Advercation = Advertising + Education

On May 10th, 2007, I produced and co-hosted a Blattner Brunner Brand Energy Workshop entitled: “The Non-Profit Marketing Plan Walkthrough”. This session focused on teaching small non-profits how to think like marketers so they can connect with potential donors, volunteers and clients.

As a passionate alturist, I was happy to create the following doucment with the help of Mark Adams and Greater DC Cares.

Click the image to go to Scribd.com - a nifty document sharing site:

Direct link to The Non-Profit Marketing Plan Walkthrough

Last night, my roommate (Bart of TrainCheck fame) and I co-hosted a little rooftop/poolside meet and drink with some folks who were in town for Adaptive Path’s User Experience Week 2006.

I got to talking with Kevin Cheng about social bookmarking (i.e. del.icio.us, Digg, Simpy) and the importance of this folksonomic device.

At first glance, social bookmarking seems like merely a convenient way to stash your bookmarks online. The next level reveals itself to those who bother to checkout what other users have tagged.
Kevin brought up what might be - as Bart would say - a contextual leap forward.

What if this massive tag cloud…this folksonomy that we’re creating is able to provide a social context for each of us that will help guide our online search activities and shape our online user experience?

The example Kevin used goes something like this:

What if I’m a designer and I’m searching for free fonts online? I can certainly find them, but this search has been done a million times before. What if we had a tool that enabled the tagged pages of my designer friends to float to the top of my search results based on whatever context I put myself in at the time?

What if I can click a button and change my context to LAWYER or HUSBAND or REPUBLICAN?

Have I missed something? Is someone doing this already? Please comment.

I have to thank Ernie Mosteller for blogging about my use - and possible coining of - the term “Branded Tagging” even before I got a chance to.

If I’m the ‘owner’ of this term…great (I first used it on 8/05/06). If not, it doesn’t really matter does it?

So what is Branded Tagging anyway? Well, as you may already know, tagging is a methodology associated with Folksonomy and is a way of identifying content with a certain keywords.

The process of folksonomic tagging is intended to make a body of information increasingly easier to search, discover, and navigate over time. -Wikipedia

Branded tagging is the process of folksonomic tagging which is intended to make content relatable to a brand - whether that brand wants that association or not. -Peter S. Corbett

Examples:

1. Negative Brand Tagging: A web user reads an article about how SUVs are exacerbating global warming. In their del.icio.us account that user can tag that content with “Hummer”. The tag in del.icio.us for the keyword Hummer just shifted a little towards the negative side.
2. Positive Brand Tagging: Peter Corbett visits www.adrants.com, reads a post about something Steve Hall felt compelled to write about, and comments on it. Within that comment section the commenter’s name could either be my own, or the Brand I’d like to attached to that comment/article. Namely, I could comment with “Blattner Brunner” as the commenter name so that people will associate my knowledgeable response with the agency I work for - better yet, I can link my Branded Tag to the Blattner Brunner homepage.

The point is that content can be associated with brands whether those brands like it or not. More than ever consumer have control over the brand.

I guess the customer is always right…