ROI of Tagging

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

I'm just back from vacation in Canada, and I found it interesting that the author of one of my favorite Cleveland blogs is also just getting back from a week in the same general area of Ontario.  Like my family, Callahan is impressed with the commitment of our neighbors to the north to the idea of sustainable energy.  We're always impressed with the everyday, just-a-part-of-normal life environmentalism we see there, including recycling bins in restaurants and limits to out-of-control growth. 

Now that I'm back and catching up on podcasts, it seems that I'm hearing everywhere (for example, here) lately about the growing awareness of the business value of tagging content to make it more searchable and indexable.  Tagging content is the process of associating keywords and other meta data ("tags") with content -- either when the content is created or when users read it.  In the study I linked to above, researchers estimated that users at IBM save 12 seconds for every Intranet search they do because of good tagging --- which saves IBM an estimated 955 person-hours a week. 

As someone with lots of experience both building data repositories that depend on tagging and using them (going back to work with Lotus notes at PMSC and E&Y in the mid 90's), I'm surprised that the figure is as low as 12 seconds per search.  In my experience, good meta data, including keywords and tagging can make the difference between Intranet or Web users finding exactly the resource they need the first time and hours of fruitless searches.  In my experience, it's not an exaggeration to say that good tagging is as important as good content, or, more precisely, that good tagging is enables good content to do its job.  The value of tagging goes way beyond search and visually appealing Web 2.0 tricks like tag clouds.  If you build tagging into the information architecture of a site before you start writing code, you can design the site to dynamically display relevant content --- things like showing related product pages when a user reads a blog post, or showing industry specific information for the industry a user selected when they registered with your site.  Bottom line --- tagging is key, as is a good information architecture and content plan (developed before you start writing code).
Posted by: Mark Reichard at 6:01 PM
Tags: Content Management

Comments: