Floxee

Tags

Tags are a very powerful yet under utilized tool in Floxee. With this post, I will explain how to go about adding tags to group members and the benefits of using tags on your Floxee site.

Tag Creation

There are two ways to tag group members via the Floxee admin tool.

1) Go to edit an individual member and add a comma delimited list of tags in the “Tags” field.

2) Go to People -> Import and upload a CSV (comma delimited list) file that has a column heading of “tags”. The tag list should also be comma delimited and surrounded with quotes. Spreadsheet tools such as Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice should do this for you if you save a spreadsheet as a CSV. The uploaded CSV file will add new members with tags if the Twitter screen name does not already exist in your flock or it will update the memberss tags if they do exist.

Tag Use

Once you have your flock tagged and you browse to your Floxee “List” page (e.g. http://tweetcongress.org/list), you will see two groups of tags. The first “Top tags” are the most abundant tags used in your flock sorted by the number of members tagged with that tag name.

The second tag group will list all of your tags in alphabetical order.

Once a user clicks on a tag, a third groups of tags will appear titled “Related tags”. This will list all of the tags for the list of users that was filtered by the tag that was selected. A user could then drill down further by selecting a related tag which will subsequently narrow down the related tags list.

For example, in TweetCongress I can click on “Texas” which would result in this list of related tags:

Clicking on “Tweeting” would give this:

Then clicking “Republican” would result in this:

If I click on “Senator”, the “Related tags” list is gone because there are no more related tags for that user list. (In this case, John Cornyn is the only Texas, Republican, Tweeting, Senator in our database and that is his entire tag list.)

You will also notice that every time you select a tag, not only is a breadcrumb style list of tags added to the top of your list page, but you can “X” out any of those tags and get back a new corresponding list.

Tags are not only a great way to drill down into data, but they are a great way to slice data to get member counts. For example, in the above example, after I selected the “Texas” tag in TweetCongress, I immediately know that there are 12 Democrats, 22 Republicans, 32 Representatives, 2 Senators, etc. in the TweetCongress database for Texas. Clicking “Republican” shows me that 20 Reps and 2 Senators (9 of whom are Tweeting) who are Republican congress people in Texas in the TweetCongress database.

Tags Type Suggestions

The types of tags you may want to use will probably vary by your group. Here are some ideas by group type.

Businesses:

Title (CEO, VP, developer, consultant, geek herder)
Department (accounting, marketing, IT, etc)

Conferences:

City / State / Country
Interests / Hobbies
Speaker?
Languages Spoken

Local Organizations:

Part of town they are from
Interests / Hobbies
Kids?