A lot of folks (esp those in the Social Media industry like me) are at odds with the Social Media Optimization industry. I dont need to name names, but if youve been paying attention to techmeme, youll know what Im talking about. I want to shed light on some ways where listening to your audience can actually help build a better vernacular and vocabulary on your website. Heres a few resources that I ran across, that I find interesting.
Use Folksonommies to better understand your community, and then factor into building better Web Strategy
Understand Folksonomies, learn how to listen
Its up to you to determine if you think this is snake oil or not, but I see the value. A good web strategist should try to understand his community, listen very carefully and respond. This post is really focused on Folksonomies or natural language and tagging. Heres some examples of Folksonomies if youre not familiar with them. Now that youre in the know, use those tools to find out how people are speaking, tagging, and sharing.
Improve your Web Strategies
I dont see anything wrong with using these tools to learn how to listen (yup, Im flipping the telescope around) so that companies can better understand their audiences and communities. Now that you understand the real language that your real audience is using to think, tag, label, and navigate you can now build better Information Architecture, Marketing Copy, User Interfaces, and Taxonomies. Its pretty simple, the community is telling you (and each other) how they think of content, its up for you harness this free information to build a website that matters to them.
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/02/14/web-...