Does Social Tagging Promote Governance?
In an article on the AIIM SharePoint Community site, Does Social Tagging Accelerate Acceptance of Business Tagging in SharePoint?, Russ Edelman asks whether the growing acceptance of social tagging across various consumer applications and websites is picking up steam within the enterprise and, specifically, with SharePoint.
I believe so, though I don’t have any empirical data or formal studies to fall back on other than my own experience and customer interactions. But why would that stop me from sharing my opinion?
Respond to an online article or blog post, make an online purchase, or review recently uploaded project documents on the intranet – and you’re likely able to attach some sort of metadata, such as a rating, a comment, or a keyword. In my view, its not so much a question of whether social tagging is picking up steam, but what do you do with all of this additional data?
A follow on topic for any metadata conversation is, of course, governance. Within SharePoint, a metadata strategy without a sound governance model to manage it is a HUGE mistake. My observation is that as people become more comfortable with social tagging, and start seeing the benefits of using a folksonomy in SharePoint (attaching their own keywords to someone else’s document upload, for example), they begin to self-regulate their tagging. They become more reflective, and conscientious of the keywords they apply because they know they are going to want to find the content again. The whole point of social tagging is improving search.
My thought is that there is some degree of evolution that happens around individuals who actively tag content in that they begin to self-govern, create personal standards around common keywords, and hold fairly true to these standards – because they inherently understand the connection to future content queries. I recognize that this scenario is more likely in the business world, and with SharePoint specifically, than with consumer-focused sites and tools.
Your thoughts?
