Nice tool for checking the strength of your message

I have stumbled on lots of online tools that are interesting but trying to find an application for them in PR is sometimes a struggle.  Twitter Mosaic for example is a nice tool but does not have huge amount of PR useage potential.

At Search Marketing World 2009 Ciaran Norris from Altogether Digital mentioned a service called Wordle in his presentation where he showed the tag cloud it created on Obama inauguration speech which clearly showed the key words he was emphasising.

Basically the service allows you to input text or a url and it will create a tag funky tag cloud from it.  Frequently mentioned words are emphasised as in any tag cloud and the layout is pretty intuitive and easy to interpret with nice colour coding and layout.

This one is from an analysis of this blog.  The more words the trickier it is but at a glance the main areas that you wish to cover should become pretty apparent.  So how is this of help to the PR industry?  This has great use to test the messaging validity of things like press releases and speeches.  It wont replace the manual intervention but it should give you a snap short.  It only does words and most messages are more complex than words but it should help to make sure that what you are trying to communicate actually comes across.   Consider that most people absorb huge amount of information but simple repetition of key words can stick.

Here is one I did on a press release we did for Repak on recycling at Christmas time.

Repak Green Christmas Wordle Example

Packaging Recycling at Christmas time was the key message we wanted to get accross and it shows in the tag cloud.  I would suggest that if you put in a press release or speech from a CEO and the tag cloud bares no resemblance to the core messaging then something may be wrong.

One note of caution – do not add to the gallery unless you are comfortable with people seeing it.