Wrangle Your Creativity With Wordle

You may have heard of Wordle before now, but if you haven’t it is a MUST for your business. What is Wordle? Well here’s a little blurb straight from their site:

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

So how can Wordle help your business? For starters, it can help you identify the frequency of words that appear in your marketing materials such as brochures, flyers, websites, or any other advertising material you currently have, or more importantly…plan to have. You can take things even further by using Wordle to analyze your business plan or mission statement. By doing this you can visually see the prominent keywords that reflect your business message…and what kind of image you’re portraying to your clients or potential customers. Heck, you could even use it to create a graphical representation of your products, services, or business values to use in your marketing materials.

You may be wondering why you wouldn’t just use a free keyword density tools to analyze your website pages for frequently used words. First, you only get a list of words – they’re not visual like Wordle. Second, you also have to typically enter a URL to get that information which doesn’t do you any good for all your off-line copy, while Wordle on the other hand allows you to enter text, a URL, or del.icio.user name to create a cloud. Last, but not least, you certainly won’t have as much fun as you would with Wordle.

What can you do with Wordle?

• Change color schemes and even create a custom one
• Change the fonts
• Change the font style (lowercase, UPPERCASE, etc.)
• Change the layout
• Set a maximum number of words (default is 150)
• Instead of single words, use phrases by inserting the tilde sign (~) between the words you want to keep together. For example if you want to use the phrase “Hooked on Wordle” simply enter it as Hooked~on~Wordle.

How do I use Wordle? Besides using it in many of the examples mentioned earlier, I also use it to brainstorm. When I’m working on a new tagline for a client or strategizing a new marketing campaign for them, I love to use Wordle. And I actually use it in conjunction with the Visual Thesaurus. These tools allow me to visualize my thoughts and notes, as well as to get better results by tweaking here and there.

I have to admit that I get a little caught up with Wordle, but it sure is fun and actually feels more like playing than work…which I don’t get to do much of these days unless it’s Duck, Duck, Goose with my 4 year old or peek-a-boo with my 10 month old.

I created a couple of “Signature Wordles” based on my Design and Marketing websites. I think Signature Worx is represented quite well as a Wordle. Take a look at the finished products [hint: you can click on the images to enlarge them]:

Have you used Wordle yet? How do you use it in your business?