How do you get people to tag?

Before diving into the results of the study and the implications that can be drawn, I'd like to start a discussion, about how you can get people to use a collaborative social tagging system if they don't really know the benefit of it, yet.

First of all you need to think of, why people tag. Joshua Porter wrote about this in The Del.icio.us Lesson:

"Blinded by the Aggregation LightReal people, in contrast, tag for their own benefit. And they surely won’t tag if the incentive to do so isn’t clear.Aggregation, in general, is probably more effective as a second-order feature of software. If we create features just to aggregate them, without providing users with tangible value first, then people simply won’t use the features. My guess is that aggregation technologies which prove most useful will be ones that are added to some activity that users have already started doing without the promise of any aggregation benefits."

So, what can you do, to encourage people to tag anyway?

• just believe that it is impossible--which might be right...
  Alex Barnett in Del.icio.us Inside:
  
  

  "However, he came to the early conclusion as part of that discssion that there was no conclusion - that is a waste of time to try and encourage employees to
  adopt a tagging culture to share knowledge inside corporate firewall. That users either get it or they don't. You can't force them."

  
  


• teach them, to point out the benefit of using the system
  
  

  "# re: Del.icio.us Inside
  Monday, May 01, 2006 12:53 PM by Andre Charland
  Hey Alex, Good points. Generally you can't "force" people to do anything. But you can encourage them to, and even better if we can fine reasons and educate them about the benefits for them then they will adopt these technologies on their own...which is our ultimate goal..."

  
  
  The utter futility of geekness, Dave Winer:
  
  

  "I promised I'd explain once and for all why it's hopeless to "try to get the users" to use social bookmarking software unless they're already using it. Here's why: I don't know. But I do know it never works. It's so bad that when I try to solve the problem (I'm a geek, so I fall into this trap myself, can't help it), I hack at making it easy and painless, figuring it's a user interface problem (if you're a geek you're nodding your head right now, right?) but when I make it so easy anyone would have to do it, not only doesn't anyone else do it, I don't even do it myself! Why? As I said, I don't know! Makes no sense to me at all. But there you are."

What kinds of motivation do you think could work?

• training and point out the benefit
• give incentive by providing rewards/awards/...

How could you increase the value of the folksonomy? Problems might be synonyms, spelling mistakes, etc.

• prepare a vocabulary/taxonomy
• integrate private into corporate tag lists/taxonomies by
  - possibility of proposal
  - automated / semi automated acceptance of frequently used private tags
• Might there be the possibility of creating mechanisms to identify insufficient tagged documents/sources, and get benefit out of this information?

Some additional useful thoughts, again by Alex Barnett :

"Sunday, April 23, 2006 8:45 PM alexbarn
Tagging behind-the-firewall. Questions.
Stowe Boyd points (via David Weinberger) to a discussion regarding the potential of tagging within companies.Tagging behind-the-firewall....Questions -Who would tag their content?How (with what software) would they tag it?What's in it for the taggers? (the del.icio.us lesson)?What would the discovery solutions look like?Is there a critical mass number of users to make internal, behind-the-firewall tagging
successful?And if so, what is that number?And if there is a number, does that
mean only companies with x number of employees can play tag?Managed or organic
taxonomies (or both)?"

Method

Methodology used in the “Keep Found Things Found” (KFTF) project to study how people organize project-related information were provided by Wiliam Jones, and were used in modified form to collect data for this study.

Seven participants were observed during a period of twelve weeks working on current projects to show how they structure encountered information, and how these structures changes over time. The study consisted of seven sessions with each participant, divided into introductory sessions (to get the participants general usage with information to know, and to find and be introduced to a suitable project to observe), intervening sessions (to observe changes in structure of their information collections concerning the selected project), and final sessions (to wrap up, and to compare results with a chosen back-up project to avoid tempering findings).

The observed projects were either work-related or study-related or private, and varied from small to huge projects, had moderate to sophisticated difficulties, and familiarity of the participants varied from familiar to unknown.
Planing a wedding, developing a web site, introduce a new product to a new market, and writing a research thesis are some examples of the observed projects.

why PIM4U?

Don't let me think so much about the name. PIM was already taken, so PIM4U it is.
PIM stands for Personal Information Management, and this blog will wrap up my previous research on Personal Information Management, and will be continued with upcoming research.

Personal Information Management is a sub-discipline of Human Computer Interaction (HCI), and tries to find answers to the problem of managing information in all kinds of information like mails, bookmarks, documents, and so on (all digital, and paper-based, and called Personal Information Collection).--A rough description can be find at Wikipedia.

My studies tries to reflect the way, people handling information they encounter during working on a project. Those people I observed worked in private, work-related, or university-based projects, and it seems to be, that there are three different approaches to handle the today's complexity of incoming information.

Different people not only have different strategies to organize information they encounter during a project, but also have different strategies to keep their organizations up to date. The project-related Personal Information Collections can be created in advance or grow over time during a project. The structure can represent the project itself, or be created in ad-hoc decisions
and gives no clues about the project itself for other people. Messy people created a way to get unused information out of their view by moving them away, or changing the current work folder.

To understand how and why it is, how it is, could be interesting for some people, researching in the same field of Computer Science, but since I decided to call this blog PIM4U (in an ad-hoc decision, as I mentioned above), I will try to write my posts in a way, that even interested people without any background can understand and get benefit for themselves from the results of my studies.