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Brand Tagging – How is Your Company Perceived?

While browsing Kottke today I came across a little snippet about Brand Tags, described as "ask[ing] people what they think of in association with particular brands and then the results are displayed as tag clouds."

The concept of this site is pretty cool.  While everyone by now is aware of how useful tagging can be in terms of organizing a blog or searching through del.icio.us or similar sites, Brand Tags takes the same concept but reverses it.  Instead of posting entries and then tagging them and having them searched in multiple places, this site takes some of the most popular brands and asks you to apply one tag word or phrase to whatever brand it displays to you at random (though you have the option to skip a brand if you wish).  You can browse by brand, guess what brand it is based on the tags, or search for brands that were tagged with a certain word.

Brand Tags still appears to be relatively small--you can't add a new brand without contacting the site creator, for instance.  However, as a starting point, this is an interesting way to see how the big brands are perceived, as well as compare multiple brands that have similar offerings.  Check out, for instance, the difference between Target  and Walmart. Do the results on each page match up to your perceptions?  As anyone in business knows, how the public perceives your company and its practices can often have a huge impact on whether they choose you or a competitor.  Knowing these popular brand perceptions allows you to get in on the conversation and help address the negatives and possibly boost the positives (Jason Cormier just posted an entry the other day on staying in front of PR crises, which addresses some helpful tactics that should be used.)

If you are a savvy company, you are already tracking your brand reputation online through a variety of methods including Technorati, Twitter, Google, and of course myriad others.  The downside to this method is that you are relying on many different arenas to help provide an overall picture.  If a site based on something like Brand Tags caught on as more than just a fun experiment, just think of the possibilities when searching for smaller brands.  Assuming rival companies are not maliciously tagging their competitors, the results would speak of what the masses think of your brand in general, which can help during times when you are not headline news and the talk of the town.  The general impression gained by all of the tags inputted by hundreds or thousands of individuals will more than likely be a better reflection of long term perception of your brand by the public. Do you know how you will rank?

TAGS: BRAND TAGS • TAGGING • BRAND PERCEPTION • KOTTKE • ONLINE REPUTATION

Capturing Conferences: Expanding on Beth Kanter's Thoughts

Beth Kanter, one of the many great minds I encountered at BlogHer 2006.

Ever since the BlogHer conference in late July, I've been thinking about live blogging and other ways to capture the energy and creativity that often arises at conferences and other gatherings.

Well, as often happens when I don't get around to writing something down, some smart blogger beats me to it. That's just what Beth Kanter did. See her Aug. 25 post, Collaborative Models for Capturing and Sharing Conference Notes at Nonprofit Gatherings.

As a matter of fact, go read her post first. What I'm about to say will make more sense after you read her excellent overview of tools and techniques.

(Really, go read it. I'll wait. It's cool.)

...OK, now that you've read Beth's overview of collaboration tools and strategies that can help capture the value of conferences (and hopefully followed her links to some examples), here's my bigger-picture thought for today:

Conference planners should consider how to capture and extend the value of the conference during the planning process. Because for many people and organizations, what gets captured from a conference is more valuable than the event itself.

So here's a quick checklist of what I think conference planners should start taking into account...

TAGS: BLOGGING • SOCIAL MEDIA • TAGGING • EVENTS • CONFERENCES • WIKIS • BLOGS

Important Ways to Increase Blog Traffic

Over at SEOmoz, they have just posted a great entry on 21 ways to increase blog traffic. This article offers a lot of good tips and sound advice for new bloggers, seasoned veterans, and can be an invaluable list when clients come to you wanting to know the benefits of blogging and how to get more people to read.

I wholeheartedly agree with point #1, choosing software that can be fully customized. The site won't look as professional if you can't edit the HTML, and a powerful blog application, particularly one that is hosted on your own server, lets you take advantage of an amazing range of customizations.

Another point is to integrate the blog into your existing site--this means that you shouldn't host it on a different URL. Our approach is generally to have a blog section of the site, as part of the main navigation, and also to pull a list of recent entries onto the home page or another relevant portion of the site. This helps to integrate the blog more fluidly into the existing site and with the recent headlines, makes it a little more visible.

In order to drive traffic it is extremely important to participate in related blogs and forums. There is that old saying that you get what you give. If you don't get out there and participate, how can you expect others to do the same? Making yourself visible to your community will help people know that you exist, and eventually people will head over to your site to check out what you have to say.

The article also mentions that you should take advantage of social media such as del.icio.us or digg. Go tag your posts to help drive traffic to your site. And, if you should find yourself on the front page of digg or another site that nets you hundreds of extra hits, make sure to capitalize on it with more high-quality posts that day.

Another of my favorite points is to be sure to convey a human voice. You're a person with your own voice and personality, and that is a trait that is highly valued in the blogosphere. If you're blogging about a controversial topic, it's perhaps best to wait and re-read it before publishing, but don't sacrifice a more personal tone by trying to play it safe and not ignite criticism. Good debates are what help fuel traffic in many cases, and as long as you are careful with how you word sensitive topics, there's no reason why you can't be true to yourself.

I suggest you go check out the 21 item list and see how many you as a company are implementing--either for yourself or your clients. Follow as many of the tips as possible, and not only is traffic is sure to increase, but you will have a more relevant, interesting blog as well.

TAGS: BLOGGING • SOCIAL MEDIA • TAGGING • WEB TRAFFIC

The Power of Social Media and Flickr

Social Media is not just a buzzword floating around the internet, it's an actual social phenomenon.

Don't believe me?

A mere 24 hours after announcing the new ability to geotag your photos with the location in which they were taken, a reported 1,234,384 photos were already tagged. The number is now well over 1.6 million, and will surely grow as the word continues to spread and new photos are added.

Flickr is one of the easiest, most intuitive, and popular social media sites currently on the web. It provides users with the things they care about most--storing and sharing photos, and community. It also helps that with the implementation of this new geotagging feature, Flickr has made it extremely easy to go back and add these tags to your old photos. I think the incredible numbers attest to that fact quite effectively.

Social media sites continue to find ways to provide their users with new and exciting features, which allow people to interact like never before. It's very exciting to watch the new innovations, and I am anxious to see what comes next.

Thanks to Techcrunch for being one of the first to report the numbers (before the Flickr blog even!)

TAGS: SOCIAL MEDIA • FLICKR • TAGGING • WEB 2.0 • GEOTAGGING