Guten TAG – Good day to the world of tags

I never thought I’d have to explain to anyone what tags are and how to use tags nowadays.

Oh you hyped Millennials, you grow up with computers, you can’t put away your smartphone for 2 seconds, you tweet without end  and still it seems as if you have never heard about tags or seen how to make use of it to organize content.

Oh SAP, you probably thought that consultants, functional experts and developers who work all day with computer and Internet and your products  will know what tags are and you extra challenged them with tag names for which even Google does not find a single hit.

What I saw on chosen tags was incredibly creative… and totally off.

If those people had to tag the most famous German mouse then we would see such result:

Users: Elephant; Giraffe; Hippopotamus, Snake,  animal, Zoo, Uncle Ernie
SAP: 1DuckX; SAP Net Beaver Mobile: Rodent 3.0; SAP Replication Mammal; retagging required

Earlier we had spaces, now we have tags, we had a space Materials Management, now we have a tag MM Materials Management. I can see all content to this tag like I saw all content in a space.

Earlier I followed the space, now I follow the tag. Now and then I got this way the wanted content into my activity stream.

So basically there is till here not really a difference (apart from the fact that everything is too pale, to white, to empty, to buggy, to ……..(add your missing features here)

The difference is in the handling when you ask a question or when you write a blog.

Earlier, you had to decide first in which space you want to post. Now you write your question and at the end you have to decide under which tags you want your content be visible to the audience. Scroll and space lovers  can of course first scroll down and add the tags and then scroll up to phrase the content.

Tags have a big advantage, especially if your question is transboundary. You can add many tags  contrary to earlier where you had just a single space.
If you have a question about a user exit for a certain functionality then you can tag it with the functional area and with the technical area, for example MM Materials Management and ABAP Development. This way your question shows up in both tag places, is visible for the functional guys who follow MM Materials Management and also to the developers who follow ABAP Development.
Earlier this was called cross posting, now its legalized with the tag concept.
And if the Community developers in their galaxy far far away manage to let this appear only once in activity stream of those people who follow both tags then they make some people happier.

Now to the people.
Let me tag them “helpseekers” (helpless was dicarded as rude) and “experts”.
The helpseekers tag their question with an approriate tag to get help from those people who follow this tag for which they can offer help. This means a tag brings people together, similar to a space, but 2 tags can bring more people together than ever fitted into one space.

Of course has a tag to be meaningful to get people together, remember the mouse tags.

If you have a question about a purchase order then it is pretty nonsense to tag it SAP Forum, or do you really think that a person who follows the tag SAP Forum can answer this question.
Isn’t it logic that people may want to talk about SAP Forum if they follow this tag. And people who can answer a question about purchase orders follow probably the tag MM Materials Management because that is the workarea where we manage purchase orders.

Would you tag your video about a visit of the Singapore Night Zoo with “YouTube” when you upload it in YouTube?
Do you think people enter “YouTube” in the search field of YouTube to find information about the Singapore Zoo?
By the way SAP Forum is an event, like TechEd. If you want discuss about the problems that you have with the new Community then you have to use the tag, “Using SAP.com”, you see the logic?

That is the challenge which I already mentioned above. We Normalos we just say MM, SD, QM, and similar already for 20 years and more, now SAP wants educate us to use their official public unknown names, like MAN production planning  or PLM Quality Management.
MAN is for me a German truck manufacturer, they may run SAP, but here run the people away having to use such tags.
Google has today 3 results for a qualified query with “MAN Production Planning”. All 3 are content which was created since the new Community is live.
PLM Quality Management is even worse, the Google result has on the first page only results from competitor products.
Many names, uups sorry tags, were unknown and now we do not find the tag without looking into an Excel sheet.
MM Material Management as tag is easier to find, just enter MM and a blank and you get it already. However, I really wondered that I found countless MM questions under the tags  SAP Mentor, SAP Forum, TechEd, R/3, SAP Community, SAP Select …oh I could still continue a while.
No wonder that people who follow MM say it became calm with the transition.
And others who follow such tags complain about unrelated garbage posting.

Let us make an exercise to see if you understood the example from above with the user exit for the purchase order, which tags would you choose?:

Mad mad world, since we got GPS nobody remembers the way anymore. Tomorrow I will have lunch in the shoe shop and then I will watch a movie at the green grocer.  It’s late now, need to go to the bath for a nap and will dream about a major 3 letter company who gives all us disoriented people a searchable site index and alias tag names to run simple.

More about tags:

Wikipedia

Tags and hashtags: The ultimate guide to using them effectively

Using tags in the SAP Community