Product Marketing Blog

Ever see a set of words in different sizes which are all links on a site?  It’s probably a keyword cloud.  These clouds try to give a visual representation of what the site is about.  Sometimes they’re based on tags, which the writer of the content uses to categorize their content (these are .  Often they are based only on the words the site – the keywords – the words that are mentioned the most often are represented by the largest size.  The problem is these keyword clouds often falsely represent the true content of a site.  Keywords are not intelligent.  They don’t know that a story about – they don’t know about context or associations.  Keywords are dumb.

For example, we try to cover social media, marketing, strategy and technology links through our Twitter feed.  Many of these tweets do not use any of those keywords, but they do cover that subject area.  If you were to just look at the words we tweet, you’d come up with a keyword cloud that looks similar to this:

From this keyword cloud, it looks like all our feed is about is thanking people, being happy and retweeting. Secondarily, about marketing, social media and the web.  While our tweets certainly to include those words, it’s not the entirety of what we’re about.  It doesn’t show context or association.

These types of keyword clouds also encourage people to game the system by always including certain words in their tweets and websites (what people often think of as keywords).  This makes conversations dull, repetitive and largely useless.  When you start writing and tweeting for search engines or computers, you’re missing the conversations you need to be having with customers and people.

(photo by kevindooley)

Technorati tags: content, business, usability, design

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