Marc Sirkin and I have been trading emails about his nonprofit's use of tags. He responded to my question with a post over at his blog, npMarketing. It's right here.
Tagging can be used to develop a shared archive of resources for a pre-defined group of people (an organization's staff or community of practice. Using a unique tag, the members of the group can contribute articles and also easily find them. Adding RSS tools allows some additional benefits of developing content.
Marc notes that these resources are not on any of their "official sites" which presumbably have more formal content development pipeline/process - so they have some more flexibility in presenting and experimenting. It serves as a sandbox or action learning experiment -- as an informal way to get some feedback from content users as a prelude to overall site design and selecting new CMS based on tags.
More questions for Marc Sirkin:
What was your initial reason or catalyst for wanting to do this?
Who is in the group? Is it an existing community of people or people coming together because you started to use the tag?
How do people use these articles or resources? In the emails you are getting from folks, why do they like it? What have you learned?
Do you have any lessons learned yet for how to structure something like this?
Main challenge is to get your staff or leadership to understand the benefits of tagging.
What advice would you give to other nonprofits who might want to do an experiment?
(FROM OUR EMAILS back and forth)
I've been learning the power of social bookmarking and tagging content - this helps in 2 ways - first - it starts to answer how we collaborate with other orgs, patients etc to index content.
It also help as we begin to completely overhaul our existing sites and pick a new CMS - tagging content will be crucial.
An alterative *COULD* be meta data - but it's so limited and only has a few indexing applications (ie search) - tagging seems to me to be infinitely more powerful - and different in some key ways.
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