I scoffed at Brand Tags when it launched, but this article from Digital Influence Mapping has compelled me to check it out again.  The battle of the brands was interesting, but what I’m really finding fascinating is the “guess the brands” section.

It took me all of 11 seconds of looking at the tags to determine Bose Audio and 21 seconds to figure out another tag cloud was Second Life.  It took me about 10 seconds to guess Jif Peanut Butter, but I spelled it wrong, so they didn’t count it.

As the site points out: “the basic idea of this site is that a brand exists entirely in people’s heads. Therefore, whatever it is they say a brand is, is what it is.”  This is a really interesting way to see what people think of well known brands.  I’ve also found Amazon’s experiment with user tags to be a similiar, but real-world example of this same idea.  Anyone can add a tag to a product.  I’ve seen some really interesting tags that surprised me.  For example, someone is clearly on a mission against homeopathic treatments because you’ll find many tags like “junk science” and “total crap” on those products.    There’s a potentially serious brand management issues here.

We can add user tagging to the long list of UGC that companies need to get really smart about really fast.  If nothing else, they should be listening.

[tags]brands, tagging, relationship marketing, brand tags[/tags]