Folksonomies” – a New Viral Marketing Tool
There’s another consumer phenomenon in the viral marketing world, its called “folksonomies” or “tagging” (short for folks and taxonomy).
Folksonomies or tagging is a great tool for viral marketing because people are building an organizational formation for online content. Tagging helps people to organize file content under tags and it allows you to share it with others through filing it under a global tag that they make.
How tagging works? With use of sites such as (del.icio.us – a bookmark sharing site and Flickr – a photo sharing site) it lets people communicate with each other by sorting out their online content under a specific tag or keywords.
For instance, an individual can post photographs of their iPod on Flickr and file it under the tag “iPod.” These images are now not only visible under the individual user’s iPod tag but also under the community iPod tag that displays all images consumers are generating and filing under the keyword. Right now Flickr has more than 3,500 photos that are labeled “iPod.”
Folksonomies is spreading so fast since it is a usual complement to search. Type the word “blog” into search engines and it can’t identifiy what you are searching for since blog has broad categories.
Site owners are already getting on the folkosnomy train. They apply tag-like structures to assist users to easily locate content or information on a specific thing that they’re searching for.
Though tags are not a perfect tool in promoting products or services, business owners should nonetheless, use it to monitor the pulse of the American public.
Start subscribing to RSS feeds to monitor how consumers are tagging information related to your product, service, company or space. These are living focus groups that are available for free, 24/7. Folksonomy sites can be also be carefully used to unleash viral marketing campaigns – with a caveat. Marketers should be transparent in who they are, why they are posting the link/photos and avoid spamming the services.
