Different levels of Tags Sharing in Business Social Networks (LinkedIn)

In my last post I wrote about sharing tags between users to help and be helped in finding the right user/s on your network that fill better your needs.

There are two issues here: private research or marks and visibility over the network.

The first one is that maybe, sometimes you are looking for or researching about something actually private so you don’t want to share your tags. For example, maybe you want to put a tag indicating that this is the better choice for something or you want to mark someone just to remember you to come back later to see this user profile and you don’t want (logically) to share this kind of things.

The other one is about visibility of tags. We can think about restricting tag coverage and visibility to some different levels:

• Just me (private: previous paragraph)
• Me and my connections
• Me and my entire network (maybe it’s difficult to calculate tags from all my network)
• Me, my connections and his connections
• The entire users network (public)

Maybe the first two options are the most imaginable ways of tag’s scope. The first one for the reason I gave above and the second one because we are using tag’s scope just in our scope or visibility of people and that is direct connections. That way I will be sharing our tags with my direct connections and in the same way, they will be sharing their tagging information with me.

That would convert Linkedin or any Business Social Network into an actual Social network, because we are making a community and also we are sharing important information with our connections like, for example, tags.