How to Market With Word Clouds

I’m easily entertained. Especially when I discover a Web-based application that’s fun, free, easy, and useful.

So when my friends at CRAVEbusiness alerted me to Wordle, I had to check it out.

Wordle  is a toy (yes, a toy!) for generating “word clouds” from text you provide.

When I first heard the term “word clouds,” I thought, What’s the big deal? I see word clouds all the time used as a “search” feature on people’s blogs.

But the cool – and addicting – thing about Wordle is that you can customize what words appear in your cloud, and you can tweak the layout, color schemes, and fonts.

Here’s my first effort:

After creating the above word cloud, I figured out how to make certain words larger (you simply input the word multiple times and the font size grows) and how to add a space between words in a phrase (add ~ between the words).

Here’s my second effort:

The possibilities for using word clouds as a brand development tool are endless. You can use them to create:

• greeting cards
• advertisements
• posters
• mouse pads
• t-shirts
• title page for a report
• backgrounds for PowerPoint slides

Here’s the other ultra-cool thing about Wordle: You can enter the URL of any blog, Web site, or Delicious account and Wordle creates a word cloud based on key words from the site.

Here’s one Wordle automatically generated from key words on my Delicious account:

You could paste in a blog post and create a word cloud out of it. Or an inspiring quotation. Or song lyrics. Or your resume. Or a list of your favorites.

You can even use Wordle as a teaching tool – in the public gallery, I saw a word cloud of verbs a student was learning to spell.

When you have half an hour to kill, try Wordle. E-mail me a screenshot of your word cloud and explain a creative way you might use it. I’ll post some of them on my blog.

Look forward to seeing your word clouds!