Augmenting Employee Profiles with People-Tagging

Employee directories play a valuable role in helping people find others to collaborate with, solve a problem, or provide needed expertise. Serving this role successfully requires accurate and up-to-date user profiles, yet few users take the time to maintain them. In this paper, we present a system that enables users to tag other users with key words that are displayed on their profiles. We discuss how people-tagging is a form of social bookmarking that enables the community to maintain part of the employee directory.

Analyses of the usage data from our system show that people have used tags for impression management and that they contribute distinctive information to the employee profile beyond the information available in the basic profile. We also report on initial feedback from users, which has been mostly positive. We conclude with a discussion of the social issues we have encountered based on our experience deploying a people-tagging application in a corporate environment.

By: Stephen P. Farrell; Tessa A. Lau; Eric M. Wilcox; Michael Muller; Kate Ehrlich

Published in: RJ10395 in 2006

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