NewComm TopTips

By Elizabeth Albrycht

Social bookmarking, tagging and folksonomy are three new tools that can be very useful to corporate communicators in tracking and influencing online conversations. Briefly, social bookmarking is a way to group webpages, blog posts etc. so others can follow along. Del.icio.us, Furl.net, digg.com and Shadows are examples of social bookmarking services. Tagging is a way of grouping online information by assigning keywords to an object (article, post, photo, podcast, video, etc.). Technorati and http://www.flickr.com/ are examples of tagging services. Finally, folksonomy is the collective classification of online objects. Cloudalicious and TagCloud are two examples of folksonomy services. These are mainly grassroots -- driven from the bottom-up. Rather than imposing categories from above, people are working through a messy process of converging on accepted descriptions – sometimes multiple descriptions. Can groups of heterogeneous individuals cooperating, however loosely, create knowledge or new wisdom through the aggregation of their efforts? Questions like this won’t be answered tomorrow, but we communications professionals can begin to experiment with these new tools today, with an eye to watching (and documenting) how they can be useful in providing new ways to manage the ever-increasing information burden we are faced with.

Here are some tips on how to use these tools:

1) Use social bookmarking, tagging and folksonomy services to keep track of what people are saying about products, companies, trends and other subjects.

2) Create a social bookmark/tag for your company name and ask your team to save all articles, blog posts and other online sources that mention the company. Have your team and your executives subscribe to the feed, and you suddenly have a near-real-time record of online conversations about your company.

3) Find out if your key reporters and other influencers have a del.icio.us or other service account and subscribe to their feed so you know what they are finding interesting. If you see they are saving many articles on a topic near and dear to your company, you have a great opening for a pitch.

4) Research who is reading about the topics you are interested in order to discover new influencers.

5) Tag your organization’s blog posts and other online content. Tags aren’t just for blogs. Do some research and make sure that your content is represented in the popular (and appropriate!) tags, e.g., tag the white paper on your companies social software framework “social software”.

6) Create your own tags. This is easy. At Technorati, type in the tag you want and if it doesn’t exist already, they will set it up and provide the code for you to include on your blog/website for it to be added to their database. (If you are blogging, your categories are automatically considered tags.) An obvious example is your corporate name. Warning: Others can use that tag to add posts they write that are negative about your company. You can’t control this, but it can provide you with an early warning system for potential problems.

7) When new technologies are introduced, it generally takes some time before standard ways of describing it are reached. During that time phase, watching how people are tagging a subject can give you some insight into what descriptions are catching on and what ones are losing ground, enabling you to adjust your corporate/product descriptions accordingly.

8) Provide a tag cloud for your website as an alternative navigation device. Track how people are finding information via that tag cloud vs. your standard navigation menus. You might find that you should change your website navigation structure to make finding the most popular information easier.

9) Create a tag cloud from your list of top 10 or 20 news sources, and watch it carefully for trends.

10) Track del.icio.us bookmarks for an important news piece. How many people are bookmarking it? Who is bookmarking it? Was it influential? If you were responsible for placing that story, this gives you another way of measuring its impact. Include the graphs created by Cloudalicious in your activity reports.

[Excerpted with permission from January 2006 article in PRSA’s Tactics Magazine by Elizabeth Albrycht. Article not yet available online for viewing.]

Elizabeth Albrycht is a 16-year veteran of high technology public relations practice and Research Chair of the Society for New Communications Research. She co-founded and built the program for the 2005 and 2006 New Communications Forum , a conference series designed to bring journalists and marketing and PR professionals together to learn how to use participatory communications tools. She has authored articles on blogging, RSS and other new tools for PRSA's Tactics magazine, the IABC's CW Bulletin, and the Future of Work eNewsletter, and has presented teleseminars and in-person seminars on new communications tools for PRSA. She is a member of the Future of Work, PRSA and the IAOC. She blogs at CorporatePR and is the editor of Future Tense, a Corante blog that explores the future of work.