Taxonomies and Social Media

Any discussion of online media today cannot ignore the elephant in the room that is social media. Facebook will reach 700 Million Users by the end of 2011, according to Ted Shelton of Open-First. If anyone had any doubts about the revolutionary power of social media in general and Facebook in particular, those doubts have certainly been swept away by recent events in the Middle East. Not least among the many disruptions caused by social media is the way it has changed how people search, discover, and use content. Significantly, this impact is not limited to people’s personal lives, because social media is increasingly being used by businesses and institutions. Agencies and corporate marketers are scrambling to come up with ways to control messaging across the over 900 million “Tweets” generated by Twitter users every month, but these one-to-many and many-to-many communications (via “re-tweets”) have revolutionized the way business is conducted. Content professionals, and especially those in Knowledge Management and Enterprise Content Management, are beginning to ask what role we should be playing in this unfolding trend.