Sunday, August 5, 2007

E-marketingclass article summary #2 (Hodgeman)

In our e-marketingclass we’ve created a blog and discussed the importance of blogs to potential marketers. I found the following article very relevant and very important to the success of blogs and many other e-marketing activities.

The article discusses tags and the importance of them to consumers and marketers at the same time. In the article they state that “the real goal of tags is to allow people to find what they are looking for quickly”. As an online user, many people use tags and probably aren’t even aware of it. On facebook, or myspace if a user uploads a photo and names the photo, that would be a perfect example of the user tagging their content.

Tags become relevant for marketers through keyword searches. Tags give advertisers the ability to keep ads very relevant to what the consumer is searching for. An example in the referenced article was that if you type in “auto show” you should get car ads on the results screen. Marketers have to be especially careful when tagging their content because it can directly affect the market they reach and the effectiveness of their advertising campaign.

Technorati and Amazon.com are two examples of companies which heavily use tags. Technorati recently started to sell the tags and even sells bundles of tags which result in words related to each other. The selling of tags is very similar to what Google did in selling the results of popular search items. This is just another example of how a company can make money in the ever expanding e-marketing environment.

The development of tags is just another avenue that marketers can target their audience through. Tags originally weren’t developed for that purpose but as online marketing develops and consumers online usage increases, the need for new ways to reach your audience also increases. Advertisers will have to evaluate if this is an avenue in which they will need to expand their concentrations. If they feel it will benefit their company and the profits accumulated then I expect to see a lot more companies investing in this form of advertising.

As a consumer, I feel tags are a very good thing and keep my internet searches relevant. Some people feel that the advertising is excessive and hurts the online experience but at the same time there are others who are doing the online searches only to try and find potential products to purchase and love every relevant advertisement thrown their way. Without tags it would be difficult to find what you’re looking for and overall I feel tags benefit both marketers who need to reach the masses and the public who wants fast relevant search results.

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