Streamline Training & Documentation: Thomas Vander Wal on Tagging

Thursday, August 30, 2007

Thomas Vander Wal on Tagging

Thomas Vander Wal gave a presentation at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in June that provides a good overview of how tagging fits into business use of Web 2.0 capabilities. The presentation slides for "Bottom-up All the Way Down: How Tags Help Businesses Organize" are available here.

I'd highlight Vander Wal's summary of the benefits businesses can realize from making use of tagging:

Company's Internet site

Improve understanding of your customers' interests.

Stay on top of current terminology used by your customers.

Identify market segments.

Target your messages to the language, needs, and tastes of each segment, and adjust messages in light of trends.

Follow your customers' thinking via aggregation and correlation analysis of the tags they use.

Monitor and analyze how customers are using various tagging services (e.g., del.icio.us).

Company's intranet

Improve refindability of information.

Use people's annotations to understand the context in which they are interpreting content on the intranet.

Make it easier to share resources in ways that are responsive to different perspectives.

Build an information taxonomy cost-effectively.

Facilitate shared use of terms within and across organizational silos.

Facilitate networking.

The bottom line is that businesses that are not already using customer and employee tagging to help organize company information and marketing should look carefully at whether this is a practice they would benefit from supporting.

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Labels: Taxonomy and tagging, Web 2.0

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