It is Saturday morning and tomorrow I will turn 59. I was hopeful that at this age I wouldn’t still need to be concerned about tags and labels, but hey I still do laundry at least once per week and in this day and age I find myself discussing the pros and cons of labeling or tagging blog posts. Let’s talk about clothes first: What is it about the tag or label in the neckline of a shirt or top that is so annoying? I ask this question, because as a woman I can categorically state I have never removed a tag from a piece of my clothing. But I can also attest that my significant other hates tags in the neckline of his clothing and he has on occasion twisted himself into the shape of a pretzel to attempt removing the tag while he is wearing the garment!
He claims it is scratching his neck and driving him crazy. I maintain that this is learned behavior from childhood when his mother tried to make him comfortable and dutifully removed all tags. You should know that when my children were little I never removed a tag from the neckline of their shirts, pajamas or the like. It was a sociological test I was running in my own little world. The truth is I really don’t care if my spouse removes these tags, unless, of course, the tag includes the laundry instructions.
Can’t tell you how many golf shirts have been ruined because they needed cold water as opposed to warm, or they should be hung to dry! Clothes manufacturers came to our rescue about 2002 and invented the tagless label. Accordingly, Marshal Cohen, chief retail analyst at NPD Group, a Port Washington, N.Y., market research firm stated in 2005: ”Tags are a very emotional issue.” Is he kidding me? Illness, death, bankruptcy, divorce, crime, war and the like are emotional issues, not TAGS!
My blog commitment has been to make you laugh and to offer you something useful, so today I am including a PDF that you can print and hang by your laundry machines. It is a Guide to Home Laundering and Dry-cleaning Symbols. The reason you may need this is twofold: 1) You may find that when you launder your clothes, someone has removed not only the neckline tag with laundering instructions, but they may have removed the additional tag sometimes found elsewhere on the clothing. 2) You may discover that the laundry instructions are written in size 2 font and in universal code. Take a look at these instructions; you may be amazed at how often you have misinterpreted a symbol.
Now for a short discussion about Web 2.0 Tags and Labels: I will make this short and sweet. You can read a lot about labels / tags, as they relate to blog posts. I will only offer you my very simple observation. Tags and labels have always been important in our day to day life, even before we had the world wide web. Think of it this way. The tag/label is an identifier, it guides the reader to more information about the subject matter within your historical blog posts and it perhaps provides just a bit of information that will make your life easier in the case of Web 2.0 allowing your blog to be found by more people. If you really want to understand this in greater detail, contact Webconsuls’ Social Marketing guru…Darin McClure, because I have to go do the laundry!
P.S. I know I took 599 words to enlighten you today. Happy Saturday!
