In order to get the most of services like del.icio.us and StumbleUpon there are a few things we should all be doing.
Tagging is transforming the web in a ways that we have yet to fully realize. Social bookmarking sites allow us to save a page we find, tag it with a few descriptive words, add a short description about the page and then share it with a network of friends and the entire community.
Here a few tips I would like to encourage each of us follow as we practice being a good social tagger.
Use Good Tags
For starters let’s use good descriptive tags. I suggest using a minimum of 3-5 tags.
The first 2-3 should be about the page itself. If I were going to tag this post, my first three tags would be: tagging social.networking best.practices.
Make sure you’re using tag protocol appropriate for the platform. del.icio.us uses spaces not commas to differentiate tags but StumbleUpon uses commas. If I were going to Stumble this post I’d use those same tags like this: tagging, social networking, best practices.
The next 1-2 tags should reflect why you tagged the page. If the post sparked an idea that I wanted to blog about later I might add the tags: blog research.
These last tags are also a great way to set up a group tag. Back in my consulting days I used to set clients up with RSS readers and del.icio.us. I would have them use a unique tag or unique tagging structure and have everyone subscribe to the feed for that tag. If New Comm Biz were it’s own company I would set up a series of tags using “ncb.” as the prefix and have a series of suffixes like “research”, “marketing” or “operations” that different people in the company could follow. Everyone in the Marketing department would subscribe to an rss feed for the tag ncb.marketing.
Use Good Descriptions
Every tagging platform out there I know about allows you to add some additional notes about the page.
Whenever possible avoid leaving the notes section blank. The notes section is not only a huge benefit to your network and the larger community, it’s also a huge benefit to yourself. If you’re not going to use the notes why not just use your browsers bookmarks?
IMHO there are 3 acceptable ways to do this.
Copy content from the page you’re tagging. If there is a really good descriptive line about the page, use it as the notes. (Note to bloggers: Do your posts have some easily copied, descriptive text?)
Make a note about why you are tagging the site. In my del.icio.us network, Sarah Lewis does the best job of this. It’s interesting to see why others tagged a site.
Add your own commentary about the site. To me this is kind of the highest level of social bookmarking. It’s like making individual blog posts about each tagged page. Some bloggers even set up del.icio.us or in my case Diigo, to automatically post these tags to their blog.
As a special note to StumbleUpon users, make a habit of adding a short review to the sites you “thumbs-up”. This will make your recommendations more powerful in the StumbleUpon algorithm and encourage more people to “friend” you.
Send Recommendations to Friends
del.icio.us has a powerful but underused feature: the “for:” tag. When you go to tag something everyone in your network shows up with a for: before their username. Just click to add one or more of them to your tags section and it will show up in their “links for you” section.
StumbleUpon has a great “send to” feature that allows you to send a recommendation along with a personal note to one of your friends. Justin and I have carried on rather long conversations this way.
Next Steps
If you aren’t using del.icio.us or StumbleUpon I highly recommend signing up for both today. If you do use these features please add me to your network. del.icio.us users can add me here. StumbleUpon users can go here and give me a thumbs up. I will add everyone who adds me.
The best part comes then when you add all of this to an RSS feed reader, but that’s really a post for another time.
What have I missed? Please leave a comment on your tagging best practices.
Technorati Tags: tagging, bookmarking, socil networking, best practices
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