Brand Tags

Note: This was originally posted by me on my other site, www.crowdpreneur.com

Brand Tags, the social branding project that has exploded over the past few weeks is a side project of Noah Brier, a strategist at Naked Communications. Garnering the praise of the Wall Street Journal and other notable sites, Brand tags has become sort of a phenomenon, filling a void that almost makes you scratch your head and say, “Why didn’t I think of that?” To understand how Brand Tags works, I asked Noah to explain the basic premise.

“It is pretty simple really. People come on the site, where we have 400 brands listed. You come on and you are supposed to write down the first thing that comes into your head when you see the brand and then I take all these results and put them into a tag cloud, so whenever someone says something, the larger the word becomes”

For example, the following is a part of a tag cloud that was generated when users were presented with the UPS logo.

As we can see, the tags “brown” and “delivery” are among the more common impressions. If you look at the tag cloud as a whole you will see that “what can brown do for you”, “reliable” and other positive tags are among the largest. This is indicative of a very positive brand image for UPS.

But look at what happens when the Beijing 2008  logo is displayed.

Not a pretty picture if you are a Chinese Olympic official. It is through Brand Tags that we see that when people think of Bejing 2008, they think of the Tibetan crisis. As Noah pointed out,

“Everything communicates” when we look at some of these brands we see a lot of advertising and ultimately what you see in these tags is “bad customer service” and things like that. No matter how many impressions you get, one time when I can a customer service line and someone is a jerk to me I am going to tell people that.”

However, this data is only important if the representation of users representative of the population as a whole. Being that it is using web 2.0 technology, and incorporates extensively tag clouds, the average web surfer who isn’t a twittering, friendfeeding, blogger might not be prone to use it. For example,one commenter on the WSJ article noted

“I really don’t give it any credibility whatsoever. The descriptors are all listed in different case sizes, almost as if there is a secondary objective here to put a personal opinion behind the responses”

Clearly this person doesn’t understand how the concept works, or tagging etc. So is data skewed towards just  the “geeks” of the world and those who read blogs? Noah responds:

“I have been surprised how ‘ungeeky’ it has been. If you take a look at some of the more ‘techy’ brands, a lot of the people don’t know what is. I think especially in our universe of blogs and tech and startup, we forget that these people are actually small fish in a much larger pond. Its like when you see the Tech Crunch cloud, and you see that “technology” is as big as “huh”.

This certainly rings true. Just take a look at

ReadWriteWeb’s top 3 tags.

But all this begs the question. Can and will it be leveraged by actual companies? I am sure by now some of the major ad agencies representing these companies will have seen what the people are saying (680,000 and counting) and are disseminating the data, but what it really comes down to at its core is the wisdom of the crowds. The crowd is speaking, but is anybody listening?

Leveraging Web 2.0 technology  is now emerging as a major competitive advantage. Innocentive is just one example of using crowdsourcing as tool. Sites like Get Satisfaction (see CP post here) are opening a door for consumers to be heard, and giving companies a chance to listen and speak back. What Brand Tags does is along the same lines. Dont you think AT&T should take a hint when the “bad customer service” is as big as “cellular”?

Noah mentioned that he has been in contact with several ad agencies, and as the project gains popularity, more will likely follow. Speaking on what the future holds for the information, he noted that he “just wants to keep it fun, and adding the right brands so people will keep on enjoying and using it”.

In the future, I would love to see open API to see how all the data could be explained. I am curious as to how some of the correlations come to light. One such interesting tidbit that Noah discovered is that contributers that use Microsoft label Apple as “pretentious” way more than Apple users. I am not exactly falling off my chair after that revelation, but it does show that there could be some very interesting details awaiting to be mined.

Brand Tags is an excellent example of how to use the wisdom of the crowds properly, but as always, using that wisdom and leveraging it for commercial purposes is a struggle.