conversations your customers have about your product/service… And increasingly those conversations are mediated via the Web.
That and “Emails are opportunities!” are probably the two most used phrases with my working hours lately.
Why do I bring this up?
For that first phrase. Awesome, awesome site put together by a friend, Noah Brier, called Brand Tags. And congrats to him for his write up in the Wall Street Journal.
What brand is this below?
Best buy?
No, but that is a good guess.
Obviously it’s Amazon.
But this is only part of it, right? Seems to only include descriptors that begin with letters B through E.
How is it obviously Amazon? I think that it is a good sign if it is fairly obvious. It almost shows that a small cluster of words can immediately differentiate one brand from another.
I just took a screenshot of B through E to try and not giveaway obvious tags like Amazon or JeffBezos.
I did also notice that in that screenshot there is a tag for EC2, I guess that gives it away pretty quickly to someone familiar with the Amazon brand.
I actually didn’t notice the ec2. There are probably a number of other brands that those descriptors, ranked as they are, could apply to. But when I went to look at the Brand Tags site, it didn’t give me a choice of which brand to describe, but simply asked me about Wikipedia. In other words, we’re only talking about really well-known brands here at this point (which makes sense). And given the type of people who are going to be interested in this type of thing, I could just see how they would end up giving those descriptors to Amazon.
For the most part, I think that Amazonians would like the way that page is shaping up. But of course, they have a lot of smaller, younger brands, sub-brands if you will, that might be more interesting to define. What about Kindle? Unbox? Or ec2, for that matter?
I would definitely think that Amazon would be happy with how their page is shaping up. The biggest thing that could happen for Brand Tags is it will go mainstream and you will really get a sense for what people *really* think of brands. Right now, it is in that early adopter/Digg home page phase of, “oh my God Ron Paul is going to win the Presidency, and Mac’s have 90% market share!”
What is interesting from the current data is brands that were born on the web or have made a significant investment in the web; seem to be talked about and thought of far more favorably.