Znetlady: Modern Media

Tagging: Into the Mind of the CEO

Blogging is often offered up as a tactic CEOs should employ to humanize the seemingly too distant CEO or as a way to communicate regularly and effectively to internal audiences.

But blogging is hard - and besides, really getting inside your own head to communicate “who you are” is impossible for anyone. After all, when we sit down to write a blog post, it’s almost always reactionary - we write what is immediate, burning at the moment, on our radar right then, or what we believe the troops need to hear about a specific issue.  It is rarely with the discipline to communicate consistent visioning or mentoring or even the passion we have for what we do everyday.   And, even if you were that disciplined, it would take a long time of reading your blog for a clear window to develop into what drives you and your decisions or your leadership.   

Enter tagging.  CEOs should be tagging. It is the most powerful way to communicate what makes you tick or what is important to you as a CEO.

It provides insight into why you make the decisions you do and what flavors your leadership.  Tagging adds up all those vital little “bits” that make up your personal “CEO-ness” - like a mind scan but without all the high-tech equipment.  It is something no other medium can do quite as effectively - or as simply.

Tagging can help CEOs meet the eternal challenges of leading.  What if you tagged things like:

• Books you are reading
• Book that have inspired you
• Articles that you find yourself wishing everyone would read
• Web sites that worry you
• Web sites that inform you
• Web sites that “get it”
• Competitors whom you have your eye on
• News pieces that point to current or emerging market pressures
• Articles that mention your company
• Interviews you do
• Industry reports that you think will impact your products or services
• Blog posts that say something you wish you had in a way you wish you could
• Your RSS feeds or email subscriptions
• Jokes that are funny because they seem to comment on something as you see it in your organization
• Case studies that you wish were yours
• Things that illustrate industry or consumer trends you think the company should pay attention to

Now, by simply being able to scan through your tags, you are giving everyone in your organization a window into not just who you are, but the things that drive you, your decisions and your vision.  How much more impactful is this than your once a year or quarterly address; or your blog posts that are, by their nature, excruciatingly narrow? 

Tagging gives your entire organization an evocative view of both you and the challenges you see that face their industry, their company and their jobs.   It is a bird’s eye view they can get no other way.  It’s even better than winning a “day with the CEO” because it evolves over time - just like you and your challenges and your organization.

Here's how to get your own CEO tag cloud started:

1)  Choose a social bookmarking site that allows private tags and register for an account (most are free).  I like Blogmarks.net, but del.icio.us and Blinklist.com are also great choices.  (You can also do this with public tags, if you don't mind the entire world seeing them.)

2)  Take a second to drag the bookmarklet provided by your bookingmarking site to your browser toolbar - it makes for one fast click while you are viewing something you want to tag.  You’ll find the bookmarklet in your account settings/tools of your chosen bookmark service.

3)  When browsing something you want to tag, click your bookmarklet in your toolbar and simply type in your tag words in the appropriate place in the bookmarking form (they usually pop up in a small separate window).  Use any words or concepts as a tag.  Words that make sense to you or your organizational culture - it might be “competitors,” “must-read,” “trends,” - you get to choose.  Use several tags, as content you bookmark often fits into more than one “category.”

4)  Give everyone in your organization access to this “private” account and url so they can view your tags. 

5)  Encourage everyone to subscribe via RSS - or by email - to your entire tag list; or just to the tag they might specifically want to watch.   Feedblitz is a nice service that turns any RSS feed into an email for those not yet using RSS on a regular basis.

If you are brave, you can even suggest employees tag items with your name that they think you should see.  Check in on that tag periodically, or better yet, subscribe to your name tag via RSS to keep the information flowing both ways.

You just might find tagging gives you an evocative view of yourself.

Tagging – What Is It Good For? – Part 3; Eighteen Ways to Use Tagging in Your Communications and Marketing

So, just what is tagging good for practically?   Hopefully Part 1 and Part 2 laid the groundwork for finally answering this question, discussing how tagging is shifting online searching and is a growing and powerful way to both organize and share web documents.  Now, the next step is putting it to practical use in your communications or marketing.

My last post reviewed specifically how tags work at del.icio.us and Technorati, but those concepts are much the same for all social bookmarking sites and tag search engines.  More and more online services are incorporating tagging. Dating sites like Consumating.com uses tags on dating profiles – you tag your own & others are able to tag your profile.  Evdb.com uses tags for worldwide events and venues. InfoWorld editors tag articles.  Dinnerbuz.com shares favorite restaurants via tags.  43Things.com uses tags for goal setting.  And, Amazon is experimenting with tagging in a concordance feature that shows the 100 most frequently used words (tags) in a book – and by clicking on a tag in the “tag cloud,” Amazon will display the sentences in the book that contain that tag word. 

