Follow me on this. This idea came to me yesterday while talking about what organizations own with regards to events and conferences. It was more pointed towards PR folks and product or service vendors hoping to capture the buzz of their exposure at an event.
Tags Are Your Website
When I say “tag,” I mean data identifiers used by services like Technorati and Flickr, Network2, and anywhere else clever enough to help people find things easier. When I say they are your website, I’m suggesting that following the conversation created by people not inside your organization is far more important than creating pretty flash pages and dazzling product descriptions on a site that you still have to push people to visit.
I’m saying, “bring the conversation out into the web where it belongs. Don’t leave it bottled up on your site.”
Sure You Need a Presence
It’s great to have a landing website, and better still to have lots of great participatory interactions built into it (like phone contact info, comments for your blog posts, pictures of the people who contribute to the organization, ways to find the information you need). And that website should be alive with audio, video, text, and all kinds of ways for people to experience what you want them to experience. But your website itself is no longer the storefront. It’s no longer the front line of “awareness” of you or your organization. Instead, it’s the fulfillment, the backoffice, the meeting rooms off the main stage.
Tags as Neon Signs
If you choose NOT to use tags, awareness of your efforts will stay in the same channel it has always occupied: your friends, your colleagues, competitors, some fans. By using tags to deliver your message further, and to absorb the conversation about your product, service, organization, or whatever it is you need to communicate.
The message is no longer a buzzword you control (though you can influence it). It’s a conversation the people create.
In Action
In case this is too meta, the concept is this. Imagine we give out Video on the Net tags at the beginning of the event for bloggers, videobloggers, the Press, etc. What if we ask that folks tag things VON2007? On top of it, things I liveblog or videoblog or things the team blogs will be tagged with “event, conference, techconference, videoblogging, podcasting, community” and whatever else.
The first set of tags are “official,” and they’re the neon signs I mentioned above. The second whole string are words that don’t bring “Video on the Net” to the picture, but that might be caught by someone surfing Google or Technorati for the phrases contained therein.
Now, when I go out and surf Technorati and Google Blogsearch, I have a means to find conversations in and around what we’re doing. Now I can see what the people think of the event. Hate it? Great. I’ll know about it better if you tag it VON2007. See how it goes? It’s a conversation that happens OFF my websites, but instead onto the open roads of the web.
Full of crap? Make sense? I’m yours to abuse on this one.