"Folksonomies" - a Viral Marketing Tool


A new consumer phenomenon is called "tagging" or "folksonomies" (short for folks and taxonomy). Tagging is powerful because consumers are creating an organizational structure for online content. Folksonomies not only enable people to file away content under tags, but, even better, share it with others by filing it under a global taxonomy that they created.

Here's how tagging works. Using sites such as del.icio.us - a bookmark sharing site ? and Flickr - a photo sharing site - consumers are collaborating on categorizing online content under certain keywords, or tags.

For instance, an individual can post photographs of their iPod on Flickr and file it under the tag "iPod." These images are now not only visible under the individual user's iPod tag but also under the community iPod tag that displays all images consumers are generating and filing under the keyword. Right now Flickr has more than 3,500 photos that are labeled "iPod."

Tagging is catching on because it is a natural complement to search. Type the word "blogs" into Google and it can't tell if you are searching for information about how to launch a blog, how to read blogs, or just what. Large and small sites alike are already getting on to the folksonomy train. They are rolling out tag-like structures to help users more easily locate content that's relevant to them.

Although tags are far from perfect, marketers should, nevertheless, be using them to keep a finger on the pulse of the American public. Start subscribing to RSS feeds to monitor how consumers are tagging information related to your product, service, company or space. These are living focus groups that are available for free, 24/7. Folksonomy sites can be also be carefully used to unleash viral marketing campaigns - with a caveat. Marketers should be transparent in who they are, why they are posting the link/photos and avoid spamming the services.

Yes Kram,

You are putting a tag to the image like an image tag but using the most relevant term for it so that it helps make it easier to know where to list it in image search.

So there's a difference between image tags which is adding the most relevant keyword to your image as a tag

and the tags you put on bookmarks at bookmarking sites.

For instance, if you find a nice site that you'd like to add to your bookmarking community, you may want to add

tags to it to help other  users of the community know what it is and find it..

Like, for example, there are categories where some users only look for new bookmarks of new sites, news stories, new content, etc.

about a certain subject in which they share an interest with other users who check those categories.

One thing to pay attention to when bookmarking is that when you are adding tags to the bookmark,

a lot of these bookmarking sites will separate the tags you may add with a space instead of a comma so you may need to use underscores instead to make sure the tags don't get broken.

Like, for instance, if you want to bookmark toptrafficforum,

the most relevant tags would be:

web_site_traffic, increase_web_site_traffic, web_site_traffic_forum

That way each of the words in the phrase stay together without

being broken into:

web,site,traffic,increase,forum

which would not be as relevant and means a lot of people who are searching for us here wouldn't find us

unless we made sure that the entire search phrase they use when looking for us is entered into the fields where they

can find us.

As you can see, this is different than just adding a relevant tag to an image but still uses the same guiding principles.