“Tagging” or “Folksonomies’ are a new powerful consumer phenomenon that help consuemers to organize their experience of online life. Not only can consumers create groups of documents based on their type, but they are also able to share their experience with other.

Just as an exmample sombody could take photographs of their pet dog and upload them to Blogger. Dependng on the settings this picture will be visisble either to everybody or just to the individual user. By tagging the picture as “dog” everybody in the wider community will be able to quickly find and identify the picture. Some photo sharing communities have many thousands of photographs available.

Tagging is a natural way to search because the results that you receive have been human edited. Even the most sophisticated search engine algorithms struggle to properly identify the semantic content of text. By allowing users to tag content small and large sites alike are making their content easier to locate, better structured, and more relevant to their users.

From a marketing perspective tags are an important way to reach consumers. Even though they may not always be accurate the truth is that many people on a website will use them to quickly find content that they are looking for. An internet marketer may want to subscribe to RSS feeds or watch social bookmarking sites to see what people are tagging. By seeing what tags are popular the internet marketer can develop content based on the current zeitgeist of the internet. Of course any marketer should be honest and ethical and avoid spamming social service.

Tags: social, tag

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 at 2:35 am by Bertus Floor and is filed under Search Engine Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.