Social Marketing, Bookmarking and Blogging.

One of the first topics in the next Web Whisperers LondonLondon or a href=”http://www.thewebwhisperer.com”>Santa Fe Information Markeiting Bootcamps will be using Social Marketing in your Blogs. I have included social marketing “tags” in my Feldenkrais Blog so that anyone who uses technoratic, delicious or digg can instantly “tag” my posts and both share them with others as well as easily get back to my posts when needed.

But what is all this jargon about social bookmarking and tagging? I thought the easiest way would be to share an online news article from the Pew Research Center and let you read the information from them. Here’s a short quote followed by the link:

A December 2006 survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 28% of internet users — and 7% on any typical day — have tagged or categorized online content such as photos, news stories or blog posts.

These are people who responded “yes” to the following question: “Please tell me if you ever use the internet to categorize or tag online content like a photo, news story, or a blog post.” The survey wording was designed to capture the growing use of tagging on sites such as http://del.icio.us/ (a site for sharing browser bookmarks), http://www.flickr.com/ (a photo sharing site), http://youtube.com/ (a video sharing site) and http://technorati.com/ (the blog search engine).

Because it advances and personalizes online searching, tagging has been classified by some as a “Web 2.0″ hallmark. Traditionally, search on the web (or within websites) has been done by using keywords. Tagging is a kind of next-stage search phenomenon — a way to mark, store, and then retrieve web content that users have already found valuable and want to keep track of. It is, of course, more personalized and not designed to be the all-inclusive system that Melvil Dewey tried to create in 1876 with his decimal-based scheme that, in much revised form, is still widely used in library classification.

From the Pew Research Center

And here’s a great common-sense example from the same article. Note the language about using the categories that matter to “us as individuals”:

First, tagging lets us organize the vastness of the Web — and even our email, as Gmail has shown — using the categories that matter to us as individuals. You may want to tag, say, a Stephen King story as “horror,” but maybe to me it’s “ghost story” and to a literature professor it’s “pop culture.” Tagging lets us organize the Net our way.