Follow the exploration on how to build a better taxonomy for business. I believe current taxonomies are currently lacking. Using a spatial concept of taxonomy, our team has built a taxonomy that is used to power research into Comparables for Mergers & Acquisitions in the evolving sector of Information, Software and Media, and I would like to share our thoughts on how to build a better taxonomy.
Monday, January 9, 2012
A Multi-Dimensional Quandary - Social Networking
Today our team had an interesting issue come up. As our taxonomy tries to model business, we try to keep on top of how business models evolve, and we find we have to reconsider terms and what they mean. The term that gave us pause today was Social Networking. We use a multi-dimensional taxonomy, where we have four distinct trees that model different aspects of a business and each one roughly answers the following questions: 1) who is the clientele of a business, 2) how does a company do business, 3) what problems does a business solve or subject area it specializes in, and 4) what channel does the business use to reach customers. So our problem was that we had Social Networking defined in our business solution tree, but then we found that Social Networking started to morph into something beyond Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Shopping sites started to incorporate Social Networking into their businesses, and then Social Networking, no longer seemed like an "end: but a "means to an end". So our solution, which is far from the only solution was to add social networking to our channel tree, where it sits along with mobile and online terms. I hate having the same term in multiple trees, but the term is now used in multiple contexts, and we do have repeated terms for different contexts. What are your thoughts?
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