Do you have the right Tag Cloud?

If you’ve ever wanted to know whether the subjects on your blog or website is exactly what you’ve been hoping for, then you’ll want to check out Wordle. This interesting application allows anyone to find out what tags are associated with blogs, websites, or anything else that has an RSS or Atom feed. Simply go to the site and plug in the right URL and within a few seconds, your very own colorful tag cloud appears.

But what’s so special about this site? It gives you a good self-check on what’s important and what people are looking for on your site. Yes, WordPress does allow you the widget that you can add to post on your site that lets people know what subjects are being searched and what topics are posted often, but if you want to know whether you’re broaching the right subjects, then this gives you more proof to help support or dispute your principle.

Wordle is a simple web application and won’t offer a great marketing breakthrough, but it might be a useful tool when examining sites to see if it has the right topic for you to review. For example, what if you’re wondering if blog X is related to social media, instead of perusing through the different posts, you could do a search in their blog search engine (if there is one), or you could hit up Wordle and query whether it’s a blog to explore further, possibly saving you time.

The queries are free and you can save tag clouds as JPEG, GIFs, and use them under a creative commons license. So check it out and find out if your blog is what you hoped it would be.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Can politics and social media survive together? Robert Scoble seems to think so.

Popularity: 22% [?]

Are you down with the “Groundswell”?

Another great book has been written. “Groundswell”, written by Forrester Research social and technology gurus Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff is a phenomenol book that will help guide any company’s social media campaign and strategy.

What’s great about this book is that they’ve incorporated the POST method into it. I first heard about this method in December 2007 through one of Jeremiah Owyang’s Twitter post and subscribed to receive a brief intro on what it is (you can read that blog post here). So just WHAT is the POST Method? It’s a systematic approach that you can use to gauge your approach in implementing a social strategy. Basically it stands for:

• People: have you looked at your users and sought out what their social psychological behavior might be?
• Objective: what is the end goal you want to achieve with your social strategy?
• Strategy: think long-term about what impact your strategy will have on your audience.
• Technology: what applications and solutions are you going to use to make your strategy happen?

This book is self-absorbed in the POST method and puts it into good practice. Compared to “Naked Conversations” or “Once you’re lucky. Twice you’re good…“, Groundswell is pretty much the same, but I think has a different audience in mind.

I enjoyed reading “Groundswell” and thought that I gained some really important information and data from their statistics, their Social Technographics data, and even their case studies. While “Naked Conversations” seemed more like a primer on blogging and social media and “Once You’re Lucky…” dabbled in the background information and provided some much needed lessons learned, “Groundswell” reaches out to those more interested in the analytical side. And who’s to blame them? It’s written by two great analytic minds of social media!

But if you’re thinking that “Groundswell” has examples for the small folks, you might find one or two examples, but for the most part, a majority of all the case studies and data focus on global and large corporations like FedEx, Dell, etc. and how that could be replicated for smaller businesses with a sizeable difference in revenue and resources is probably like comparing apples to oranges. The principles are still sound in that you should apply the POST method in any and all strategic discussions and campaigns since that, at the very least, is universal.

Follow along with the “Groundswell” or get out of the way…everyone needs to read this book and join in on the conversations. There are lessons to be learned and ideas to take away. And don’t worry…if you’re a beginner in the social media realm, you’ll be able to find this book worthwhile too. I’m not a big numbers person and would have fallen asleep if it was filled with just data and numbers throughout the book - but luckily Li and Bernoff knew who their audience would be and decided to just sprinkle a bit of data on us. Good job!

There’s more too…”Groundswell” will start you off on defining what the groundswell is and why it’s so important. Then you’ll go through how you can tap into this great market and phenomenon, including listening, discussing, energizing, supporting, and ultimately embracing it. Lastly, watch it be transformed and take on a life of its own and you’ll be the hero of the company.

Approximately 240+ pages of content (except for the acknowledgements, notes, table of contents, etc.) and it’s good information. I bought my book from Border’s for $29.95 (without tax) and it’s definitely going to sit around for a while. I’m going to reference this book for a while, that’s for sure.

Popularity: 55% [?]

The evolution of marketing stems from the brand

I had a great lunch with Ernie Mosteller, creative genius of Blattner Brunner, yesterday and everytime I talk to him, I’m motivated and inspired to talk about what’s going on with the world of technology, the Internet and marketing.

In any event, the conversation we were having began with a simple question and gradually evolved into what I’m trying to explain here in this blog post. Ernie asked what allowed online video functionality to become the biggest thing out there today? Our discussions involved talking about the viral aspect, the entertainment factor, the issue of content, and how marketers could use this mechanism as a strong tool without compromising the integrity of social media and remain transparent. This led me to explore how a company can take their message and combine it with traditional marketing (print, television and radio) and online marketing (website, email, search, and social).

If you take a company’s brand message and adhere to its “rules” across all media, is it easy to do? Taking a company like Nike or perhaps even Washington, DC could be easy or it could not - I say it depends on what the message is trying to be sent and whether it can be done in a consistent manner. If you take the Washington tourism campaign as an example (their slogan is “Create your own power trip“), then it might be interesting to see and should these things be thought about when creating the brand FIRST and then executing it across different media?

When you’re creating a new brand, should you not think about what media you’d like to explore and whether or not that idea will still send the same message? If branding can be affected by the way a particular product name is translated into other languages and made to sound different, then why can’t marketers take equal care to reflect that on the media? If I know that the Create your own power trip slogan and Washington, DC brand will be great in traditional media like print, television, and radio, then should I expect it to also flow easily into the online arena?

I want to transfer the brand to demonstrate the message onto a website. Will it work? High probability that it will simply because a lot of your marketing will center around the website anyways and that’s expandable/scalable and doesn’t have a high barrier to manipulate. But what about e-mail marketing? Will your message get across that way? If I throw in SEM tactics, will the message still carry across? Of course…because it all leads back to the website and you can easily control the message. Besides, with SEM and e-mail marketing being antiquated as it is, marketers are probably used to adapting their message to these traditional online features.

But what if you start to enhance your online campaigns by delving into the social web - an area where your audience is so inundated with different ideas that you’ll need to act quicker to keep their attention? Can you still relate your message and brand into a Facebook group? What about a YouTube video? Could you recreate the success of the Will it blend? video that garnered much success from a blender slicing and dicing random objects?

Throwing a little bit more complexity into the equation is taking ALL your messaging and evolving it one step further to the mobile arena. Now, you don’t have a webpage people will view or an e-mail you can send out. You’re constrained with simply crafting your message to someone that you can only assume has at least text-messaging capabilities on their cell phones and can read a message of no more than 140 characters. Best case scenario is that your audience has a smartphone, Blackberry, PDA, etc. so that they can surf the web after receiving your text message to get more information.

So what do you think? Should you evaluate the scalability of your brand message prior to executing different media or am I wrong and you can modify the message on a per media basis?

Popularity: 66% [?]