Have you ever heard the word “folksonomie”? It’s a combination of the words folks and taxonomy, and it’s another word for tagging or social bookmarking. Sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, and Propeller are only three of the many dozens of sites popping up all over the Internet. There are sites for tagging almost any type of content, too, such as video, audio, graphic, or written. And unlike traditional search, where you get comprehensive results back for terms, social bookmarking sites give you results based on what people have tagged and made popular with their votes.
The bookmarking and social interaction sites are labeled “Web 2.0,” and they also include video sites, podcasting sites, wikis, and every blog on the planet. What makes the sites in Web 2.0 different from the rest of the Web is that the content in them is all user generated. Think of My Space, Facebook, and Flickr. When You Tube was sold to Google last year for more than $1.6 million, people started paying closer attention.
You can tag blog posts, web pages, and other written content at places like del.icio.us, BlinkList, or Scuttle. Share photos at sites like Flickr, and videos at Google Video or You Tube. There are Web 2.0 sites for every type of medium. Here’s how it works: You see a great blog entry here, for example. You can go down to the bottom of the post, and click one of the bookmarking buttons for Netscape (now Propeller), Furl, or Ma.gnolia. When you’re taken to those sites, assuming you’re a member, you’ll fill in a description of the post and you’ll tag it using appropriate keywords. So, for this post, you might choose the tags, Internet marketing, Web 2.0, and social bookmarking. What makes this so cool is that your tags are open to the public, unless you specify that you don’t want them to be, so that other taggers can see them.
Think of tagging as being related to search. It’s just a natural complement. You get some pretty great results from Google, but they won’t necessarily be the sites that people are enjoying the most, though they may be the most relevant. Social bookmarking allows you to see popular pages.
Web 2.0 is a great viral marketing technique for your Internet marketing business, too, if you go about tagging your own posts and the posts of others. Just be sure that you’re transparent about what you’re doing, and avoid spamming. If a site forbids tagging your own material, then don’t do it. You could be banned for life from the site, and you don’t know how important to your Internet marketing business it might become in the future. I doubt that anyone suspected that Google would be tops in search way back in 1998 when it was just starting.
You won’t always find what you’re looking for when you search the tagging sites, but you should be in there getting familiar with the territory for the sake of your Internet marketing business. Subscribe to several sites and notice how people are tagging your products and services. What makes this great is that you can use the taggers as a control group and it won’t cost you a single dime. Internet marketing businesses who aren’t using Web 2.0 to some degree are really missing the boat. Be sure yours isn’t one of them.