The Role of Community in Tagging
I’m back in the office after a few weeks on the road presenting at seminars and trade shows where I was showing off the new social search capabilities in Velocity 6.0. The most common question I heard was about tagging search results with keywords – would employees really take the time to tag information?
Tony Byrne of CMS Watch addressed this issue in a recent post and discussed two relevant problems associated with enterprise tagging. The first is that many users can’t tag because they haven’t been given easy-to-use tools in order to do so (filling in 5 or more required metadata fields in a content management system doesn’t count as easy). The second problem is that of users who won’t tag – here Tony gives some good advice about creating incentives along with an institutional emphasis on organizing digital information.
But it seems to me that in many of the discussions of tagging within the enterprise, we’re overlooking the obvious – user-friendly tagging is in use on many web sites now, and where it works well is when there is a connection between the users, a community where participation is based upon some shared goal (an example is the Democratic activist political blog Daily Kos) or passion for a specific activity (Flickr for photographers) or interest in an artist’s work (Amazon for books, videos and cds). All of the sites mentioned above have some form of user-generated tags in widespread use, demonstrating that motivation is often driven by passion.
So, a logical place to start with tagging search results within an organization would be at the project team or department level with folks tagging content that they think would be helpful to colleagues. An easy way to streamline this process would be to enable role-based search first – i.e. choosing collections of information most pertinent to specific groups – then enabling tagging on these collections. In summary, start small and allow time for organic adoption before resorting to the carrots … or sticks approach.
Tags: digital information, search capabilities, social search
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