I stumbled onto Noah Brier’s Brand Tags concept today (a little late) and was pleasantly surprised by what I found. The concept is simple: display a company’s logo/brand and have a viewer type in the first word or phrase that enters their mind. Marketers and researchers have been doing this forever, but never on this scale. Sure, the Internet, with it’s techie nature, skews the results a bit, but the results are fascinating.
Here are some examples:
Comcast - The cable conglomerate everyone loves to hate. The top 3 words are “cable”, “internet”, “tv”… their basic services… good so far. But it gets ugly quick with words like “evil”, “expensive”, “crap”, “sucks”, “monopoly”, “ripoff”… it gets worse…
Compare Comcast to Klondike’s top 3 words: “ice cream”, “bar”, “cold”… more simple terms about their products, but instead of “evil” their marketing slogan (”what would you do”) comes next. And most suprisinlgy, the word I entered “Yummy” comes in 5th. Think about that. Of all the words that mean tasty, “yummy” was the 5th highest word/phrase people associated with Klondike. Klondike’s marketing head needs a raise.
If you’ve never seen this site, I encourage you to look around and ponder what people would say about your brand… and then do something to help improve that.
Check out this great article at A List Apart on Developing Creative Ideas. Idea creation and development is a key part of my role and this article has some great tips on how to drive innovation out of an idea sessions (brainstorm). Getting a group of people together to be creative is never an easy task and having tools like these in your back pocket will always be useful.
Hackalytics.com is a social bookmarking tool for web analytics news, articles, jobs and more. Simply create an account to contribute links, vote and save the links you find most valuable and discuss links to share more information.
The site is based on Hacker News (which is technically based on Reddit) so I’m hoping the interface will be familiar.
This site is a work in progress and I value any feedback you may have. Feel free to leave comments below if you have any suggestions or see any bugs.
I’ve been thinking a lot about tagging and entity extraction lately (I know, exciting!). We use Inform on most of our properties and they perform very well, but new techniques and tools are all over the place. One of those tools is Open Calais by Reuters.
Open Calais is an open source API for automatically extracting keywords from text. I hadn’t had time to fiddle with it until I heard that someone had created an Open Calais Wordpress Plugin.
I immediately added both the archive and auto tagger to this site to test it out. While it came up with some odd suggestions and omitted some obvious ones (I tested a Computerworld article about MS Vista, and it didn’t recommend “Vista”), I was optimistic with this first test. Even for this post, Calais wasn’t perfect, missing the obvious “Open Calais” and “Wordpress” as key entities offering up only “API” and “Reuters” as tag suggestions. Calais is far from perfect, but a promising step in the right direction.
The Calais Wordpress plugin itself was very impressive, integrating seamlessly with Wordpress’ native tagging functionality. Basically, you can use Calais to recommend tags and then redefine them (adding/removing) as you see fit. Open Calais is officially on my watch list.
Aetna Fire Alarm needed an online tool to allow clients to login and view their building alarm tests and needed it quick. To save time, I reused Wordpress’ admin design, but developed the application completely from scratch to meet Aetna’s unique requirements including CSV file importing and exporting, multiple building address searches and bar coded device integration.
I worked closely with Aetna and their clients to ensure the product met everyone’s needs and delivered it on time and on budget.
