Dan Klyn on Tagging for Online Retailers
Dan Klyn makes some suggestions for online retailers thinking of using tags:
[from Wildly Appropriate: Non-Anarchy Tagging for Online Retailers]Instead of a totally open and user-assigned approach to tagging for online shopping where the site is launched without any tags, waiting for a critical mass of customer activity to populate the tagoverse and unlock the benefits of item-level and fellow-shopper-who’s-like-me types of findability, why not "harvest" or extrapolate adjecteves and descriptors from the existing product catalog on an online shopping site? The products on your site have words associated with them: just turn some of these words into what the Web 2.0 world knows as "Tags."
Customer behavior on the site (viewing products, using search, adding to cart, adding to wish list etc) could be aggregated and analyzed in a manner whereby certain kinds of customer behavior are tantamount to assigning ratings or rankings to products/tags. In such a system, a product that receives more customer page views than its neighboring products will translate into that product’s tags (as derived from its product description) attaining greater rank in the overall system than the tags derived from less popular products.
The tag clouds generated from a site-wide pool of product descriptions would at first constitute a visual snapshot of the vocabulary and language used by the site’s merchants. Once customer behavior analytics and/or customer free tagging is applied to such a system, the tag clouds would reconstitute themselves to become more a reflection of customer interests and community preferences.
Tag cloud navigation for eCommerce is happening right now at Etsy.com. Think of how cool it would be as a merchant to watch those tag clouds evolve over time. Tracking the memes and themes that emerge from your site users' site visits and behaviors could be a tremendously powerful and predictive tool for merchandising and product development.
This lines up with suggestions I have made in the past, bases on the notions of social architecture (such as here). The social dimension -- where people share things, look at what their friends like, and so on -- has to support the domain schema. For example, in the case of wine (a favorite topic), the domain schema includes a variety of predefined tags with well understood relationships: grape(s), vintage, region, country, vintner, and name, so on. In a sense, these tags must be associated with any wine before you can begin to talk about it. These can be prepopulated in any social app that supports wine commerce, discussion, or reviews. And the case holds for other domains, such as autos (year, brand, model, etc.), movies (director, producer, actor(s), etc.), or music (artist, album, year, track, etc.).
[Pointer from David Weinberger]
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