Socially 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 people to organize their contacts into groups, annotate them with terms supporting future recall, and search for people by topic area. In addition, we show that people-tagging has a valuable side benefit: it enables the community to collectively maintain each others’ interest and expertise profiles. Our user studies suggest that people tag other people as a form of contact management and that the tags they have been given are accurate descriptions of their interests and expertise. Moreover, none of the people interviewed reported offensive or inappropriate tags. Based on our results, we believe that people tagging will become an important tool for relationship management in an organization.