The Best "Free" Tagging Solution We've got

First off, no strategic tagging or folksonomy solution is free; they all take a ton of time to get information in and out of. There's also a huge learning curve and opportunity cost for most teams,

And normally, I'd try to jump quickly to review the new release of a social media product that I use and strategically recommend. But now that I've been using Diigo for nearly a year, I feel a lack of impetus to rush, because I'd rather take the time to learn to use and balance the features.

Don't get me wrong; there are tons of multifunctional social bookmarking sites (del.icio.us, Sphere, Magnolia, etc.) that you can employ in a strategic manner. But Diigo's the best of them. Just so you know, it's a double-edged sword, at that. And I'll leave it to other bloggers to give blow-by-blow feature breakdowns. I just want to explain the strategic importance of the tool.

I've been a Diigo user for nearly a year now, and I likely have deployed one of the largest strategic implementations of Diigo (my company uses it as a targeting solution, sharing it with over 30 people and some clients.)

In the wake of Diigo, a slew of imitators have popped up: Clipmarks and Blogrovr both have tried to steal Diigo's thunder, coming out with pared-down versions of some of Diigo's best features. But , I'd rather say that for small-to-medium sized organizations who need some type of strategic tagging, you should go with Diigo.

Let's get its flaws out of the way: the biggest obstacle is convoluted user interface and simply too many options. Some days I'm unsure whether Diigo is a research tool, a tagging solution, a slideshow software, or a social network. Imagine what would happen if 37Signals responded to every single feature request in their forums. Sure, they'd make a lot of customers happy. But they'd also convince a lot of prospective customers that they were batshit insane.

So, let's try and look past this attitude, and gage this software product by its strengths: the first of their pros would include fast, responsive support via email. The second would include secure RSS feeds. When you're deploying a strategic tagging solution (for PR or marketing purposes, or even for, say, sales targeting), there are two things that you need: (1) quick support, should something not work and (2) total privacy on all data.

Diigo has pretty good privacy options; once you're logged in and using the Diigo Toolbar (where it seems to work well in most browsers, even on a Mac), it's fairly easy to share the bookmarks and comments only with folks within your company, or even with a group that's composed of your company and its clients (that's one way I've been using it for months). The Webslides feature is also pretty cool, if you're working with data that's public (a la Slideshare), but if you're only using it inside your company, it's pretty rough, because all of the slideshows and URL lists are publicly visible.

Although Diigo's social networking features have also evolved to even surpass those of del.icio.us, this is not exactly advantageous, if you're using Diigo in a strategic manner. The key takeaways for training your team to use Diigo are as follows:

1. Make sure everyone understands that the purpose of strategically tagging data is to search it later for a purpose (i.e. building media lists, conducting outreach, making sales calls, etc.) If the organization lacks an impetus to retrieve the data, tagging it is pointless.
2. Reserve one tag as a "red-flag" tag for time-sensitive, company-wide data. Make everyone subscribe to an RSS feed for this tag (e.g. "red," "hot" or similar), and instruct your team that it will replace all-company emails of important information.
3. Mailing lists of URLs should become a thing of the past once Diigo is installed; teach your team the value of tagging, both as a time-saver and as an ontological device.
4. Teach your team to take advantage of Diigo's little-known tag-clustering "Related Tags" capabilities. On the right-hand side of the screen, below the tag that you've selected, lies a slew of loosely related tags. These can aid your team in tough searches; tell them to run the stubborn terms through Diigo to see if they can come up with alternatives.
5. The most critical thing to have in any strategic technology solution is full buy-in and use by your company's management team. Their example speaks volumes, in showing others the business value of the technology.