4 Comments »This morning Alley Insider posted about Brand Tags, a site which enables users to post tags about different popular brands. One of the brands included in the ratings is Facebook. When looking at the top tags for the Facebook brand, a large percentage of the tags have a significantly negative connotation. The top 25 tags are:
friends, social, college, annoying, people, facebook, fun, boring, kids, lame, community, social networking, myspace, waste of time, addictive, social network, network, networking, stupid, young, useless, crap, internet, stalker, s***
This is by no means a scientific experiment because the distribution of users visiting this site is highly skewed. The MySpace brand does not fair any better though. The top 25 tags for MySpace are:
kids, music, friends, people, teenagers, lame, ugly, stupid, emo, annoying, social, crap, internet, myspace, community, old, young, teens, network, losers, networking, social networking, gay, boring, spam
Social networks in general clearly have a tainted image as well. Alley Insider also compares these brand tags to that of Google and Amazon which have positive tags for the majority. The real question is if these tags are a sign that people are getting tired of social networks in general and if they are going to begin seeking new ways to connect. Do you think that these tags are an accurate image of Facebook? Do you think there’s any way Facebook can recover their tainted image?
Kids, teenagers, and adults, all have their own view of social networks and search engines.
Search engines, it's hard to “hate” them because they only serve one purpose, to search for stuff.
Social networks, however, serve multiple purposes.
People can easily do without a social network, but they cannot do without a search engine.
I personally dont like myspace, but I do like facebook. Simply my social network of choice, that's all.
I think these “bad” tags come from people that just don't like one or the other or don't like social networks in general.
And again, you can't really hate search engines, that's just plain dumb.
Kids, teenagers, and adults, all have their own view of social networks and search engines.
Search engines, it’s hard to “hate” them because they only serve one purpose, to search for stuff.
Social networks, however, serve multiple purposes.
People can easily do without a social network, but they cannot do without a search engine.
I personally dont like myspace, but I do like facebook. Simply my social network of choice, that’s all.
I think these “bad” tags come from people that just don’t like one or the other or don’t like social networks in general.
And again, you can’t really hate search engines, that’s just plain dumb.
But you can be negative about search engines eg. semantic problems, poor results, spam sites. You could also be negative about Amazon. Sameways Facebook's brand tags could be mostly positive. But they are in a different market to Google & Amazon and more subjectivity plays a part.
I think the image is not tainted, no-one expects social networks to be 100%, but the novelty could be wearing & people are more inclined to be critical.
But you can be negative about search engines eg. semantic problems, poor results, spam sites. You could also be negative about Amazon. Sameways Facebook’s brand tags could be mostly positive. But they are in a different market to Google & Amazon and more subjectivity plays a part.
I think the image is not tainted, no-one expects social networks to be 100%, but the novelty could be wearing & people are more inclined to be critical.