I’m really high on tagged lists (or boomkarks) as a way for businesses to get involved in Social Media technologies without a major investment of time or capital. After all, blogs and podcasts require a decent amount of planning and maintenance. Creating, maintaining and sharing a tagged list is snap though.

Back in the old days (like three years ago) people would find interesting items on the web and save them as bookmarks. If they wanted to share the links they’d send an email with a copy of the link to one or more people. That gets the job done but it’s a slow and inefficient way to distribute information to the masses. And if you wanted to access your favorite bookmarks from another system you were pretty much out of luck.

Today’s web based services solve those problems by giving you a place to create, categorize and share your lists. When you find items on the internet (like news stories, blog posts or websites) that are relevant to your business you can then save those items immediately to a central location. And once saved you can add tags to provide further relevance and make the items easier to find later.

All the popular services that help you maintain lists provide you with web browser add ons that allow you to add an item to your list without even leaving the page. So you can compile information while you surf with minimal impact to your process flow.

Once you’ve saved your list items you can then decide how you want to share this information. Since list services typically allow you to redistribute your items via RSS you have a great variety of options. One option that I like involves converting an RSS feed to HTML so you can republish your list items onto a website. I use the BlinkList feed to javascript code to maintain the Latest Links section of this blog as well as my Social Media Directory page. Just drop the code into a section of the web page and the links will be updated as you add to your list.

You can also publicize the RSS feed for your list so that others can subscribe using their favorite feed aggregator just like they would subscribe to a Blog’s RSS feed. For example, you’re welcome to subscribe to my RSS Feed for Social Media tools by using this link. And if you have a blog, many of the tagged list services allow you to publish your list items as blog posts as well.

You’ve got nothing to lose by giving it a try. After all, creating and sharing tagged lists is simple, quick and costs nothing but a few moments of time every day.

If you decide to make the jump, I’ll tell you that I’m pretty high on Blinklist for creating tagged lists of bookmarks. If you want to peruse other services, you can find a nice variety of other free tools to help you get started.

[tags]Social Media, Tagging, Business Ideas[/tags]