Your Online Presence > Strategy & Development, Managing Content

Let's play tag

By Paul Caplan, New Media Trainer for Media Trust

Tags are simply keywords that you attach to your Blog postings, videos, pictures or whatever. These tags let people find your stuff and also help you organise yours. Using tags can help finding your content easier.

There's a lot of stories out there. The Live Web has made it easy for anyone and everyone to have their say in words, pictures, video, sound and every possible combination. Organisations, individuals, Big Media, small media, young and old are not only telling their stories but are commenting on each others and engaging in conversations that are at once powerful but also mesmerising.

We know that we should be keeping in touch with those conversations as well as making sure that people can find ours but in a world moving as fast as the Internet it's intimidating. How do I manage this 'story overload' and make sure people find my stories through their overload. It's not difficult and its free. Just add some labels. Tag your stories.

Tags are simply keywords that you attach to your Blog postings, videos, pictures or whatever. These tags let people find your stuff and also help you organise yours. As with all Live Web issues, let's look at both the writing and the reading side of the issue.

If you're publishing a Blog or uploading videos to YouTube or photos to Flickr etc, you can add keywords or tags to your posts.  Most uploading tools provide a simple field to fill in. If your Blogging software doesn't, simply add the following to your story:

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You can add as many tags as you like. Just swap TAG#1 with whatever word or phrase you want. The key thing when picking tags is to put yourself in the position of the reader. What might she be searching for? This might involve you in some difficult decisions. You might not use the phrase "mental handicap" for very good reasons, but a young mother who has just been told her baby has Downs Syndrome might, and that would be what she searched for. You can help her see things differently but only if you can start a conversation with her which is only possible if she finds your story.

You might also want to think about using your Brand as a tag. People might not search for your brand... yet. But when they have found your YouTube video because you tagged it with something they were searching for, they will find your brand as another tag, click on that and find all your other stories... and your organisation. And this is where it becomes really interesting because other can tag with your Brand too. You could ask all your supporters who are Blogging about your event or have photographed it to add your Brand's tag to their stories and pictures. Then, when someone finds their photo or video, they get led through to you.

Tags do not work on their own. They are about connections.

You may have written a story about a young mother who's dealing with the issues around a new baby with Downs Syndrome (or better still you are helping her tell her story). You tag the story with Downs Syndrome, Mental Handicap, Learning Disabilities, Learning Difficulties, Motherhood and the name of your organisation. Another mother in a similar situation searches for information on Downs and Mental Handicap. She finds this story, likes what she reads and sees that there is the name of an organisation. She clicks on that and a whole lot of others tories about this organisation are brought together. Some are about the first stages of motherhood, others about issues around 'supported employment', 'disability rights' and 'housing' (all suitably tagged of course). Not only does this reader see the breadth of the work you do, she gets new information, sees the broader picture and incidentally learns that 'mental handicap' is no longer seen as an appropriate label

Some of those stories will be yours, some may be your supporters'. By encouraging your partners to use a particular set of tags, you can ensure that all the wealth of content that is created around that multi-organsiation lobby or initiative is tied together. But the tag web is even more powerful than just an organisational tool for you and the people you know. Some of the content that young mother finds by following the tags will be from people you have no connection with who have used the same tags. This is not only good for her, it is potentially powerful for you because you may get some reflected glory from having your story brought together with a bigger organisation's content or an expert's report. And, as we will see it enables you to find other people in your area to start conversations with.

If you had not tagged your information, she might have found you. All you have done is made it easier. You have given her the power to make her own journeys through the information available.

Just as that young mother is finding her way through the mass, some would say morass, of information by using tags, so can you.

You know the theory. There are lots of passionate people 'out there' talking about my issues and even my organisation. if I can have a conversation with them, I can set up all sorts of interesting relationships that might become fundraising or campaign partnerships. I might learn something or help someone or... ah the possibilities are endless. The problem is I don't have the time the time to surf around looking for these people and those stories. Let tags do the work.

Just as you as a passionate and involved person in your area are now tagging things to help people find stories and connect them, so are others. If someone has tagged a story or a video "learning difficulties" you can bet they are involved with issues that are relevant to you, to continue our example. They have taken the trouble to think about the content of their story, its likely audience and how they want people to categorise and find it. Talking to them would probably not be a waste of time. So if you find stories and other content that is tagged with your sort of tags, that's a good cross section of possible conversation partners.  And the good thing is tags help search.

YouTube for videos and Flickr for photos will; allow you to search for content that has been explicitly labelled. If you go to one of the Blog search engines such as Technorati or Blogpulse you can search for any text within a Blog entry or specifically for the tags people have taken the trouble to add. Searching for tags tends to cut down on search results because it pulls up the categories that the author has chosen. You'll still get some references to that little known Heavy Rock band "Learning Disabilities" desperately trying to build their brand by adding their brand tag to everything, but not as many.

The next step in your bid to manage the Live Web is to bring the filtering that tags enable with the power of RSS to automate information retrieval.  It can be a good way of subscribing to Bloggers or sources that you regularly read. But you can also use it to subscribe to tag searches. When you do a Live Web search on the likes of Technorati or Blogpulse or  Google Blog Search, the search results will have an RSS link. You can add that search as a feed to your aggregator and then every time you boot up Bloglines.com or your aggregator, the software will go off to your favourite Blog search engine, do a search for those tags and pull in every new Blog positing where someone has added that tag.

Through an intelligent combination of RSS and tag searching, you can creatively filter the wealth of information and stories circulating on the Live Web, find people actively engaging with your issues or brand and organise them so that you can then link to them, add comments, or otherwise engage with the people behind them. And of course because you are tagging your stories, as are your partners and stakeholders, so your stories are being creatively filtered and found by people who want to engage with you.