New Media

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Tagging as Marketing: Are You Playing 'Tag' Yet?

Are you using tags in your Web marketing? Tags are the short, one or two word, descriptors that you can attach to your bookmarks on del.icio.us, your images on Flickr, videos in YouTube, audio at Last.fm and to blog posts appearing in Technorati. Because you, not some supposed authority, choose what and how many tags you want to apply to the media you are tagging, they reflect how you want to organize the information. While highly personal, tags can be used to help direct others with similar interests to your products and services. As the Web evolves, it will become increasingly important for marketers to learn how to harness the power of tags.

Although you can be creative and use almost any word (even made up words or abbreviations) as a tag, you should choose tags you intend to use for marketing with the same care and deliberation that you use for selecting search keywords. Finding tags that will bring visitors to your tagged information is a little different than selecting high traffic keywords. Searchers often browse multiple tagged files in a single session so generic words often make excellent tags. For example, the tags "recipe" and "chicken" or "chickenrecipe" would be appropriate for a tagging a blog post on "how to fry chicken." Tags are frequently navigational and used to identify the location where a picture was taken or a business is located.

Tags are often shown in "tag clouds" where the size of the font reflects the popularity of the tag in the corpus of documents. If you were to tag the posts in a blog about cooking, your tag cloud would reflect the overall composition of your content. For example, if you only have a few items tagged with "chicken" and many "recipes," the font size for "recipes" will be much larger than the one used for "chicken." If you spend a little time looking at tag clouds, you will note that many popular tags are also popular keywords. Keep this in mind as you think about selecting tags to use in your marketing program. You will want to develop a list of tags, a tag list, just like a keyword list that you can use to tag your files. The tag list should help guide you and ensure that you thoroughly and accurately tag your files.

If you are unsure about how you should tag specific pieces of information, you can always go to the search services that support tags and browse the popular tags. Since people search using tags to find interesting information, you can intercept these browsers by using tags and can make sure that you get your information in front of them. This is particularly important for images and video. Searchers browse many images or videos on their favorite topics at each session. By using topical tags for your media, you will increase its visibility, increase your traffic, and expand the reach of your marketing message.

Amanda Watlington is a frequent speaker at Search Engine Strategies, AdTech, and other conferences. She is the principal of Searching for Profit, Charleston, Massachusetts.