Bob Baker's The Buzz Factor

Bookselling behemoth Amazon.com has been adding some cool new interactive features to make its site more community oriented. One of the newest holds the potential to be a powerful online music promotion tool.

Go browse the pages of individual music CD titles at Amazon, and you'll notice a field under the CD title labeled "Your tags." What is this? As Amazon explains ...

Tags provide an easy way for you to "remember" and classify any item on the Amazon site for later recall. For example, you might be shopping for holiday gifts and tag items with the names of the people on your shopping list. At any time, you can review the items you've tagged and make final gift decisions. You might also want to tag items you've purchased in the past. This allows you to organize your collection in any way you wish ...

Because people's tags are (by default) visible to others, a great side effect of tagging is that you can navigate among items through other people's tags. What items have people tagged "gift" or "Tuscany" or "robot?"

How you can use Amazon's tags: Go to the pages of the most popular CDs in your genre and start tagging away. You'll need to log into your Amazon account to do this. Then make sure your personal profile on Amazon is complete. Upload an image and give a compelling description of your music and what you do. Also, be sure to list your web site.

Why go through this trouble? Because your name and tag will show up right on the sales page of every CD you tag. And thousands of music consumers will be able to link to your profile, where they can find out more about you and your music.

Example: Go to the page for Peter Spellman's The Self-Promoting Musician. Scroll down to "Customers who tagged this item" and you'll see Bob Baker, with a link to my Amazon profile page. Just for fun, I even tried it with the bestseller The Da Vinci Code. And there I am.

Hardly anyone knows about this new feature yet, so you'll be one of the first to stand out by doing it. So go to Amazon now and start tagging!