Why Social Tagging Isn’t Enough for High Value Content

Are organizations relying more on so-called ‘social tagging’ and full text indexed based searches and forgoing controlled vocabularies?   I don’t think so.  There is a place for social tagging and I talked about this a while back in my post on Folksonomy vs. Taxonomy.

Although social tagging is less costly, and it can be useful, it would be completely inappropriate when trying to organize high value content.  For instance, content used for customer support, marketing processes, asset reuse, or processes with a compliance component.

One should keep in mind when considering these issues that not all content is equal.  Some content is not worth the effort of manual tagging, in which case automated or hybrid methods can be applied.  This would include including user defined tagging that can be applied along the way.  But, if the process that the content supports is of critical importance, then more effort (and cost) needs to be applied to ensure that the quality of searches remains high.  

And, not just the first time that controlled vocabularies are defined.  A plan for “content curation” is needed from the start.  Content curators are the people assigned to keep a repository well organized, tagged with appropriate metadata (keywords on various facets).  This prevents "editorial drift" in the tagging process and to get rid of out of date and redundant content.

The idea is to provide the right kind of tools and processes for the wide variety of situations that people find themselves in when doing their work  - either during content creation or content consumption.