5 Useful Things About People-Tagging

Tags and tag clouds are everywhere but they are generally used to tag content (pictures, blog postings, documents, bookmarks ... ) and rarely to tag people.

But I think people-tagging* unleashes a world of hidden and unknown connections across an organisation. Who knew Smith from Accounts also designed websites in his spare time, how can we bring together all those people that love using Google Apps to share the love, who can help with this emergency press release ...

Through tagging you can start to discover and nurture the informal communities which are, I would content, the more useful and sustainable types.

The opportunities to use a VERY simple approach (tagging/tag clouds) to unearth the hidden potential of your employees is one I love showing organisations and the outcome (decreased cost, improved service and/or increased reveneue) can be immediate.

One final benefit that I have recently used people-tagging was sharing and merging of languages (buzzwords, techncal jargon, business speak meeting real world plain English).

Huh? Geeks (a phrase I use lovingly and with great respect) have a certain way of looking at the world and they have generated a whole new language. For instance, they don't talk about phones, they refer to telecommunication devices; they don't talk about intranets but refer to on-line collaborations spaces ... you get the picture. All well and good until the worlds and languages are asked to interact - when people want to find a geek they rarely use the geeks langauge. With the ability to tag others these languages can merge - Mike Riversdale may have tagged himself as "web2.0, collaboration, knowledge management" but his tag cloud has been augmented with real terms such as "intranet, facebook, google, information" - the worlds merge.

Much learning from all worlds normall occurs!

And so, the 5 useful things:

1. Organisations become aware of what people actually do
   
2. People can find people
3. Communities can be discovered and nurtured
4. Languages can be merged and barriers broken down
5. ...!
   

Number 5 purposely left blank for YOU to fill in ... leave a comment


Further reading:

• IBM Research: Socially Augmenting Employee Profiles with PeopleTagging (.pdf)
• IBM Research: Fringe Contacts: People-Tagging for the Enterprise (.pdf)
• Bringing 'social networking' into the organisation
• Faceforce shows the way with enterprise social networking

And a few funnies for you to giggle at:

• Concerns that 'in-person' social-networking could corrupt children
• Man keeps in contact with friends without using Social Networking site

* "People-Tagging" in the sense of applying a category to a person and not scrawling all over them with a spray can ... although that could be fun as well. AND "tagging" by applying this category to an on-line profile and not slapping on an electronic taggging device to the ankle to stop you breaking your prison conditions - hence the picture.