving it to your browser on your hard drive, you save a link to the page on the network where you can access it later from anywhere in the world. Unlike your IE Favorites though, these links are generally saved ‘publicly’ for other’s to discover. Hence the ’social’ part of social bookmarking.

What makes Delicious (and many of the other services) wildly popular with so many people is its implementation of tagging. Rather than trying to save each item within a folder, people can ‘tag’ the page with relevant keywords and/or unique tags. For instance, if you wanted to save this blog post for later, you might want to add it to your Delicious account and tag it “BeyondBlogging“, “Beyond Blogging”, “Tags”, “Tagging” and perhaps “BeyondBlogging:tags“. This is a different way of organizing the Web pages you visit - rather than being a hierarchically based structure, it is an unstructured system which makes it more flexible and usable.

Tags plus public bookmarks that are shared gives us insight into the wisdom of crowds. So if for instance, we wanted to see what Web pages other people have tagged with “folksonomy“, or even “tags” we have a new way of discovering what other people are thinking and how they are classifying content.

Bottom line, if we want people who use these systems to discover interesting and relevant content, we should start by tagging it ourselves, as I have done with this article.

For those of you wishing to dig deeper into this subject, the April 2005 issue of D-Lib Magazine has a great overview of Social Bookmarking tools. A generally current list of the more known tools is available from Wikipedia.

Technorati Tags: Tags as a means of promotion, discovery and community

As with the example of social bookmarking, Technorati Tags are also about the idea of someone tagging a piece of content and someone else being able to more easily search for it. Unlike the social bookmarking use of tagging though, Technorati Tags are ways that Blog authors are able to add tags to their blog posts. In a sense this is how an author is able to let those people interested in a particular topic know that they have something to say about it.

Blog search engines like Technorati, IceRocket, and BlogDigger leverage the tags within the blog posts to enable people to find out what people have had to say about a given topic most recently. Services like PubSub enable you to subscribe to receive alerts when people write something new about a topic. Communications professionals need to use tags for the purpose of promoting a given piece of news to its intended audiences as well as for monitoring what is being said around a given topic of interest.

It is exactly those people who watch what is being said about a given topic of interest, via the tags for that topic, which forms a community. Another interesting way to think of tags is as the ‘glue’ that holds the conversation on a given topic together. The tag for “Web 2.0” for instance is almost always one of the hottest out there. There are numerous experts, analysts, students and lay people who care about what people have to say about Web 2.0, and the tag is an important element of what holds the community together.

For those of you wishing to dig deeper into Technorati Tags, the blog “A Consumning Experience” has a great introduction. The best way is to jump into Technorati’s Tags and see how people tag things for yourself.

So much more…

Tags are such an important part of the fabric that weaves the Web 2.0, I could not possibly do the subject justice in one post - especially in trying to keep this somewhat short. Beyond tags, there are tagclouds (aka Heat Maps) which let you see the most popular tags in a given cluster. And there really is so much more…

But rather than go too deep here, let’s check in with a few questions and see what is on your mind. What do you think of tags? What questions do you have? How might you use tags to your advantage professionally? What are some important issues that should be added to this primer?

[Disclaimer: Tagging is not something to be done lightly on behalf of a client, nor is it to be done excessively. This introduction to the topic gives you enough knowledge to be dangerous, so let’s take a breath and not be dangerous. Tags must be honest and accurate. In this case, less is truly more - using every word in the english language to reach a wider audience will not only be ineffective, it can be downright damaging to the interests of your clients. There is a great danger of ‘tagspam’ which has already become a bit of a menace, polluting the valuable tagstream with inappropriate material. If this trend continues, a truly valuable service will lose its value.]

Tech Tags: BeyondBlogging Tags Tagging BeyondBlogging:tags

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