Ibm Motivation

The Wisdom of My Crowd: Motivation and Audience in Enterprise Social Tagging
Jennifer Thom-Santelli
Cornell University, HCI Group 301 College Avenue Ithaca, NY USA 14850 [phone]

Michael J. Muller
IBM Research One Rogers Street Cambridge, MA USA 02142 [phone]

[e-mail]

[e-mail]

ABSTRACT
Social tagging systems allow users to share resources categorized according to community-generated tags. These systems serve to organize personal information, provide opportunities for users to express their identities and to allow for social information seeking. In this paper, we examine the motivations behind tag selection, specifically focusing on the social aspects of choosing tags for an audience. We describe initial results from a qualitative study of users of tagging systems deployed within a large enterprise. Exploratory coding suggests that users remain cognizant that their tags play a social role and that users’ tag selection strategies are managed with respect to this awareness.

encompasses both organization of resources and communication, while sociality describes tagging for oneself versus other recipients (i.e. viewers of the content). Tag typology has also been studied with respect to whether or not tags are helpful in completing a task [9] or whether they fulfill a specific function such as information retrieval [4]. It is not yet clear from a priori categorization of tags what motivations exist for selecting specific tags. In this poster, we focus primarily on the social motivations behind the tag-selection process, specifically the awareness of one’s audience. We then describe initial findings from a qualitative study of users of tagging systems that are deployed within a large enterprise.

Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.5.3 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Group and Organization Interfaces

2. METHODOLOGY
We are conducting a field study in which we observe members of two communities of

References: [1] Ames, M. & Naaman, M., Why we tag: motivations for annotation in mobile and online media. Proc.CHI07. [2] Farrell, S., Lau, T., Wilcox, E. & Muller, M., Socially augmenting employee profiles through people tagging. Proc.UIST07. [3] Goffman, E., Presentation of self in everyday life. Doubleday, New York, 1956. [4] Golder, S. & Huberman, B., Usage patterns of collaborative tagging systems. J. of Info. Sci., 32 (2006), 198-208. [5] Glaser, S. & Strauss, A. Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. Aldine, New York, 1967. [6] Marlow, C., Naaman, M., boyd, d., & Davis, M., HT06, Tagging Paper, Taxonomy, Flickr, Academic Article. To Read. Proc.Hypertext06. [7] Millen, D., Yang, M., Whittaker, S., and Feinberg, J., Social bookmarking and exploratory search. Proc.ECSCW07. [8] Muller, M.J. Comparing tagging vocabularies among four enterprise tag-based services. Proc. GROUP 2007. [9] Sen, S., Lam, S.K., Rashid, A.M., Cosley, D., Frankowski, D., Osterhouse, J., Harper, F.M., & Riedl, J., tagging, communities, vocabulary, evolution. Proc.CSCW 2006 [10] Wash, S. & Rader, E., Public Bookmarks and Private Benefits: An Analysis of Incentives in Social Computing. Proc.ASIST 2007. [11] Zollars, A., Emerging motivations for tagging: expression, performance and activism. Position paper, Tagging and Metadata for Social Information Sharing Workshop, WWW2007. 3.2 The wisdom of “my” crowd However, the audience is not an undifferentiated one. Instead, users are aware that it is largely composed of members of the organization who aren’t necessarily strangers. The audience usually shares mutual interests (more frequently) and job function (less frequently). As a result, users tailor their tags to their audience by anticipating how each audience might be drawn to the content they are highlighting in each of these systems: “I choose a selection of tags, as many as possible, in order to pique interest so that people can read it (a web bookmark). It’s not really for me to re-find – I know what each of these articles are.” (ET, Visual Designer) However, the individual utility of social tagging systems remains salient. While the active taggers in our sample do believe that the value of tagging is primarily social and expressive of one’s interests to an audience, the ease of re-finding bookmarks and blog posts also plays a role in tag selection (see also [7]). We