Carfi and Barnett on Support Tag Beacons
Alex Barnett picks up on an idea from Chris Carfi, which Alex is calling support tags:
[from alexbarnett.net blog : Support tagging]By providing a support tag [in a blog post, like "office2007question"], it could allow for further structuring around this 'listening to the blogs customer support' approach. A kind of tagged post RSS aggregator feed could be plugged into existing customer support systems - so instead of email or forum post, it's just a blog. Of course, not all your customers would use it, but if there is a real benefit to the customer in doing so (i.e. faster response times, quality of response, etc), then why wouldn't they? And the benefits to the company providing support in this way? Well, happy customers for one - but if the support is provided via a comment then this provides evidence to prospective customers of the quality of service who happen to come across the blog post.
My partner Greg Narain calls these predefined sorts of tags "beacons," like the suggested tags pushed by conference organizers: "please tag all posts about the conference "shift06"."
Today, product vendor put up press pages that include logos and bios, and product pages that include case studies and technical spec sheets. In the near future, we can see a big inversion, where savvy vendors will provide beacons for all manner of things:
- support tags, like "support:typepad" or "feature-request:iCal"
- case exerience tags, like "user-testimonial:nokia+n90"
- complaints, like "complaint:comcast+customer+support".
I am using a prefix sort of notation for these beacons, but it may not go that way. However, the savvy companies will start publishing these beacons, and providing users a way to submit their RSS feeds to be filtered for beaconed content.
stowe, you and greg n. are absolutely spot-on with the beacon metaphor. i like the term. the format will shake itself out (do we prefix with a set of defined beacon-types? or post-fix?), but i think this is inevitable.
Posted by: christopher carfi | October 19, 2006 at 02:53 PM
Very cool idea this beacons. Seems like there could also be combinations of beacons certain groups could listen in for. Something we'll have to consider to TekTag.com.
TJ
Posted by: TJ | October 19, 2006 at 04:41 PM
In addition to vendor-supplied support tags, might we also see customer-initiated mass mobilization becons? For instance, Liz Gannes griped about the poor support she got from Apple on GigaOm earlier. Would it make sense for her to start a "complaint:apple+genius+bar" beacon and encourage other unhappy customers to tag their gripes?
Similarly, activists could use beacons to campaign for/against various causes. It's like collecting petition signatures, but in a distributed fashion.
Hmm... so maybe what we need is a beacon aggregator, where people can find issues to contribute their voice to? It'd be sort of like TechMeme or Digg, except instead of news headlines, you'd see a giant tag cloud.
Posted by: Isabel Wang | October 19, 2006 at 07:15 PM
This all is heading to some universal Publish and Subscribe protocoll (social-routing?).
Posted by: Zbigniew Lukasiak | October 19, 2006 at 11:42 PM
Good idea Stowe, albeit beacons remain somewhat of a stop-gap until MT and WP are able to infer the meaning of a post and self-tag, much like Delicious does. I did the full Buzzlogic demo last week and this particular customer service question was addressed. They seemed to be able to identify what a post was about, to some extent, which was exciting to see in operation, even if it's early days for the service. After three years of manually tagging I'm ready to let my CPU take over the chores to some extent, at least to make tag suggestions.
Posted by: David Evans | October 24, 2006 at 07:25 AM