Facebook continues to trial its profile tagging in the New Zealand market with a limited number of users being granted the ability to tag their connections.
The tagging system is similar to LinkedIn’s endorsements where you can associate someone with a particular trait or skill.
It is a very simple process. You go to your friend’s profile and in the left hand column you will see a text box with the option of adding a tag as you can see here with my good friend, adventurer, fundraiser, all round good bloke and nutter Malcolm Law.
You simply enter in the word or words you would associate them with and tag them with that skill or trait. The person tagged gets to approve the tag so it is visible on their profile.
No doubt also like the endorsement system in LinkedIn it will be easily manipulated and rife with people tagging friends or contacts for random things they have no idea about.
In LinkedIn for example I get endorsements for skills from very tenuous acquaintances that really have no idea how good I am in any particular area of expertise and I am also well endorsed for the highly valuable skill of “General Awesomeness”
Why should you care?
This is no doubt it will be a bit of fun for us users and we will happily tag each other for our crazy traits. It is also clear that if the trial gets pushed global this data will at some stage be used to assist Facebook in gathering data to allow advertisers to run much more targeted campaigns based on profile tags and user generated segments.
As a user be wary about what you accept as a tag but also embrace the opportunity to help advertisers that are actually relevant to your interests. Lets face it, as a runner I would rather see sponsored posts from ultra-marathon events and sports apparel than hunting or fishing equipment. We are all going to be shown sponsored content so lets make the most of it and see if we can game the system in our own favour.
I would be keen to hear from any of our many international readers when they get the function enabled as well.
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Glenn is a Partner and Senior Consultant who has had a very successful career building growth companies in the private equity arena. He has a wealth of experience in both the digital space and strategy development. Prior to becoming a partner in SureFire Glenn built one of the largest digital teams in New Zealand for a NASDAQ listed global online marketing company & Google's largest premium partner.
