Digital Business

Image by Lenartney via Flickr

At school in the 1970's, I found out about The Sex Pistols when a teacher said that, for the school disco, we could request music we wanted to hear apart from that band.

Well, of course, I only knew bands that my parents listened to, Gary Glitter and the Bay City Rollers (even aged 9 I thought they were a bit wimpy). Who were The Sex Pistols? Of course, the teacher who implemented the ban sparked off a large following of that splendid bunch of misfits.

The Sex Pistols arrived at a time when the music industry was dominated by music and bands that had been manufactured by corporations rather than created by artists. They,literally, stuck two fingers up at the established way of doing things (although, ironically, they were manufactured by Malcolm McLaren) and brought about a change in the industry. Whether that was for better or for worse is debatable, but it ended a period of fairly dire, formulaic music.

Come now into the 21st century and picture yourself in Lausanne, Switzerland, the home of the International Olympic Committee. The conference I attended was run by the European Patent Office, which is a hub of controlled information, where language, diction and terms are managed, checked, agreed upon and shared in a tight community of patent information professionals.

At most conferences I have attended in the last two years, there was one noticeable difference in the presentations with the audience, which was the lack of social media activity while the speakers spoke. Nobody was tweeting their thoughts about the conference speakers. There was no 'back channel'. People in this industry sector just don't seem to be into social media.

So, imagine my surprise when I sat in on a focus group which was asking for the attendees feedback on the use of social media tagging in the world of patents. That's like asking if an audience of classical music fans if they would like to hear the latest track from The Sex Pistols.

Patent information is highly organised and complex. Social media tagging, with services like Del.icio.us, is unruly and anarchic in comparison. No one controls the tags in Del.icio.us unlike the highly controlled diction in patent information.

This industry is starting to look at using these social technologies to help them adapt to a world where an increasing number of non-information professionals need to research their markets to launch new products without relying upon the traditional professionals who used to do this for them.

The non-professionals need easier ways to find, retrieve and use the results and social media tagging is one way to make complicated information more accessible to them.