Folksonomies - a New Viral Marketing Tool

"Folksonomies" (abbreviation of folks and taxonomy), also known as "tagging", is the latest consumer phenomenon and is powerful as consumers are busy creating an online content organizational structure. Folksonomies enables people to file content away under tags and share it through filing it under global taxonomy's created by them.

How does tagging work? By using sites like del.icio.us (site that shares bookmarks) and Flickr (site that shares photos) consumers collaborate on categorizing their online content via certain tags or keywords.

For example any person can post iPod photos on Flickr, filing it using "iPod" as the tag. Such images now become visible both under the individuals iPod tag and under the iPod tag of the community which displays all images that consumers generate and file under that keyword. At the moment Flickr has over 3,500 photographs with the label "iPod."

Tagging is becoming popular because of the ease of the online searches.  For example, if you enter into Google the word "blogs", it can not identify whether you are searching about ways to read blogs, how to start a blog site or searching for other information. Small and large sites equally are seriously focusing on folksonomy and are creating tag-like structures in order to assist users to find relevant content with a lot more ease and less hassle.

Even though tags are not perfect at this point, marketers would be wise to use them to keep in touch and keep pace with the trends of Americans. It is a good idea to subscribe to RSS feeds in order to monitor the ways in which consumers tag information relative to your company, services, products, etc. It is all free of charge and can be accessed anywhere and at any time. You can use Folksonomy sites in viral marketing promotions (with caution) and marketers must always be transparent regarding their identity, why they want to post specific links and or photographs and also not get involved in spamming.