Monthly Archive for May, 2008

Brand Tags - Crowdsourcing Brand Perceptions

My good blogging friend and burrito fiend Noah Brier has created and interesting tool called Brand Tags. Essentially visitors to the site are shown a page with a brand on it and asked to tag it with the first word that comes to mind. Brand Tags then shows “tag clouds” with all the words people have typed, the bigger the word the more people typed that word, simple really and the results are going to be fascinating. Even in this early stage some trends are emerging.

Google
Google

Yahoo
Yahoo

What does that say about Yahoo’s branding?

Amazon
Books

Adobe

BMW
Bmw

LOL!

If you want to see other brands added just twitter them to Noah at heyitsnoah

Social Capital and The Whuffie Factor

Interesting video/interview with the Threadless founders. Tara (blogger at HorsePigCow) put the video together and has written a book recently called the Whuffie Factor about businesses that are succeeding by leveraging web2.0/social media and of course the community. Threadless is probably one of the best examples of a community driven company.

The book that will catch the crest of Web 2.0 and show how any business can harness its power by increasing their Whuffie, the store of social capital that is the currency of the digital world.

I think the real key word here is Social Capital (I’ve talked about Social Equity here before but I think Social Capital works better even) and the more I think about it the more I think it is the secret sauce, or at least a way to think about secret sauce.