Brand tagging (things I wish I'd thought of #54)

BrandTags asks visitors to write the first thing that comes into their heads when they see a brand name. This is a great way to find out what a brand really means, rather than what the owner thinks it means. So what are the main tags (roughly) for key online brands:

• Amazon - books, cheap, convenient, easy, everything, shopping, smile
• BBC - british, england, news, quality, reliable, tv
• Digg - blog, cool, internet, news
• eBay - auction, buy, cheap, fun, junk, scam, sell, shopping
• Facebook - annoying, boring, college, friends, fun, kids, lame, social, stupid, useless, young
• Flickr - cool, photos, pictures, web2.0, yahoo
• Google - awesome, cool, everything, evil, god, smart, useful
• MySpace - annoying, community, emo, friends, kids, lame, music, stupid, teenagers
• Yahoo - dead, email, fun, google, lame, mail, microsoft, old, outdated
• YouTube - awesome, cool, funny, google,

Amazon seems to do best, and Facebook worst. The service is too new/small to be representative of the man on ye olde Clapham omnibus (note the popularity of tags such as "web 2.0"; the pervasiveness of Americanisms such as "awesome"; and industry jokes such as "world domination" as a tag for Google). At its current low volumes, BrandTags is also easy to manipulate, either by a brand's competitors or by people who find it funny to attach negative tags to brands (perhaps I sound like the kind of brand manager who finds convenient excuses to dismiss the tags he doesn't like). The real value of the service (or more generally, this application of tagging generally - after all, the technology itself is pretty simple), is to brands  who can poll relatively controlled audiences. So, Unilever could ask iVillage members, Ford could ask Exchange & Mart visitors and Guardian Media Group could ask their own users.