Viral Marketing Using Folksonomies (Tagging)

Today we are going to talk about folksonomies (tagging) as a viral
marketing tool.

Folksonomy (also known as collaborative tagging, social
classification, social indexing, and social tagging) is the practice
and method of collaboratively managing tags to categorize
content. The fairly new consumer phenomenon is called "tagging". Tagging
is powerful because consumers are creating an organizational
structure for online content. Folksonomies not only enable people
to file away content under tags, but, even better, share it with
others by filing it under a global taxonomy that they created.

Here's how tagging works. Using sites such as del.icio.us - a
bookmark sharing site - and Flickr - a photo sharing site -
consumers are collaborating on categorizing online content under
certain keywords, or tags. For instance, an person 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."

You can also use Digg.com. All of digg's content is created,
submitted, and judged by its audience. If your page, blog or online
article is good enough to be "dug" by digg users, you could
receive literally hundreds of unique visitors immediately. The best
thing about digg is that it is so popular that many submissions can
instantly dominate some keywords on search engines like Google.

Another site is Technorati.com. If you have a blog, Technorati
should become one of your favorite search engines. Because
many Technorati Tags are beginning to dominate the search
engines. You can easily add your blog to technorati's tagging
system. Just like digg, even if you only happen to get a small
amount of traffic from technorati it will increase your site rank in
the search engines.

There are many sites that can help you with "tag syndication."
Web applications like TagCloud integrates RSS and tagging
while wikipedia.org is method of allowing social webpage and
content development.

Tagging is catching on because it is a natural complement to
search. Type the word "blogs" into Google and it can tell if you
are searching for information about how to launch a blog, how to
read blogs, or just what. Large and small sites alike are already
jumping on the tagging train. They are rolling out tag-like structures
to help users more easily locate content that's relevant to them.

Here are some other sites that you can visit to start using tagging
as part of your viral marketing campaign.

A1-webmarks
http://www.a1-webmarks.com/

All My Favorites
http://www.allmyfavorites.net/

Ambedo
http://www.ambedo.com/

Blinklist
http://www.blinklist.com/

Socialmarker
http://www.socialmarker.com/

And that is a very short list. There are literally hundreds of sites
that you can use to increase your visibility through tagging. I especially like to use socialmarker.com, because it allows you to instantly add your information to multiple sites without visiting and manually submitting to each one individually.

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