Social Tagging and the Enterprise: Does Tagging Work at Work?

As social tagging grows increasingly popular on the Web, organizations are curious to see how this trendy Web 2.0 approach can benefit the business world.

Social tagging allows users to employ their own language to organize and retrieve content, and encourages social collaboration between peers by making those tags visible to others. Organizations are thus looking to social tagging as a potential solution for increased findability on intranets, news/blog monitoring and collaboration in work groups. The enterprise context is different however, and many of the elements that make social tagging work on the Web make it a challenge behind the firewall.

These include a smaller and more defined corpus of content, a much smaller user population with less available time, and stricter information retrieval requirements. Other challenges include the quality of tags (misspellings, compound words, personal tags) and of tag search engines (no spell-check, no stemming), both issues which impact the performance of social tagging. These problems aside, social tagging is still a valuable tool for the enterprise, as long as these challenges are considered. A hybrid solution that employs social tagging and formal taxonomy as complementary information access approaches is emerging as a winning solution.

Introduction

You can tag just about anything these days: vacation photos, products, blog posts, friends on Facebook, etc. But what about that travel approval form you can never find on the intranet? Or the latest company annual report? While the popularity and application of social tagging has been on a continuous climb on the Web since the launch of Del.ici.ous in 2003, the enterprise has been slower to adopt the trend. In the past few years, vendors — from niche companies like Connectbeam to large providers like IBM Lotus — have launched social tagging products aimed at the enterprise, hoping to capitalize on the growing curiosity around how this Web 2.0 approach can benefit the business world. But just what is social tagging in the enterprise: a cheap solution to information organization in difficult economic times, giving people the tools they love at home to use at work, or just a faddish attempt to incorporate “cool web 2.0 stuff” into the enterprise context?

Social Tagging on the Web — Popularity Explained

Before we can determine whether social tagging works in the enterprise, we have to understand why it works so well on the web. Social tagging originally emerged as a solution for offering individual users control over findability. It allowed individuals to use their own language — tags with personal meaning — to organize and retrieve content important to them. No need to sift through unwieldy directory structures or guess at a good search term. When made visible to others, the value of tags expanded from the individual to the group: you could not only re-find your content but also explore content tagged similarly by others. So tagging moved from being a personal use tool to enabling serendipitous discovery of content, ideas, and peers.

The ability to support a multiplicity of views is an important aspect of this approach. Whereas taxonomies and thesauri force convergence around a preferred term (e.g. use Cinema, not Movies), folksonomies (“structures” that emerge from social tags) allow users to choose whatever term they find meaningful and there is no funneling into a single point of view. Essentially, people tag the same content differently, and not only is this OK, but it's the whole point: people who tag content as “cinema” probably think differently than those who tag using the term “movies”¹. This allows users to get around the “problem” of semantics, that is, having to figure out what terms others have chosen.

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Tags: collaboration, enterprise 2.0, folksonomy, metadata, metadata management, social media, social tagging, stephanie lemieux, web 2.0

As social tagging grows increasingly popular on the Web, organizations are curious to see how this trendy Web 2.0 approach can benefit the business world.