How do you make your organization’s mission or vision statements come to life for employees and stakeholders? How do you help teams align with the mission or vision and take ownership of it? Try using a word cloud. Help people align around your mission and vision Or since this is a long page of copy, she may create another word cloud that focuses only on the first three paragraphs and headings-those most likely to be read by people visiting the page. Since there aren’t any other words that dominate nearly as much, Kristeen will edit the page to reflect more of the terms she wants people to associate with DiSC. She’s glad to see words like “relationships,” “assessment” and “effective” appear, knowing that these words matter to her audience.Ī webpage that gives an overview of DiSC, on the other hand, is rather heavy on the use of the word “DiSC.” It also appears to lack a strong central message. She’s fairly happy with the results but wonders about making the “Everything” in the Everything DiSC brand stronger. Let’s say she wants the site to rank highly in online searches for the keywords “DiSC,” “workplace” and “communication.” Analyze and identify SEO terms.Īre the keywords you want to rank highly in online searches prominent or too overwhelming? Here’s one of Kristeen’s clouds for a webpage of the Everything DiSC Workplace site.
What does your newsletter really say? What does your web content focus on? What words or terms do you rely on too heavily? Dropping a few pages of content into a generator is a great way to check recurring themes or terms and to improve your writing-both in terms of clarity and style. Check the effectiveness of your written communications. Remember that clouds take words out of context, so a big, bold “SERVICE” in your cloud could indicate either “lousy” or “excellent.” 2. Review the resulting cloud with your team to discuss what high occurrences of words like “responsiveness” or “price” might indicate. What was the biggest topic on users’ minds as they completed your survey? What words did employees use most often in their evaluations? What was trending in last month’s online customer comments? If you have access to data sources such as these, it’s an easy task to combine them into a text document, drop the copy into a generator and see what emerges.
Though word cloud generators are not robust analytical tools, they do provide some very useful applications when you let yourself be creative. Here’s a cloud based on Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
Paste some text into a word cloud generator (available free online see our “tips” below) and the more frequently a word appears in the source data, the bigger it appears in your word cloud. Also known as a tag cloud or text cloud, a word cloud is a visual representation of text that’s based on the frequency with which a particular word appears.
If you’re not already creating word clouds, you’ve no doubt seen them.
In this post, colleague Kristeen Bullwinkle and I share some of our favorite creative uses. But beyond providing colorful pops to posts, word clouds can offer some practical benefits to your business. Whenever we use images of word clouds for our blog posts-like the one above, based on the DiSC i-style-the posts do very well with our readers and the images are frequently shared on Pinterest.