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. All these methods and many more have two great things in common

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.

Well, we’ve come to the end of this short course. I hope you have learned the basics of viral marketing and that you will be able to use the information to start your own successful viral marketing campaign.

Good luck with all of your viral marketing ventures

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