The point is tagging is for finding and sharing stuff.  It is redefining all types of online search.  And, since search is increasingly important to all of your communications, media relations or marketing efforts, it’s time to start learning about tags, experimenting with them, and incorporating tags into your communications strategies. 

Here’s a start with eighteen practical ways to use tagging. While they will help others find you and streamline how you find important information, you might even find tags help you organize and find your own “stuff.”

• Search on social bookmarking sites for tags related to your organization, brand or industry.  If one exists, subscribe (via RSS) to those tags.  This is an easy way to track what people find valuable in your industry, what people are saying about you – even to spot potential customers, channels or marketing opportunities.  Start at del.icio.us, Blogmarks, Shadows, IceRocket and Technorati.  Also check out Yahoo’s My Web 2.0 (in beta).

• Look closely at the  “related tags” to your most relevant tags.  It’s very likely you will find unexpected perspectives or uses of your brand or content.  Use the insight to develop both tagging and communications strategies. 

• Watch for changes in tag clouds on social bookmarking sites.  See one here.  The size of the tag suggests what’s popular.  Use it to detect trends.  If you look sideways, you might even find some interesting clues for innovations in your markets.

• Tag your existing web content at social bookmarking sites with appropriate tags.  If a tag doesn’t exist, just create one.  Don’t forget to subscribe to it, so you will know what others are tagging with the same tag.  And, do look periodically at how the related “cloud” is developing around your tags.

• If you have a blog, tag your individual blog entries, as well as your entire blog. Check if your blog software supports categories or has other tagging capabilities. IceRocket and Technorati will use your blog category feature to tag your blog entries at those search engines.

• Use a blog as a newsroom and post your press releases and news items – and tag them.  Blogs are an easy way to incorporate tags immediately, as noted above, many popular blog services have category or tagging features that are then used by social bookmarking sites to include in tag searches.

• Use tags to organize your web site’s press releases, articles or media resources.  This is an easy way to guide journalists, analysts, customers, or investors to organizational or topical content that might be overlooked at your web site.  Point them via your web site to the relevant tag link on your chosen social bookmarking site(s) and show them the same content but organized by tags; and don’t be afraid to expand on your own content by adding bookmarks to relevant content on other web sites.

• Ask journalists that cover your industry if they are using tags.   A few are using them as a way to accept pitches as an alternative to email, as are some influential bloggers.  While this practice is not yet widespread, journalists are subscribing via RSS to tags and keywords to research and find story ideas.

• If a favorite journalist is tagging their blog or has a social bookmarking tag, subscribe to it via the RSS feed for that tag.  An easy way to follow what the journalist is interested in, writing about, or following.

• Create a set of “private bookmarks” and advise journalists what your tags are and invite them to subscribe.   When you update your bookmarks or content with tags appropriate to that journalist, they will be notified via RSS.

• Use social bookmarking and tags to create an ongoing “library” for your email (or RSS) newsletter readers. You will be creating a valuable growing resource for your readers – and they can also contribute to the “mind share’ by adding relevant resources.

• Use tags to gather and organize resources for customers, distributors or partners.  These can be public or private tags, but this makes it incredibly easy to organize and share reports, articles, whitepapers, data sheets, industry research, etc. that may be stored all over the web by simply tagging appropriate web pages.  Link to the social tag from your web site, intranet, or extranet.

• Contribute links to existing tags that point to relevant content on your web site or blog.  Do not engage in “tag spam!”

• Use tags on your internal blogs and web-based resources, extending your organization’s “corporate memory.”

• Create special tags for your presentations or training sessions.   We find this especially helpful for our seminar participants.  We gather all the resources discussed. such as web sites, studies, tools, etc. into one easy place for the attendees to reference post-event.  Attendees can also add resources they know of or find later, initiating a community among your attendees. 

• Create a “news aggregation” site relevant to your customers, brand, employees or partners by combining tags and RSS.   Use RSS and tags together to gather, filter and then automatically publish news or content items to a page on your web site, blog or intranet.

• Tag staff and employee profiles on your intranet related to specialized skill-sets or knowledge or experience.  This could be an unexpected boon to training, identifying internal experts, or maximizing internal resources.

• Use tags for your personal bookmarks and research.  Because tags are so much more flexible than browser-based bookmarks, it makes it easy to find relevant resources you might otherwise “lose” in your “Favorites" lists.  You can tag them with more than one tag, allowing you to find content evoked by differing circumstances or needs.  Plus, because they are stored on the web rather than your own computer, you can get to them from anywhere – including mobile devices or someone else’s computer.

There are countless ways to use tagging.  The important thing is just to start using them - your own ideas will soon surface.  I invite you to share your own ideas for using tags here via comments.  I’ll be adding more ideas in other posts - check for them in Categories here; look for the tagging tag!